Currently lives and works in: Between France (Giverny) and Romania (Mirosi), but in the last 5 months rather in France
Practice: Installation, Performance, Mixed Medias
Areas of interest: Vernacular techniques, ethnography, weaving, relational art, installation, processes
I concentrate on contextual interventions based on interactions with various actors of a particular place during a certain lapse of time. I question the way objects and environments communicate real situations from which they originate. Like contextual chameleons, my performative installations are moulded punctually to one space-time. Social, historical, geographical, or intimate contexts determine a subliminal message for my arrangements. Each piece is composite and carries a narrative at once. The meaning that emerges is fuelled by interactions with the objects in specific frames. The actions use narrative triangles to communicate their intentions, that is, an intelligible triangular relationship between three interactive elements – the actor, the objects, and the frame. I question the way in which objects and environments communicate real situations from which they originate. Like contextual chameleons, my craft moulds itself punctually to one space-time. Social, historical, geographical, or intimate contexts determine a subliminal message for my arrangements. Each piece is composite and carries a narrative at once. The meaning that emerges is fuelled by interactions with the objects in specific frames. I use narrative triangles to communicate intentions, that is, an intelligible triangular relationship between three interactive elements – the actor, the objects, and the frame.
By playing with a variety of mediums, I deal with topics related to the disappearance of handicraft, the instrumentalization of resources and raw materials, and the muted violence of our contemporary societies. An important part of my production is centred on vernacular techniques, accompanied by ethnographic field research. For me, collaboration with artisans in rural areas is a way to perpetuate knowledge. I also seek inspiration in my day job as a regular employee at the Louvre Museum.
Magic Carpets project | To hope is to contradict the future
Concept: Florica Zaharia, founder of the Textile Museum in Baita (Romania), describes “The homely industry” as a concept opposed to handicrafts. While handicrafts use expensive raw materials to design objects for a certain market, “The homely industry” functions with humble elements, usually of natural origin, found around the household and for the benefit of the family. The first case scenario derives from the second one. “Homely industry” thus relates to objects processed by the members of one home, out of basic resources that grow and fade in the rhythm of one year’s passing seasons. The craft was a process in accordance with inorganic and organic matter, changed and shaped by weather and earthly cycles. The resulting objects were meant for the household’s benefit, and the shapes were decided based on utility.
Intention: The intervention invites reflection on self-sustainable practices, “individual homely industries,” adapted to each one of us. It encourages us to think through our industrialized styles of life, integrating generosity and harmony towards and with non-human elements of our anthropocene world. My intention is to initiate a wise and sensible research on the tangible universe that surrounds us and on ourselves. It questions whether our suburban vegetation has a raison d’être other than being decorative for our architectural hives.
Method: Let’s use a different layer of perception when looking around and about in the remains of our environment. I propose to experiment with our immediate surroundings with the intent of relearning timeless manners of building for ourselves. Instead of instrumentalizing our resources, let’s rather grasp the components of our milieu in relation to our daily habits. By examining shapes, textures, and features, the mind is inclined to guess which branch could become a spoon, which dirt can become a bowl, which plant can become a thread. While scanning every material’s potentiality, its resistance, and its elasticity in time and matter, one is invited to ask several questions related to generosity and consequence.
Past projects
“All the Roads”, “Are Paved”, “With Good Intentions”
Type: Installation and performance
The three pieces, “All the roads,” “Are paved with,” “Good intentions,” stand interconnected in space. They are the result of an ethnographic research on the state of straw in today’s rural Romanian wheat-culture. Inspired by behind-the-bush habits, the artist puts into perspective the mirror relationship between human actions and the organic realm. By approaching an expendable material, she questions manners of waste-handling in so-called eco-friendly labor. Spoiled resources and arguable raw-material management come into the equation, as a shout-out to the present European war-induced wheat crisis. What do we do when grains are missing, and we’re only left with the stems? Stanca Soare offers three potential answers on the presence of a fruitless element that pops up in folk handicrafts, in vernacular house-making, and in illegal back-yard fires.
Each artwork reacts to straw by proposing a different outcome. We shall either weave it and use it, build bricks out of it and let it shelter us, or burn it and regret it. The proposals explore vernacular techniques, folk know-how, and the villagers’ bad habits. To do so, the artist immerses herself in Mirosi village (Arges county), absorbing and reusing its plants, ashes, and soil. The artworks are tied to an environment, and their making is constrained by the summer harvest season. An experimental approach puts the plant through fire and lets it be born again from its ashes. This speculation on an earthly seedling made inedible carries with it an alchemical quest. Could we make use of the unusable?
What inspires you as an artist? Mechanic processes of creation involving the whole body derived from obsolete timeless techniques, the ways tourists behave in a museum, anything outside the art sphere.
What do you think is the purpose of art? As a tool to think through the present situations, art has the capacity to underline aspects we otherwise cannot put in words.
Contacts
[email protected] | +33631828737 / +40721076123 | Instagram | Facebook | www.s-soare.com