Residency and artistic intervention – Jaana Kokko
24 June – 3 July 2024
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Siliștea Snagovului village
After a Gregorian calendar year, Helsinki-based artist Jaana Kokko returns to the village of Siliștea Snagovului. She is interested in gathering with the plants that are growing on the sides, taking the position of being not in the center. She asks: What are they revealing us with their hidden pigments and forms? And even more: What does it need from a garden to become a place/ space for emancipation, a place for political enlightenment?
Her search in the fields around the Station is inspired by dear places of her past, and the emotional connection to Maitohorsma, Fireweed (Ebilobium angustifolium).
The plant is very common in Finland, and it appears especially when the forests are cut clear, which is unfortunately still very common practice. One hundred years Fireweed was still rare in Central Europe, but the burning ruins of both world wars gave space for it and it started to blossom on the lands emptied by fire. The leaves of Fireweed unveil a yellow light pigment. The color gives pleasure, when it appears, it feels like a small, uncovered secret.
After her research residency at the Station last year, Jaana focuses this time on a precise task, albeit one that shows the ephemerality of being in this world. Collecting flowers and seeds from the area, while paying attention these are plentiful, she extracts the pigments from them, using the organic colours afterwards for woodcut printing. At the same time, this offers the team of the Station an occasion to learn the skill of working with plants pigments in order to further challenge the community of artists around (as well as the children in the village) on the importance of materials used in art, and of accepting the limited time an art work may exist in the world.
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Flowing Streams Residency
at The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life /
15 June – 15 July 2024
Václav Šana (The Czech Republic) has been selected to join Flowing Streams, a multi-residency project in rural areas of Romania exploring local approaches to the cultural ecology of water, organized by EUNIC Romania in collaboration with curator Adelina Luft.
At The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life at Silistea Snagovului, Václav will document and evaluate pre-selected sites from the vicinity of The Station, including Lake Snagov and other sources of ground water. He will look at the scale, social, cultural and environmental aspects of the water sources to develop an analytical documentation of the water channels through diagrams and drawings.
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Residency and artistic intervention – Darya Tsymbalyuk
June – July 2024
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Siliștea Snagovului village
“If, following rivers and rivulets, lagoons, meadows, plavni, and forests, you keep going down southwest from the south of Ukraine, you might eventually pass over the Stația experimentală de cercetare pentru artă și viață. Perhaps, then, looking up at the sky for a second, I will catch a glimpse of you, a greeting from places that have raised me.
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Gathering into the Maelstrom
17-20 April 2024
in Venice at Sale Docks is a four-day programme curated by Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and Sale Docks
'Gathering into the Maelstrom' – at Sale Docks Dorsoduro 265 in Venice – is an invitation to learn to inhabit the vortex of our contemporary moment, rooting artistic production in ecological struggles, and transforming the field of contemporary art into a political territory. To generate a Museum of the Commons we must both question the toxicity that permeates institutions and, at the same time, build non-capitalistic, non-colonial, non-patriarchal, and non-anthropocentric alliances.
tranzit.ro, as a partner organisation in the Museum of the Commons project, participate to two of the events at the gathering: the Climate
17-20 April 2024
Assembly (through the presence of Adelina Luft, Eduard Constantin, Delia Bulgaru, Livia Pancu, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea), and the Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto book launch and panel (through the participation of Ovidiu Tichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea), both on Friday, 19 April 2024.
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FLOWING STREAMS
Open call for participation /
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life is one of the seven local organisations to host the multi-residency project Flowing Streams taking place in the rural areas of Romania between June-September 2024, developed by EUNIC Romania in collaboration with curator Adelina Luft. It involves seven cultural institutions operating in Romania – the British Council, the Czech Centre, the Embassy of the Netherlands, the Goethe-Institut, the Italian Institute for Culture, the Polish Institute and Fundația9, each engaged in supporting one residency.
The call is open to interdisciplinary and socially-engaged artists, architects/landscape architects, hydrologists, anthropologists, community organisers from Czech Republic, Italy, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland and Romania.
Submission deadline: 7 April 2024
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Hiwa K – artist in residency in Bucharest and at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Siliștea Snagovului
15 - 29 of March 2024
We are very happy to welcome artist Hiwa K in a residency in Bucharest and at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. In the frame of the "Museum of the Commons" project, he will give a presentation for the participants to the course "Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life", led by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu.
Hiwa K was born in Kurdistan-Northern Iraq in 1975. His informal studies in his home town Sulaymaniyah were focused on informal knowledge in a vernacular language. After moving to Europe in 2002, Hiwa K studied music as a pupil of the Flamenco master Paco Peña in Rotterdam, and subsequently settled in Germany. His works escape normative aesthetics but give a possibility of another vibration to vernacular forms, oral histories (Chicago boys, 2010), modes of encounter (Cooking with Mama, 2006) and political situations (This lemon tastes of apple, 2011).
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Nicoleta Moise: The Blue Dream
tranzit. ro/București and The Last Archive present:
Nicoleta Moise: The Blue Dream
21 December 2023, 4-7 p.m.
A temporary intervention at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Coordinates
Access: by car via DN1 or A3; by bus no. 446, departure from Piața Presei Libere, arrival at Pescari stop
Since 2012, when the Maya apocalypse did not exactly happen on a planetary scale as predicted, we have witnessed instead an agglomeration of gradual apocalypses, usually inflicted on those who don’t have back-up plans, with bunkers and rifles and know-it-all-scenarios, protect-your-family infrastructures. The world is falling apart, not only in its physical condition, but also in its very reason for existing as a space that allows breathing and thriving of the spirit, be it human or other. As we write these lines, we are watching the erasure of people, of humanity, of common sense, of any sense, of reason and empathy altogether, of the will to live, confronted as we are with the capitalist-colonial-military apparatus. Destruction and doom, repression and censorship, chemical weapons and threat of nuclear escalation, on top of the existing wars, and the countless disasters that the media only reports for a limited time, on the backdrop of lifestyle advice, with gym exercises and nutritional advice, cooking and gardening recipes, pictures of cats and babies, watch the apocalypse from the cosy, fireplace-heated living room.
With tranzit. ro/București, every year on the 21st of December we gather to celebrate we survived for one more year. What about those who didn’t survive? Not because they were old and their time on this earth was peacefully coming to an end, but because of so many other reasons that we find hard to come to terms with?
We cannot fight death, no matter who inflicts it. We can, however, remember those who tried to live.
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Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life
Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life
The experimental course Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life (November 2023 - May 2024) celebrates as its starting point the anniversary of 50 years since the publication of Tools for Conviviality, considering that Ivan Illich’s call is as relevant as ever.
Modernization is an all-conquering force, yet it is never enough. The climate crisis looms large, while extractivism and the war against life are pressing on. Illich called for a “multidimensional balance of human life”, for finding a balanced scale to the growth of anything, and for identifying the convivial tools needed to rethink technology and the relation to the world. Relying on convivial tools would enable communities and societies to exit the trap of the paradigm of infinite accumulation, to develop self-sufficiency outside globalization, and to regain an ethical life outside extractivism, exploitation and impoverishment.
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Eastern European artists to participate in the main exhibition of Biennale Jogja 17 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
6th of October - 25th of November
Tranzit.ro/Bucharest in partnership with Jogja Biennale Foundation invites 12 participants and initiatives from Romania, Serbia, to Ukraine and Slovakia in the main exhibition of Jogja Biennale 17 under the project “Reclaiming Sociality around Land and the Rural” co-financed by The Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Programme. The biennial runs between 6 October and 25 November 2023 in various venues across Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Invited participants: Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Anca Bucur, Dan Vezentan, Eduard Constantin, Ilona Németh, Jelica Jovanović, Nikita Kadan, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea, Raluca Popa, The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. Curated by Adelina Luft.
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NON-WESTERN TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE GOOD LIFE
Freestanding Course at the Experimental Station For Research on Art and Life,
Siliștea Snagovului, Romania, 2023-2024.
Course leader: Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (retoolingclass@gmail.com)
* Wood Ladder, ~5.2m, dated 400-180 BC, Salt Mine Băile Figa
PREMISE
In 1973, based on collective research developed at CIDOC in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the monopoly of the industrial mode of production, Ivan Illich argued that “two thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age”; he also proposed the concept of a “multidimensional balance of human life” as the framework for rethinking technology and re-evaluating one’s relation to tools. Illich showed that it is possible to identify a balanced scale to the growth of anything, and raised the challenge of doing the work at identifying such scales and convivial tools. Such work would enable communities and societies to exit the trap of the paradigm of infinite accumulation, to develop self-sufficiency outside globalization, and to regain an ethical life outside extractivism, exploitation and impoverishment.
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Greywaters Phytoremediation
Eco-prototype design: atelier d'architecture autogérée
Participatory workshop within the project Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]
Saturday, 26 August 2023, 10 am – 6 pm
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS Coordinates
Phytoremediation is a term that groups different technical processes of removal or toxicity reduction of pollutants in the environment, based on the plants use. Among these techniques are the phyto-filtering of grey waters (used waters from the kitchen and shower), which involve installing natural filters, where botanic species called macrophytes are planted, which favour the activity of pollutant-eating bacteria, thus ensuring the cleansing of the water. Following this process, the water can be dispersed into the soil and used for irrigation.
Within the project Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC], funded by the European Union, tranzit.ro Association and its partners, atelier d'architecture autogérée, Drenart and Nedeea Vâlceană Association are realising a series of architectural and infrastructural eco-prototypes, appropriate to be used by cultural institutions. The phyto-filtering of greywaters is such an eco-prototype, already put into practice by atelier d'architecture autogéré (aaa) in the projects they developed in the region of Paris, as well as at TERRRA Brezoi, one of the sites where ABC project operates.
Alongisde the actual greywaters remediation, the eco-prototype conceived for the Experimental Station will help water the Cosmos Garden, a biodiversity garden initiation at the Station in Autumn 2022.
We invite you on Saturday, 26 August, to participate in a practical workshop of the construction of the phyto-filtering system. The workshop comprises a technical briefing, the practical part of installing the system and a collective lunch. Participation is free, for additional information you can write to raluca.voinea@tranzit.org.
Access: by car via DN1 or A3; by bus no. 446, departure from Piața Presei Libere, get off at Pescari stop, Siliștea Snagovului village.
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Residency of Elena Vlădăreanu at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Siliștea Snagovului
26-28 July 2023
With a minimal infrastructure, a garden invaded by Jerusalem artichokes and temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius, the Station is hardly the place ready to host artistic residencies. Nevertheless, following one of the objectives for the Station, to make its construction a transparent process, accompanied by events, workshops and other occasions for participation, tranzit.ro invited Elena Vlădăreanu to test the idea of research and reflection residency at the space of the Station.
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