when the old river turns, we hide, we seek








Restless draft in undried hollow’ draws from Baroque, an era shaped by a fractured worldview after the Catholic Church’s split in 1517.
As the old order collapsed, a void emerged—ready to be filled with absolutist agendas. Baroque’s excess and ephemerality showcase endless
possibilities through constant repetition and change. Emptiness becomes a central scene, where perpetually newly (re)born horizons of
expectations unfold. Architecture, music, stage design, and the choreographed body come together to perform displays of power, using
controlled perspective and the affect of togetherness to create hierarchies while highlighting exclusion and inaccessibility.

The work examines for whom the gaze is reserved and how it is choreographed—how ‘observing’ is entangled with ‘being observed’,
through means of omissions and additions; how authority is asserted over what is seen, through transient unveilings, setting doubt
upon one’s own perception.

By reworking both personal and found materials, I explore how historical documentation moves, changes, and shapes access to its information and meaning.



Caroll Durand: ‘The Apogee of Perspective in the Theatre: Ferdinando Bibiena's Scena per angolo’, Theatre Research International 13(1), 1988, S. 21-29.

Ferdinando Galli Bibiena: L’architettura civile preparata sú la geometria, e ridotta alle prospettive, considerazioni pratiche, Per Paolo Monti: Parma 1711.

Francesco Sbarra, La Contesa Dell'Aria, E Dell'Acqua : Festa À Cavallo Rappresentata Nell'Augustissime Nozze Delle Sacre, Cesaree, Reali M.M. Dell'Imperatore Leopoldo E Dell'Infanta Margherita Delle Spagne / [Antonio Bertali.] Inventata, e descritta Da Francesco Sbarra Consigliero Di Sua Maestà Cesarea, Apresso Matteo Cosmerovio: Vienna d' Austria 1667.

Jean Le Pautre, Engraving: The Fête of 1674, Fifth Day: Fireworks on the Canal, 1676 (later edition)





The first image I imagined when I began thinking about this project remains untaken. It keeps shifting in my mind, and I now believe
this is the only place where it truly belongs, in a state of flux, never fixed. It lives in my memory of a story read to me by my grandmother a long time ago.
All I can recall is that it bore similarities to Red Riding Hood, but it was more raw. There was no talking wolf, and the danger felt much more real, as though everything in the story could actually happen. What I remember clearly, though, is the book itself: a collection of old, archaic Romanian tales.
I remember its structure: its loose, yellowed pages; its strangely large size; its smell, and the smell of my grandmother’s nightshirt. Most of all, I remember one particular page containing an illustration from that story: a young woman carrying a bundle of twigs on her back, walking through a snow-blizzard landscape, slowly approaching her grotesque-looking treehouse, reachable only by a very long ladder. I also recall the presence of a wolf, although this is the only part I’m unsure of, whether it was really there, and if so, where it was standing.

Whenever I return home, I search for this book. It seems to be lost, yet I always find myself oddly relieved that I can’t find it. I’m afraid that if I were to have something tangible in front of me, something that fixes and defines the memory, everything around it might vanish.

Giving form is a human way of understanding ourselves and the world. The longing for a form that never takes shape might be what we describe as wonder.

Borders serve to delimit what is understood, given form, and brought under control, from what is not. The uncertainty of the wild has culturally evolved into imagined spaces, detached from socio-political structures. As a stage for crises, where known codes no longer apply, the obscure wilderness becomes a vehicle for consolidating the village’s power, a reassurance of its protective norms. Yet, dwelling in unknown landscapes is not only meant to disorient trespassers but also to bring about new ways of comprehending society and re-evaluating its values.

By working with myth-making as a way of grasping and taming the “hostile” land, I project dreams and fears onto the ever-shifting interpretation of a place and memory. The human desire to make sense of the unknown often leads to violent and destructive appropriation. And yet, it is the same desire that can preserve an imagined construct from erasure, to continue dreaming, and to shape it through language into a place yet to become.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988_ Variation 2 interpretated by Glenn Gould, 1955.

John Richard Green: A short history of the English people, London: Macmillan and Co 1875.

John Bulwer: Chirologia, or, The naturall language of the hand : composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof : whereunto is added Chironomia, or, the art of manuall rhetoricke : consisting of the naturall expressions, digested by art in the hand, as the chiefest instrument of eloquence, J.B. Gent. philochirosophus: London 1644.

Slavoj Žižek: ‘Void and Excess in Music’, International Journal of Zizek Studies 11(3) , 2017, S. 280-286.