Anastasia Dumitrescu
Anastasia Dumitrescu (Romania, 1989) is a multimedia artist and photographer based in Transylvania. After a degree at The National University of Performative Art and Cinema from Bucharest, she attends a master on The Theory of Practice of the Image at The Centre of Excellency in Visual Studies in Bucharest. Her research has a post humanist framework and is based on a post-phenomenological approach to geography and the theories of feminist new materialism, methods that enable relational modes of approaching narratives between meaning and matter, humans, non-humans, and the environment. Her practice is shaped by the search of surfacing through the visible part of the land the latent streams of the invisible narratives and meanings that shape our behaviours and perceptions of the world. She uses interdisciplinary intersections between photography, video art, sound design and installations. She is the co-founder of Hyphen, an audio-visual platform where she performs as part of the experimental duo NAAUM.
Find Anastasia Dumitrescu here:
https://anastasiadumitrescu.com/
https://www.instagram.com/anastasia.dumitrescu/
Dwelled
Do we dwell in a world that is already built, with its structures in place for us to occupy, or can we build only because we already dwell, in body and mind, in the world in which we find ourselves?
How does our perception build a place? Dwelling makes places, transforming space into place, and each time we enter a place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, heterogeneous actors in relational spatial/temporal settings.
In anthropology liminality is the condition of ambiguity and disorientation that occurs in the transitional phase of a passage from the previous state to the next one. The temporary dissolution of order and customs during liminality creates a fluid and flexible situation that enables a free form approach. Dwelled started as such a free form exploration of the liminal spaces and contact zones between the city and the countryside and explores the ever-shifting state of places, the intrinsic narratives and relational modes between meaning and matter, nature and culture, humans, non-humans and the environment.
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Questioning the way building remnants and artefacts affect, reshape and transform the landscape and its inhabitants, I become interested on the idea of spaces that are transitory. Places that are somehow placeless, unbounded and suspended, non-places seemingly unclassified but storing in an altered form meaning and memory. Spaces of transience where human presence retains its anonymity but shares a collective identity. The perception of a space like a non-place is subjective. Perceived as a crossroad of human relations and activities, such places are ambivalent in that they are at once spaces of transition and stasis, mobility and immobility, identity and non-identity, place and non-place, memory and oblivion.
The notion of taskscape understood as a pattern of activities ‘collapsed’ into an array of features” (Tim Ingold) helped reveal some aspects related to these apparently empty spaces of transition and labor where one can encounter vestiges and traces of our collective behaviours and identities. Taskscapes as well as landscapes, are to be contemplated as perpetually in process rather than in a static state, never complete but continually under construction.
Entwined with personal memories and marks of our manufactured environment, a geography of nowhere was brought to surface. A space of fine-tuning and reflection, an experiential bridge between self and environment that blends the physical landscape with the inner landscape of ones own thoughts and attitudes. A liminal and fictional narrative where imagination, memory and perception exchange functions and unfold into the journey of a nomad inhabitant. Places are made after their stories. They emerge from discourse, from acts of naming. Dwelled is thus a dialogue with us builders and performers of a landscape in which meanings are not fixed but constantly emerge and alter.
