autumn
ALINA MANOLACHE
Alina Manolache is a filmmaker, artist and professor, known for her work at the crossroads of documentary and experimental cinema. After studying fine arts, she transitioned to non-fiction filmmaking, and has since directed a wide spectrum of celebrated films: Lost Kids on the Beach (IDFA 2020), End of Summer (Visions du Reel 2016), I AM HERE (Jihlava 2020), 3 Dialogues About the Future (Kasseler Dokfest 2022) to name just a few. Filmmaker Magazine has acknowledged her as one of the premier female directors of IDFA 2020 and her work has been featured in The Guardian, Calvert Journal, Vice, AEON, among others. She has contributed as a commissioned director of web documentaries for global platforms like VICE and The Guardian, was an artist-in-residence in Paris, and served as a jury member in esteemed festivals, like CPH:DOX, or Mons Film Festival. She has designed and given courses and workshops across the world, and collaborated with high-profile art schools in Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, and Romania. She is currently working on her sophomore feature documentary, ‘A Summer of Nothing’ and teaching MA Film students at HSLU Luzern, Switzerland. During her residency, Alina had the opportunity to advance work on a film project exploring her relationship with a distant land, starting with a map and a glossary of terms, which evolved as she deepened her research. Studying books relevant to her research, she sketched out a possible narrative structure and a concept for a visual approach, based on the materials gathered. The residency gave her the opportunity to work at a concentrated pace and to develop a clearer vision of the artistic direction of the project. An important point of reference was his first feature film, "Lost Kids on the Beach", which followed a similar research process. In Șona, the tranquillity and isolation of the countryside were key sources of inspiration, helping her to shape the project. The space generated new ideas, and immersing herself in the countryside allowed her to connect more deeply with the research topic. Moreover, her research alternated with her pedagogical work, preparing a course on experimental documentary filmmaking during that period. In parallel, she also remained involved in the post-production of her latest feature film, "A Summer of Nothing", which will premiere in 2025.
NICOLETA MOISE
Nicoleta Moise (b.1989) is a Bucharest-based artist and author who studied photography at The National University of Arts in Bucharest. Her practice integrates archives, video and text, to make visible lesser-known stories, which require time and a careful, longstanding work. This approach creates an on-going dialogue between the past and the present, the personal and the public, inviting us to engage with the world in a more thoughtful and emotionally attuned. She is former co-founder of CUTRA, a queer, feminist magazine. She occasionally collaborates with Scena9, a publication that charts the cultural scene in Romania (and elsewhere), as well as for other international publications. A selection of her projects include Memory of the World (2021), s+s=bff, The League of Gorj Women (2020), I Am Not Entirely Happy Unless I Am Here, In My Country (2016) and Not only the seaside, but I like the mountains too! (2014). During the residency, Nicoleta reflected on the experiences gained in the artistic residencies of the last 10 years, which she intended to gather in the form of an essay. The process started from a desire to better understand the reasons that led her to participate in the residencies, the impact they had on her practice, and how she dealt with difficult moments. Going through the texts collected so far, she had the opportunity to notice a change in the way she writes, her working tool. She also set out to design the essay as a useful resource for other artists interested in residencies, with information that she wished she had known before. For Nicoleta, Șona AIR was her first rural residency, but she remained open to spontaneity and unpredictability, curious about how the experience would influence the way she worked. She enjoyed the common things, sharpened her powers of observation and found the quiet space to work on her essay, managing to shape the structure, taking inspiration from other texts she had previously written. In parallel, Nicoleta continued working on a research project she started in 2022 together with Luiza Vasiliu, which analyzes how art and journalism intersect in contemporary culture, suggesting the possibility of a new discipline. Their discussions provided fresh perspectives and the impulse for a next phase of the project.
spring
SORINA VAZELINA
Sorina Vazelina (b. 1986) is half-graphic designer, one quarter-illustrator and one-fourth comics author. A graduate of the Faculty of Art and Design of the West University of Timișoara with a master’s in graphic arts from the University of Arts in Bucharest, Sorina explores the world of illustrations and comics, creating works that often combine social and anthropological themes. She developed as an artist while working for the Scena9, DoR and Vice magazines, as well as through the creation of cultural materials for various publications, festivals and publishers. Over the years, she also gained significant experience in the production of artist books, winning her an award in the Best Romanian Book Design competition for best illustrator for the book Old Farts, and first prize in the artist book section for The Box. Between 2012 and 2021, together with Grigore Liteanu, she ran the primitivprint screen printing workshop, which contributed to the alternative printing scene. Since 2022, she has been working as a graphic designer at the Youth Theater in Piatra Neamț. In 2023, Sorina worked together with her grandmother on the transgenerational project Exercises for Grandparents and Grandkids, which was presented as part of the Art Encounters 2023 contemporary art biennial. During her residency, Sorina Vazelina assembled 40 pages of comics. These served as the introduction to a book exploring the subject of death in different cultures and periods, a book of comics and visual narratives printed in different formats and mixed techniques. The book contains themes and reflections accumulated over a number of years, which Sorina brings together in a series of comics: fear of death and how our perception of it affects our daily lives, the transformation of the Romanian village, an archive of 6-7 cemeteries documented in recent years, rituals, crafts, traditions, places. The material created during her residency ended up forming the basis for volume 4 of the While We Wait series. This publication is part of a series of three, each in a different format tailored to suit the message chosen by Sorina. As part of the residency, Sorina also created a series of post-it notes depicting the walks she took in the area around Șona, both with her dog and alone. The images, created using a Japanese brush, formed part of an exercise – of anchoring in the present moment, of adapting to the drawing technique, of observation and admiration of nature.
SUPER:SERIOS
Super:Serios is a collective of artists and architects that engage with public space through playful strategies. Since 2017, the collective has developed tactics and methodologies that involve games concerning the environment we live in, be it urban, social, or political. Two members of the Super:Serios collective, Maria Mandea and George Marian, participated in the residency. Maria Mandea (b.1991) is an artist and researcher working with the medium of play. After studying Product Design at UAUIM Bucharest (graduated 2017) she developed a doctoral thesis on play design at the University of Arts in Bucharest. She currently teaches the Art of Game Design Master at UNATC Bucharest. While studying, she created Micul Haos in 2012, a toy design project based on an original concept on the border between toys and participatory art objects. She is vice president of the Laborator Artistic Association and a co-founder of Știrbei47 art-space. In 2023, she initiated The Play Institute (Institutul Jocului). Maria works with the medium of large-scale interactive installations (Divided, 2020, Aproape Departe, 2020, System in the Room, 2020, Rousseau Game, 2022). Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in both formal and unconventional settings: National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Ars Electronica Center, in public space in Bucharest, Timișoara or Matera, Italy and can be found in public collections of museums. George Marian Preduț (b. 1991, Bucharest, Romania) is an artist who works with textiles and analogue photography. With an interest in the area of urban photography and its transfer to the textile medium, George studied Textile Art and Design (UNArte Bucharest) and Psychology (SNSPA Bucharest). As an Erasmus student at the Faculty of Arts in Grenoble, he developed a project focused on public-private space, called Balconies, a project also exhibited at Unagaleria. At the Art Quarter in Budapest he documented the work of resident artists, the photographs were exhibited in 2018 in the exhibition Progress. Since 2011 he has been keeping an analogue photography diary on ilikegoodstories.com. His photographs capture landscape, architecture and art in public space from an observational, poetic and subversive perspective of the seeing eye. Maria and George worked on a collaborative artistic research project as part of their Șona AIR residency. Entitled Persona and Place – Explorations Among Figures and Spaces, it explores the relationship between figure and place, body and territory, character and space, through observations in working environments, photographic documentation and small, temporary in situ interventions.Their research combines two of the artists’ current projects: the Micul Haos toy design project (2013-present), an original concept straddling the border between toys and participative objets d’art, and ilikegoodstories (2011-present), a narrative photographic documentary project using analogue techniques. Using free exploration and ludic participative techniques, the artists investigated the way in which the identity of a character is created in relation to its habitation of the space, with the spatial context influencing the perception and depiction of the figure and the way the characters and spaces define each other as part of a visual narrative. The exploration was carried out in a manner in keeping with the specific character of the village of Șona and its inhabitants, with the intervention, consisting of the integration in space of constructed characters and their photographing, constituting an archive of images and conclusions relating to the research.
