VIAE FERRAE[i]
Malina Ionescu & Andreea Medar
Curator Mirela Stoeac Vlăduți
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The environment constructed by Mălina Ionescu & Andreea Medar from overlaying and combined fragments of maps brings together images of roads, parts of cities or villages, houses and buildings from various places and time sequences, to become finally one merged map of a place which is emotional, affective and very personal. The space of memory – individual or common – is made of combined images of other places, different in relevance and therefore scale. The spatial identity of a place is – always – defined by more than the geographic reality it corresponds to – or used to. The two artists bring together, on the common, unifying background of the earth and growing wheat, the essentialized images of places relevant to them: their current and former homes, the places of their daily activities, places that belong to their past or only seem to be part of a different time as they either exist no longer or have become inaccessible, places that seem either further away or nearer – their difference in scale is one of the intentional in exactitudes in the otherwise precise maps. Space is compressed or expanded and alters the size, visual expression and direction – intention even – of its elements, which gain a certain unexpected independence: the exhibition contains the image of an unfamiliar place, strange to both the authors, its presence explained by an error in the Google Maps search. This occurrence gives the key to the title, inspired by the wild streets – viae ferrae – from the novella Reports of Certain events in London (in Looking for Jake, Del Ray Books, 2005) by China Miéville. The two artists bring into the project their own images and experiences, just as each of the places comes with its own history, meaning and symbolic charge, in a dialogue that shares and reveals, like any discourse about friendship, coincidences, convergences, differences and situations that complete and enhance each other.
[i] A bow to China Miéville
Viae Ferrae 2019, Tg-Jiu, unconventional space, intervention in space, earth, wheat, rubber