As part of a mapping of sustainable practices in rural Romania, we have invited a number of artistic initiatives to send us around five-minute videos that capture the atmosphere of the places where they are, in villages, in the middle of nature, outside the big cities. These represent only a few from a series of such initiatives, which are part of a relatively recent and growing tendency. We started from only a few examples of artists who grow gardens, installed their studios in their grandparents’ village or built residency places for other artists in places outside of the centres where they normally live. We organised a seminar in January 2022 and discussed their motivations and common grounds. Then we started to look around, in Romania and the region and invited more artists and cultural workers to contribute to this collection, with short, poetic or descriptive comments on their own experience. To each iteration of the montage, we added more. There are now 23 examples and it is still work in progress. Meanwhile some of the initiatives are on pause: personal lives that make it hard to commit to the presence in these places; difficulties in maintaining them without additional support; disenchantments with local authorities and communities; while others have grown, opened up, connected to each other. We see these practices not as an idyllic return to nature, but as a foregrounding of a certain type of living in nature without colonising it, and an invitation to rethink artistic work on more ecological principles, as well as an acceptance of fragility as a reason to plant life around. With: Carambach/ Adriana Chiruță, Sibiu county, Romania Cecălaca/Csekelaka Cultural Studio/ Oana Fărcaș, Cecălaca village, Mureș county, Romania Crețești Studio-Garden/ Delia Popa, Ilfov county, Romania Cucuieți Permaculture/ Otilia & Radu Boeru, Cucuieți Village, Călărași County, Romania Dom Jan Hálá cultural center/ Zuzana Janečková, Važec village, Tatra mountains, Slovakia Drenart/ Stoyan Dechev, Olivia Mihălțianu, Dren village, Pernik region, Bulgaria The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life/ Dana Andrei, Eduard Constantin, Florian Niculae, Siliștea Snagovului village, Ilfov county, Romania The House of Light and Information/ Matei Bejenaru, Bârnova commune, Iași county, Romania Intersecția Residency/ Emanuela Ascari, Brădet village, Întorsura Buzăului commune, Covasna county, Romania Khata-Maysternya/House-Workshop/ Bogdan Velgan, Taras Grytsiuk, Olga Dyatel, Ekaterina and Olga Zarko, Alyona Karavai, Yulia Kniupa, Taras Kovalchuk, Magda Lapshyn, Anna Mygal, Sasha Moskovchuk, Svyat Popov, Tanya Sklyar, Natalia Trambovetska, Vilya and Ivanka Chupak, Babyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine LATERAL AIR/ Cristina Curcan, Lucian Indrei, at the crossroards between Mureșenii Bârgăului and Colibița, Bistrița-Năsăud county, Romania Muze. Gemüse Initiative/ Maria Balabaș & Vlad Mihăescu, Șomartin village, Sibiu county, Romania Rajka Orchard/ Martin Piacek, Győr-Moson-Sopron region, Hungary Rădești House/ Irina Botea Bucan & Jon Dean, Rădești village, Argeș county, Romania Reforesting Project/ Aris Papadopoulos, Candy Karra, Dora Zoumpa, Elena Novakovitc, Sotiris Tsiganos, Jonian Bisai, Vasilis Ntouros, Christina Reinhart, Klio Apostolaki, Lia Chamilothori, Kalentzi village, municipality of North Tzoumerka, Epirus, Greece Romanii de Jos Dendrological Park/ V. Leac, Vâlcea county, Romania Siliștea Future Studios/ Adelina Ivan, Ioana Gheorghiu, Virginia Toma, Ramon Sadîc, Robert Blaj, Vlad Brăteanu, Siliștea Snagovului village, Ilfov county, Romania Slon residencies/ META Cultural Foundation/ Raluca Doroftei, Slon Village, Cerasu Commune, Prahova County, Romania SOLAR Gallery/ Ariana Hodorcă & Albert Kaan, Gulia village, Dâmbovița county, Romania symbiopoiesis/ Andrei Nacu, Pădureni village, Iași county, Romania Watermelon Residency/ Daniela Pălimariu, Alexandru Niculescu, Bechet, Dolj county, Romania What Could Should Curating Do/ Biljana Ćirić, Gornja Gorevnica VILLAGE, Serbia Na záhradke [At the Garden] Gallery/ Oto Hudec, Košice, Slovakia Artistic initiatives in nature and in villages is part of a mapping of sustainable practices in rural Romania, developed in the frame of the project C4R – Cultures for Resilience in 2022-2023. Iterations: Halfway to Paradise. Hybrid seminar, Bucharest, January 2022 (5 initiatives) It´s risky to let they see you alive and almost frangible. Screening at One World Romania film festival, May 2022 (14 initiatives) Now the Impulse is to Live! Exhibition at the Order of Architects, Bucharest, July 2022 (17 initiatives) Now the Impulse is to Live! Edition Sofia. Exhibition at Toplocentrala, Sofia, September 2022 (20 initiatives) Now the Impulse is to Live! Timisoara Edition. Exhibition at Riverside Pavilion / Children’s Park, Timisoara, co-organised with Minitremu Association, July 2023 (22 initiatives) Publication editing: Raluca Voinea, Adelina Luft, Dana Andrei Video montage and publication design: Eduard Constantin

Halfway to Paradise A discussion about artistic initiatives’ (re)turn to nature. With: Adriana Chiruta, Irina Botea & Jon Dean, V. Leac, Daniela Palimariu, Delia Popa Sunday, 30 January 2022, 4 p.m. https://whereby.com/public-meetings An invented country for artists and scientists, in the region of Sibiu. A house-garden residency for artists and non-artists, in a village in Arges county. A small house and stripe of land for permaculture experiments, near the river Mures. A dendrology park near Horezu, dedicated to contemporary artists and writers. A residency for artists and watermelons in a small town in the south of the country, by the Danube. A studio with a greenhouse and a garden, not far from the south exit from Bucharest. These are just a few examples of spaces created by artists in natural settings, outside of the big cities, and it is a trend that has grown in the recent years, mirrored especially during the pandemic by a general interest in experimenting with life in the countryside. How can these artistic initiatives inspire more than a life-style, how can they inscribe themselves in a paradigm of understanding and living with nature rather than colonise it, how can they create communities that breathe in a different rhythm than that of precarity and hyper-consumption that characterises much of the daily life in contemporary cities?! This is hopefully the first in a series of discussions on these topics, and an attempt to connect similar initiatives and thus strengthen the models they establish. Adriana Chiruta lives and works in her favorite life-art project, a contemporary art eco-laboratory under construction since 2014, in the region of Sibiu, called Carambach, an “invented” country for artists, scientists, nature and human rights activists. She is an artist with hybrid practices. A performing arts professional, theatre director and dance passionate, with a philosophy background, she enjoys taking post-conceptual walks through different mediums (sound, video, text, etc.). Structured as performative installations, her works are meant to direct the viewers senses’ from the exterior art objects, toward themselves, as subjects of art invited to occupy the stage of their own life, personally, socially and politically. Irina Botea Bucan has developed an artist-educator-researcher methodology that questions dominant socio-political ideas and centralizes human and non-human agency as a vehicle for meaning. Jon Dean has been working in the overlapping fields of community-based participatory arts and education for over thirty years. Apart from their individual practices, they have also been collaborating on educational, artistic and cultural projects since the early 1990s. Due to their shared belief in the importance of working in non-traditional 'art spaces' they decided to literally build upon previous experiences through developing a house-garden residency for artists and non-artists (human and non-human) in the village of Radesti, Arges county. Since the beginning of 2019 they have renovated a small barn and worked alongside a wide range of local residents as well as invited guests to foster new collaborations. V. Leac is a poet and a performer in his or his friends’ art and life actions, exhibitions, films. Since 2010, he created a place of resistance, a space that survived the erosion from the river Mures, in the village of Bodrog, Arad county. Together with artists and other people from Arad and Timisoara, passionate for permaculture, they used the stripe of land between the small house and the river to create a garden with vegetables, medicinal plants, fruit, wild herbs, following a concept of multiple natures. Since 2020 he started a new project in Romanii de Jos, Valcea county, a dendrology park in which the trees planted there carry the names of his friends, artists and poets. Daniela Palimariu is an artist and a co-founding member of Sandwich collective. Sandwich started in 2016 as an artist-run space and is constantly expanding and reinventing itself. In 2022, a new project imagined by Sandwich is to be inaugurated: the Watermelon Residency, in the small town of Bechet, Dolj county, an important Danube port and close to the sandy region of Dabuleni, famous in Romania for its watermelons production. The residency programme is planned for local and international artists, who are invited to propose either research projects or site-specific works for the place. Delia Popa is a visual artist who researches the almost imperceptible space between discourse and reality, representation and control, while she constantly questions man’s insistence on detaching oneself from other animals. She depicts humans under zoomorphic forms, unveiling their cruelty towards other species, she endows plants with anthropomorphic traits and draws parallels between her work as an artist and her work as a gardener. Since 2015, she builds and uses her studio and cultivates plants in the village of Cretesti, Ilfov county, in her grandparents’ house and garden. The discussion is organised in a hybrid form, with the participants gathering in person and the public invited to join online, by accessing this link: https://whereby.com/public-meetings. * The discussion takes place in Romanian language. Host: Edi Constantin (the Experimental Station for Research) Moderator: Raluca Voinea (tranzit.ro/Bucuresti) The residency of Adriana Chiruta in Bucharest and this discussion are complementary activities to Regenerative-Reliable-Resourceful, the mapping of resilient practices in the Romanian countryside, in the field of food production and distribution, construction materials and cultural initiatives, that tranzit.ro develops in the frame of C4R project and of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. *The platform https://whereby.com/public-meetings can be accessed directly from an internet browser, preferably Chrome or Firefox. It doesn’t require the installation of an application or the creation of an account.