Photography: from material to monument
Conversation between Laura Bivolaru and Vladimir Florentin
Laura Bivolaru: Your photographs start with a journey through particular areas that draw you. Tell me more about the idiosyncrasies of these urban spaces and how this practice of dérive acts as a methodology for your work.
Vladimir Florentin: There’s an undeniable energy in encountering a new place—when everything feels unfamiliar, and the air itself seems charged. I love that initial thrill of discovery, seeing things with fresh eyes, but I’m also compelled to linger. I enjoy revisiting spaces, observing their gradual evolution, and noticing the quiet, subtle shifts that happen over time. It’s a rhythm I’ve come to rely on—balancing fleeting curiosity with deliberate, patient observation. Sometimes, it feels like being an umarell—those Italian men who stand at construction sites, simply watching and waiting. That oscillation between discovery and reflection is at the core of my practice.
While I may have absorbed fragments of Henri Lefebvre, Georges Perec, or the Situationist ideas, my process was far less structured. I would stumble upon something that caught my attention, take my phone out or my camera and document it. The dérive and psychogeography are central to my process. I drift through spaces, letting chance encounters guide me—collecting not just physical fragments but also the moods, rhythms, and atmospheres of these places. Whether it’s a perforated industrial fence in Bucharest or an abandoned car wash in Arles, these places challenge our expectations of permanence. Their restless energy keeps drawing me back.
These ideas began to crystallize during my MA, but their roots go further back. Between 2017 and 2021, I lived in Hackney, London, walking daily through areas like Haggerston, Dalston, and Hackney Wick. The rapid regeneration turned these neighborhoods into perpetual construction sites. That period laid the foundation for Warped Space E9, a series that captured the refusal of these spaces to offer an easy narrative. The photographs, later exhibited and published, adopted a “deadpan” aesthetic—not as a conscious decision, but as a reflection of the spaces’ ambiguity and mutability.
During Warped Spaces, I also experimented with détournement. I photographed objects like roof tiles, mannequins, and foam blocks, physically relocating them to a studio or construction site, and then re-photographing them. In some cases, I brought the photo objects back to their original locations, creating a loop between site, object, and image—a cyclical process that mirrored the transformations of the spaces themselves.
The absence of people in my work is intentional. Including figures would anchor the work in specific narratives, turning the objects into conversation pieces. By leaving people out, I let the materials and spaces speak for themselves, preserving their ambiguity and allowing for multiple interpretations. It’s not about telling a story—it’s about capturing a rhythm, a sense of flux that resonates beyond the specific.
You’re primarily interested in the photographic representation of urban spaces, yet your works can be described more as sculptures or objects than as photographs. What is the relationship between the city and the photo-objects you create?
The city, for me, is more than just a subject—it’s an active participant in my work. I’m fascinated by its transitional spaces: construction sites, forgotten corners, and those in-between zones where decay and renewal collide. These are places that hold a kind of raw energy, spaces that are never quite finished but always in flux. The city is alive, constantly evolving, and it’s this restless movement that forms the backbone of my practice.
Rather than simply documenting these spaces, I love to engage with them on a material level. I take fragments of the city—its textures, its materials, its traces—and reimagine them into tangible objects. It’s a way of distilling the city’s ephemeral qualities into something you can hold, something that carries the weight of its history and transformation. Pieces of metal, cracked concrete, fading layers of paint—these materials are like urban fossils, charged with the memory of their place and time.
Often, my process is informed by the found, involuntary sculptures I encounter in these spaces—those unexpected, serendipitous moments where forms and materials align in ways that feel almost sculptural. These moments spark a kind of dialogue, guiding how I create the photo-objects. It’s a constant push and pull between image and object, where neither fully takes precedence over the other. This tension becomes a central part of the work, blurring the boundaries between seeing and touching, between surface and structure.
There’s a bit of psychogeography at play here, too. And then there’s détournement—a kind of creative hijacking. I take what’s overlooked or discarded and give it a new purpose, folding it back into the work in ways that mimic its original transformation.
The result is what I call “photo-objects”—pieces that occupy the space between image and sculpture. They’re not straightforward representations of urban spaces; they’re more like distillations or echoes.
In 2020/21, you studied under Lucy Soutter at the University of Westminster, where you graduated with an MA in Photography Arts. Dr. Soutter has been an exponent of what is called ‘expanded photography’, which refers to an artistic practice that departs from the framed print on the wall as the primary way of presenting photography, including other mediums, such as sculpture, installation or performance. In what ways has the concept of ‘expanded photography’ impacted how you understand and practice photography?
It’s funny because before I came across the term expanded photography, I was already leaning toward making things tangible—breaking out of that traditional flat, framed-photo-on-the-wall format. But I didn’t really have the language for it. That all changed when I studied under Lucy Soutter and David Bate. They introduced me to sculpture photography and opened up this whole world where the photograph wasn’t just an image but a material to experiment with. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about taking photos; it was about making with photographic material.
I think a huge turning point for me was discovering artists like Felicity Hammond, Letha Wilson, Rachel de Joode, Stéphane Couturier, Artie Vierkant. They don’t just make photos—they build with them. Then there was Charlotte Cotton’s Photography is Magic, which became a kind of bible for me during my MA, showing how photography could embrace performance, sculpture, and absurdity. And I can’t forget the Foam Talent exhibition at Beaconsfield Gallery in 2019—it completely blew my mind. I remember standing there thinking, “Okay, this is it. This is where photography can go.”
What’s exciting about expanded photography is that it breaks all the rules. You’re no longer bound by the frame. For me, that means photographs can be cut up, stretched, folded, or layered onto materials like metal or Perspex. In Hybrid Monuments, I pushed this idea further, turning photographs into sculptural elements that mimic the chaos and layers of urban spaces. It’s almost like the city itself becomes a collaborator.
And the history! When I read about Peter Bunnell’s Photography into Sculpture and Mary Statzer’s The Photographic Object, 1970, it felt incredibly liberating to discover that conceptual artists in the ’70s were already rejecting the purity of the print, treating photographs as objects to mold and shape. It made me feel like I wasn’t just inventing something new but contributing to this ongoing dialogue.
At the end of the day, expanded photography isn’t just a technique or a theory. It’s a mindset. It’s about not feeling restricted by traditional categories like “photography” or “sculpture” but letting the work decide what it wants to be. That kind of freedom is what keeps me excited about what I do.
You also run Displaced Materials Lab, which exhibited at UNSEEN Amsterdam last year, together with artist Adrián Coto. How did you two come to initiate this project and what role does collaboration play in your practice?
Our collaboration began almost by chance, in the way that the best partnerships often do. After graduation, Adrian and I found ourselves in that uncertain, open-ended space where the world is full of possibilities, yet the path ahead is unclear. It was during this liminal time, when anything felt possible but nothing yet felt defined, that we discovered a shared fascination: pushing the boundaries of photography.
Opening a studio together felt instinctive—a natural way to shape our ideas and create a space where we could experiment freely. This impulse led to Displaced Materials Lab (DML), a collaborative platform where we could reimagine photography as a hybrid medium, blurring the lines between image, sculpture, urban spaces and body representation.
Adrian’s work is deeply introspective, exploring the ways identity, gender, and sexuality are constructed, often using psychoanalysis as a lens. Their recent pieces dive into the political, reflecting on migration and national identity with a personal and powerful approach. This rich, reflective practice provided a perfect counterpoint to my own, and together, our different perspectives began to merge in ways that felt both natural and profound.
From this foundation, we created Cityscapes, an embodiment of our collaboration. Shown at UNSEEN Amsterdam, this photographic sculpture/installation explores the complex, often invisible relationship between the city and the human body. For both of us, these two entities—city and body—are in a constant dialogue, shaping one another in ways that are visible yet hidden, tangible yet symbolic. Cityscapes merges organic and artificial elements, employing materials like construction debris, fabrics, and Perspex to create an immersive experience.
The process of building it on-site at UNSEEN was as much a part of the artwork as the final installation itself. It was a truly collaborative experience. We brought some photographic materials with us, while others were printed locally in the Netherlands. We worked closely with local printing studios and carpenters, the festival’s technicians, and Roderick, the Director, who guided us through the curation and integration process. We sourced local debris and raw materials, grounding the piece in the landscape of UNSEEN.
What resulted was more than just an installation; it became a statement about transformation and displacement. It reflected how urban spaces evolve over time and how human bodies inhabit and respond to these changes.
You show little to no respect for the integrity of the photographic image, both as a digital file and as a physical object. In your practice, the photograph seems to play the role of raw material and is, consequently, liberally distorted, cropped, fragmented, and sliced into. Do you consider your photographs ‘poor images’?
Yes, in a way, my photographs could be seen as ‘poor images’ in the way Hito Steyerl describes them—degraded, fragmented, and stripped of their original context. But I don’t see this as a loss. Instead, I think of it as an opportunity. For me, the photographic surface is never the endpoint; it’s the beginning of a process. By slicing, distorting, or cropping the image, I reflect the way cities themselves are constantly being reshaped—through decay, development, and the passage of time. The photograph sheds its preciousness in my hands, transforming into something physical and tactile, a fragment that feels like a found relic, reimagined and re-contextualized.
This idea of the ‘poor image’ fits naturally with the DIY spirit and raw energy of punk subcultures and the Situationist practice of détournement—taking existing materials and giving them a new voice or purpose. Like those movements, my work resists polish or perfection, opting instead for something raw and direct, almost anti-establishment in its embrace of imperfection. These degraded images, often physically altered or intentionally ‘failed,’ become objects that challenge traditional ideas of what a photograph should be. They embrace resistance, not just aesthetically but conceptually.
I approach each body of work on its own terms, so I don’t really think in categories like ‘photography’ or ‘sculpture.’ Those labels feel too rigid for the way I work. Instead, I’m interested in pushing and pulling between the two, exploring how they overlap. It’s a way of thinking that resonates with Robert Heinecken’s concept of ‘paraphotography,’ where the photograph steps outside its conventional boundaries and becomes something entirely new.
At the core of it, I’m less concerned with staying true to the idea of photography and more excited about what happens when you break it apart—when you strip it back, distort it, and let it evolve into something unexpected. It’s a process that mirrors the energy of the city itself—messy, layered, and constantly in flux.
From MEFIN, a factory in your hometown, Sinaia, to the new tower blocks of Hackney Wick or the periphery of Arles, your works echo the forms of the city, both its post-industrial fate and its new face—global, gentrified and hyper-consumerist. Tell me more about how you came to think of your photo-objects as ‘hybrid monuments’ and what you consider to be their function in the 21st century city.
Absolutely—Sinaia, Hackney Wick, and Arles have each shaped how I think about cities and the stories they hold. Every place is like a layer in my practice, showing me something new about memory, transformation, and how urban spaces evolve over time.
Sinaia, where I grew up, was defined by MEFIN, this massive industrial factory that felt alive when I was a kid—loud, gritty, and full of energy. You could smell oil in the air, feel the crunch of freshly poured tarmac under your feet. It was such a central part of the town’s identity. But when it shut down, the factory became this ghostly place, all its purpose drained away. For me, those ruins were like a playground, but they also planted this idea of how spaces hold onto their history, even when they’re falling apart. That stayed with me.
When I moved to London, Hackney Wick felt like an echo of that. It was raw and industrial but also changing so fast—artists’ studios were turning into luxury flats, and construction sites seemed to pop up everywhere. That tension became the heart of my Warped Spaces project. I wanted to capture the materials, textures, and even the sense of displacement you feel when a place is in transition. But I didn’t just document it; I used photography to reconstruct it—layering images with actual materials like aluminum and concrete to make something that felt tactile, almost like a fragment of the space itself.
Then there’s Arles, which was a whole different experience. It has this deep historical presence, from Roman ruins to modern industry, but I was drawn to its edges—the abandoned car washes and industrial scraps that don’t fit into the city’s postcard image. During a workshop there, I started collecting fragments: faded signage, scraps of metal, and twisted wires. It was a bit like piecing together a puzzle, finding these traces of the city’s life that felt forgotten. Sometimes I’d assemble them into temporary sculptures, drag them around, rearrange them—it became this playful, almost performative way of interacting with the space.
What tied all of this together for me was Robert Smithson’s idea of New Monuments. He looked at things like bridges, dirt mounds and pipes—not as traditional monuments that celebrate history, but as markers of change, showing how a place is always in flux. That’s what I’ve tried to do with my Hybrid Monuments. They’re fragments—photo-objects that mix images and materials to show this in-between state, where the past and present overlap. It’s not about preserving a moment; it’s about capturing that feeling of transformation.
When I brought this all together for the “Expanded Spatialities” exhibition you curated in Bucharest, it was like building a conversation between Sinaia, Hackney Wick, Madrid, and Arles. Each piece carried its own story, but together they became a kind of hybrid monument themselves—a way to reflect on how cities everywhere are constantly changing, reshaping themselves.
I think that’s what fascinates me most about urban spaces: they’re never really finished. They’re always moving, always evolving. And that tension—between holding onto what’s been lost and adapting to what’s new—is what I try to explore in my work. It’s like the city is alive, and I’m just trying to figure out how to tell its story.
You always work with sizable prints and installations. In what ways do you think the size of the work makes a difference in how it is looked at and received by the audience?
Size is such a critical element in my work because it transforms the way people interact with it. With large-scale prints and installations, the experience moves beyond looking at a photograph—it becomes something immersive, something you step into and navigate. I’m drawn to that idea of creating an environment where people feel like they’re walking through a space, not just observing it from a distance.
When you encounter a sizable photo-object, it’s hard to ignore—it’s confrontational in a way. It has a presence that demands attention, and the scale makes it feel more like a physical object than just an image. You start noticing the textures, the imperfections, the materials—it mirrors the urban environments I work with. Whether it’s a piece of aluminum or a warped Perspex sheet, the material and the image become inseparable, and their relationship feels amplified at that size.
On a psychological level, large works can evoke different emotions. They might feel overwhelming, like the chaos of a city in flux, but at the same time, they create a sense of intimacy because the audience has to physically move around them, adjust their perspective, and engage with them. It becomes this dialogue between the viewer and the work—almost like they’re discovering the space piece by piece, just as I do when I’m exploring the places that inspire me.
For example, in my installation for Expanded Spatialities in Bucharest, I brought elements from different places together at a large scale. The audience wasn’t just seeing these cities through photographs—they were moving between them, feeling the transitions and overlaps. It was like creating a fragmented urban environment that people could experience physically. That wouldn’t have been possible without the size and spatial presence of the work.
Ultimately, the scale is about pushing photography beyond its traditional boundaries. I want the audience to feel the work—to see it, yes, but also to sense it in their body, to navigate it as they would a city street. The size helps me bridge that gap between image and experience, making the work something that resonates both visually and physically. It’s not just about what they see but about what they feel as they move through it.
You have also been working with in-situ installations, creating photo-objects that respond to the architectural features of specific places, such as MFN_SINAIA //PR_220mg, which was melted and bent around two wall corners at ⅔ galeria in Bucharest last year, or the sculpture you made for Setting the Stage: Photography as Object and Prop, a site-specific workshop facilitated by Felicity Hammond as part of Lunigiana Land Art at Castello Lusuolo in Tuscany. Can you describe the creative process involved in these works?
In-situ projects are some of the most exciting and challenging parts of my practice. They demand a constant dialogue with the environment, where each space—whether a gallery in Bucharest or a centuries-old castle in Tuscany—brings its own textures, stories, and constraints. These works aren’t about imposing an idea onto a location but about responding to what’s already there, letting the space shape the piece as much as I do.
For instance, in MFN_SINAIA //PR_220mg at ⅔ Galeria in Bucharest, I created a Perspex photo object that I manipulated on-site. Using a heat gun, I bent and warped it around two wall corners, almost sculpting the piece into the architecture. The process was raw and tactile—far from polished. At one point, a cleaner accidentally knocked over one of the sculptures, forcing me to scavenge rocks and metal bars from the old center of Bucharest to stabilize it. It felt chaotic but deeply connected to the site, as if the city itself was offering materials to complete the work.
This approach to site-specificity also shaped my experience at the Setting the Stage: Photography as Object and Prop workshop in Lunigiana, led by Felicity Hammond. Castello Lusuolo, with its layered history of construction, destruction, and reconstruction, became more than a backdrop—it was a collaborator. The castle’s theatricality informed my work there. Drawing from its historical use as a setting for performances, I created a sculptural photo-object: a crumpled, manipulated photographic material stuffed into a wooden stand, wrapped in cling film. The result was something that felt like an archaeological artifact—a relic from an imagined history, caught somewhere between the real and the staged.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this workshop was the interplay between photography and the castle’s architecture. I experimented with cutouts of photographic material, tucking them into cracks, letting them frame views of the surrounding landscape, and creating a visual conversation between the old stone walls and my contemporary interventions. We also worked with printed fabrics, hanging them on the walls like modern-day tapestries. Historically, castles were adorned with tapestries that told stories or commemorated events, and this felt like a nod to that tradition, reimagined through the lens of photographic imagery.
What’s fascinating about site-specific work is that it doesn’t always have to be monumental. Sometimes, the smallest gestures resonate the most. I’m reminded of John Baldessari’s iconic piece where he waved goodbye to boats—so simple yet rooted in its location and moment. Or during a workshop in Arles, where a friend mailed a postcard to his grandmother—a quiet, deeply personal act tied to that specific place. These works have expanded my understanding of site-specificity, showing me that it can be as much about context and connection as it is about the material.
This idea of responding to a site—of letting the space speak—has been influenced by artists like Gordon Matta-Clark. His radical cutouts and architectural interventions resonate deeply with my practice. While working on RNE_220 // 43°N 4°E, I stumbled across a wooden panel with punched holes near a church in Bucharest, and it immediately brought to mind Matta-Clark’s approach to materials and spaces. Similarly, in Lunigiana, I encountered a metal sheet with a single, perfect hole in it. These moments of serendipity—where found objects seem to echo larger ideas—are what keeps me excited about this way of working.
Ultimately, these projects are about layering materials, narratives, and histories. Whether it’s bending Perspex to fit a gallery wall or integrating photographic textiles into a castle’s architecture, the goal is always to create a dialogue between the work and its environment. It’s this mix of precision, improvisation, and discovery that makes in-situ installations so rewarding—and reminds me why I fell in love with this process in the first place.
– interview developed by Laura Bivolaru
– edited and translated by Marina Oprea
