Recipes for Ripe Societies
Marina Sulima’s residency, part of the program Cultivators of Life
11.05 – 25.05.2025
Following a previous collaboration for the project Images of the Good Life in the East, a group exhibition organized in Chisinau last year, we have invited Marina Sulima to join us in a two-week residency in Bucharest and at the Station. The residency marks the beginning of the program Cultivators of Life taking place between 2025-2026 with a series of residencies, lectures, workshops and a group exhibition.
During her residency, Marina continued her artistic research Recipes for Ripe Societies. In this project, she aims to draw attention to the relationship between resource extraction and soil degradation through writing of alternative recipes. She took several things with her on her journey: pickled tomatoes, a handful of copper sulfate, crystals, and a bunch of grapevines. Around the village near the Station, she searched for houses made of clay, painted with lime and copper sulfate. She sketched different support structures found in the village for climbing vines to provide shade to the houses, both from wood and clay, or cement and tiles.
“High-tech tomato greenhouses rely on precarious migrant labor, tons of minerals spread out in the form of LED greenhouse lights, sprinklers, sensors and fertilizers. The entire edifice of intensive viticulture would collapse without fungicides, of which copper sulfate is the proudest. What kind of recipes for ripening fruit and our minds will be needed when the earth’s resource belly empties and the LED lights go out?”
We first screened the film Marina recently directed, Consider a Tomato, at The National Peasant Museum in a pre-premiere on the 22nd of May. The film follows the story of tomatoes, from closed-off Dutch greenhouses to Moldova, home to the filmmaker, to the many greenhouse workers who leave their own tomato patches to work behind glass walls. Narrated by Marina herself, the film looks into her family’s story of migration using her mother’s recipe book as an instrument to draw connections between tomatoes-as-protagonist and the social and economic imbalances of tomato production, from the abandoned land parcels of Moldova to the industrial glasshouses in the Netherlands.
More about the movie here.
The second event that concluded Marina’s stay and research was held at the Station, where she shared a script in progress in a performative moment. For around 20 minutes, she carried us along a poetic and reflective journey of copper sulfate and the question of its different uses – as a cure to save devastated vineyards from traveling pests like phylloxera throughout 19th century Europe, to its industrial extraction or traditional uses in vernacular infrastructure in Moldova, drawing connections to the ancestral relationship people have with the practice of cultivating vines.
Marina Sulima is an artist. Born in Moldova, she grew up on the banks of the Răut River and now works and lives in Groningen, the Netherlands. She graduated from the Minerva Academy in Groningen in 2020 with Parcelpaedia, a short film about the Italy Syndrome: a depression specific to Eastern European women working as care takers in Italy. The film received a Wildcard from the Netherlands Filmfonds, which allowed her to make another hybrid film: Consider a Tomato.
“I use illustration, animation, sculpture and film to create sorties that follow the trajectories of specific objects: a parcel, a shrimp ear, fluid leaking from a landfill, a copper ore or a tomato. This allows me to interact with the heartbroken world and refocus human stories around the earth.”
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by Tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
