tranzit.ro/ bucurești/ cluj/ iași/ sibiu/

Halfway to Paradise
A discussion about artistic initiatives’ (re)turn to nature.

With: Adriana Chiruta, Irina Botea & Jon Dean, V. Leac, Daniela Palimariu, Delia Popa

Sunday, 30 January 2022, 4 p.m.
https://whereby.com/public-meetings

An invented country for artists and scientists, in the region of Sibiu. A house-garden residency for artists and non-artists, in a village in Arges county. A small house and stripe of land for permaculture experiments, near the river Mures. A dendrology park near Horezu, dedicated to contemporary artists and writers. A residency for artists and watermelons in a small town in the south of the country, by the Danube. A studio with a greenhouse and a garden, not far from the south exit from Bucharest.

These are just a few examples of spaces created by artists in natural settings, outside of the big cities, and it is a trend that has grown in the recent years, mirrored especially during the pandemic by a general interest in experimenting with life in the countryside. How can these artistic initiatives inspire more than a life-style, how can they inscribe themselves in a paradigm of understanding and living with nature rather than colonise it, how can they create communities that breathe in a different rhythm than that of precarity and hyper-consumption that characterises much of the daily life in contemporary cities?!
This is hopefully the first in a series of discussions on these topics, and an attempt to connect similar initiatives and thus strengthen the models they establish.

Adriana Chiruta lives and works in her favorite life-art project, a contemporary art eco-laboratory under construction since 2014, in the region of Sibiu, called Carambach, an “invented” country for artists, scientists, nature and human rights activists. She is an artist with hybrid practices. A performing arts professional, theatre director and dance passionate, with a philosophy background, she enjoys taking post-conceptual walks through different mediums (sound, video, text, etc.). Structured as performative installations, her works are meant to direct the viewers senses’ from the exterior art objects, toward themselves, as subjects of art invited to occupy the stage of their own life, personally, socially and politically.

Irina Botea Bucan has developed an artist-educator-researcher methodology that questions dominant socio-political ideas and centralizes human and non-human agency as a vehicle for meaning. Jon Dean has been working in the overlapping fields of community-based participatory arts and education for over thirty years. Apart from their individual practices, they have also been collaborating on educational, artistic and cultural projects since the early 1990s. Due to their shared belief in the importance of working in non-traditional 'art spaces' they decided to literally build upon previous experiences through developing a house-garden residency for artists and non-artists (human and non-human) in the village of Radesti, Arges county. Since the beginning of 2019 they have renovated a small barn and worked alongside a wide range of local residents as well as invited guests to foster new collaborations.

V. Leac is a poet and a performer in his or his friends’ art and life actions, exhibitions, films. Since 2010, he created a place of resistance, a space that survived the erosion from the river Mures, in the village of Bodrog, Arad county. Together with artists and other people from Arad and Timisoara, passionate for permaculture, they used the stripe of land between the small house and the river to create a garden with vegetables, medicinal plants, fruit, wild herbs, following a concept of multiple natures. Since 2020 he started a new project in Romanii de Jos, Valcea county, a dendrology park in which the trees planted there carry the names of his friends, artists and poets.