Currently lives and works in: Madrid (Spain), (Berlin) Germany
Practice: Visual artist
Areas of interest: My artwork is a very open work, based mainly on the realization of installations and performance, but without a doubt each project is different and I don’t mind researching and adopting new techniques, using other branches of plastic art, such as photography, video, sculpture, and even collaborating with other artists or craftsmen if necessary.
My projects have a broad conceptual base and are based on the human experience exploring our connections with nature, culture and the social system in general. They try to embody on the way we read experience, how we remember it and understand culture and history.
My latest works approach a series of representative issues relevant to consumer culture, economic power, identity and consumer ethics, seeking at all times to determine who we are and who we are not.
Curiously, I come from a completely different world, professional sports, high jump. I have been formed in physical education between Bucharest and Madrid and it was in 2010 that I specialized in industrial design and little by little I took the path of art. In 2012, together with Carlos Maté we formed Carlos Maté Estudio. Thanks to the Portuguese artist Juliao Sarmiento who has counted on me to realize one of his artistic proposals in Madrid, I discovered the direct interest towards performance.
Knowing the consequences of what we are doing with the planet and the personal need to investigate in depth on the commitment of art to the socio-environmental crisis, made me start my master studies with the aim of finding theoretical answers, plastic, current movements past. So, in 2018 I decided to study fine art through the Master of the Escuela Sur and Carlos III University.
Why are you a part of Magic Carpets: Raluca Doroftei, member of the curatorial team of the Meta Foundation is the one who proposed my work for the residency in Istanbul.
Magic Carpet | Sobremesa
Sobremesa is a performance-installation that confronts the way we read the experience, recall the memory and understand the culture and history starting from the literal meaning of the expression reaching the deepest layers of it. The table, the tablecloths, the food and drink is something we all have in common, but Sobremesa tries to bring to the table our culture, our education, our traditions, our roots and memories, our experiences and our emotional baggage…creating a unique experience for 20 people.
The table is a blank paper, which allows you to write multiple stories, about a single or several places or characters, eating or talking, working, the table is like a canvas that shapes us, defines us, connects us and determines our daily lives. The table is where we hold celebrations, make decisions and express our creativity.
On top of the table there are several tablecloths collected in the same neighborhood of Istanbul, each one different from the other, for its origin and design, material used, shape and color, but above all for its emotional charge. Could we go beyond the mere aesthetic, decorative and protective function of tablecloths? Are we able to delve into any of their layers? How is pain, hope, knowledge reflected in both material objects and intangible elements? Which hands have woven, washed and touched them? What stories are hidden in each one of them? If these tablecloths spoke…. what would they tell us?
On top of the table there are several tablecloths collected in the same neighborhood of Istanbul, each one different from the other, for its origin and design, material used, shape and color, but above all for its emotional charge. Could we go beyond the mere aesthetic, decorative and protective function of tablecloths? Are we able to delve into any of their layers? How is pain, hope, knowledge reflected in both material objects and intangible elements? Which hands have woven, washed and touched them? What stories are hidden in each one of them? If these tablecloths spoke…. what would they tell us?
The Sobremesa installation attempts to blur aesthetics and “use value” to evoke dialogues about the commemorative function of art. These marks, etched into the surface of the tablecloths, represent an accumulation of voices and moments from the past. I am fascinated by how the marks left by those who have used the tablecloths constitute an alternative and intimate historical record of the object.
Food is capable of evoking powerful memories that link us to people, places and experiences. Food is inextricably linked to cultural identities, but with this performance new challenges are being posed to gather around a table. Based on the work with the local community of the Kurturus neighborhood, it seeks to highlight the origin of the dishes as well as the imprint that each cook leaves on it. The menu is simple, based on the current policy on food access and sustainability, but loaded with a lot of identity and emotions, as well as individual and collective history.
Food brings people together and the conversation between them is one of the main points of the Sobremesa instalation. If we would consider a conversation about art as art in itself, or a piece of art, this installation would function as a frame for this work, a container with the ambitious and futile intention of capturing those moments and giving it a plastic form.
Past projects
THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER
Type: Performance
The piece is an intimate moment of reading. An invitation to immerse oneself in ghost stories in the light of an old fireplace, to remember the childhood days when we used to continue reading at night under the sheets with a flashlight.
The guest is traveling through a fragmented text that, while coming to life and acquiring physical form, bifurcates along multiple paths. He experience a time that decomposes and multiplies, that tells us of a strange story of poets enclosed by rain, of the relationship of the year without summer of 1816 with the current ecological crisis; we are facing both the birth of Frankenstein’s creature and the current ecological collapse, we live the lives of mad poets, we slowly watch the roulette of extinctions on the planet, the click of life and death and the deep darkness that resides in the soul of the terrible predator that is the human being.
MADE IN
Type: Sculpture
The Made in project takes as its starting point the example of a representative sector of this consumer madness, the fashion sector, the second most polluting after the oil industry to show how the consumer society has absorbed us, where the rapidity prevails, what cheap, simple, use and throw, individual. The incongruities of a sector that portray the current economic model that impoverishes many people, enriches only few and is depleting the planet. The project demonstrates through research how the interest that euphoric versions of globalization have faded, and the cracks and fissures hidden behind its bright facade have been exposed.
USA | FLAGS
Type: Sculpture, Video, Performance
Flags is a project composed by flags intervened in different formats and all referred to situations of violence or injustice related or justified under national symbols.
The piece USA is a flag of the United States intervened replacing the traditional stars with barbed wire embroidered and folded in the format in which is delivered to the relatives of the deceased or veterans after the ceremony. It is accompanied by a video in which the fold of the flag is done by two people following the meticulous ritual.
SILENCE
Type: Installation, Video, Performance
In one room that remained continually in darkness and in the greatest possible silence, only two point lights guided view of visitors who gradually was adapting to discover the nuances in the dark monochromatic palette of all elements. A desk and chair, burned and charred and the rest of the different wings parts also in black is located in the center of the space. A video piece completed installation.
The installation was completed or “activated” on the opening day through performative action. In it a character, in the room completely dark was showing its presence throughout the room through sound and flashes of light from matches. Located in the table and in the light of a burning book, then he made a written with black ink on a piece of the same color, and burned a photo and some pages… There being his ashes…
What inspires you as an artist? Daily life.
What do you think is the purpose of art? To teach you other ways of reading the past, present and future, your own environment, to break your schemes and to question yourself…
Contacts
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