Photo Journal Monday: Anastasia Dumitrescu
Our gestures echo matter / Dwelled / Anastasia Dumitrescu
Images and text by Anastasia Dumitrescu
Dwelled
Do we dwell in a world that is already built, with its structures in place for us to occupy, or can we build only because we already dwell, in body and mind, in the world in which we find ourselves?
By the present project I was looking to investigate the notion of hybrid spaces. Between man-made things (artefacts) and natural things (organisms), between making and growing, landscapes bear the records of hybrid histories and narratives. Amidst the normative and the unexpected, where fictional narratives can penetrate, the landscape of constant oscillations is revealed, allowing it to be encountered, destroyed, rebuild, and then released (Yutaka Takanashi).
A place is a story happening many times / Dwelled / Anastasia Dumitrescu
There is a tendency and need to transcend ones own locales. Working regionally is a prime material for my artistic practice, a constant dynamic and flow between rootedness and restlessness. Dwelling places, reading their paths, observing topographical oscillations and acting upon the landscape with my moving body, reflects and reshapes it at each passing.
Taskscape #3 / Dwelled / Anastasia Dumitrescu
Each time we enter a place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity. There are physical and material components of the land, of trees, plants, objects, dead or alive entities, non human actors but also pieces of memories and instruments waiting to be used. By way of a 'dwelling perspective' that derives from the premise of people's active, perceptual engagement in the world, the notion of 'taskscape' denote a pattern of dwelling activities.
Artefacts / Dwelled / Anastasia Dumitrescu
The images were captured in various locations surroundings my home and are spontaneous enquiries, reactions and responses to the topography, sculptural effigies of positive and negative spaces, created through co-operation between real and fictional traits of the landscape. A form of perceptual photography that explores the proximity of ambivalent landscapes, familiar yet peculiar. Through sensuous kinaesthetic responses to topography and shared affinity with sculptural and still life photography, layer by layer, a topographical visual vocabulary was being surfaced. I experienced and explored the environment as an open air studio, under construction, where each actant is encountered in its in-becoming state. Sharing a building archeology approach and aesthetics, I traced a hybrid history of existing places and traces, and analysed data such as surfaces, materials, building techniques and the way various elements and materials connect with one another. A space of fine-tuning and reflection, a bridge between self and environment that blends the physical landscape with the inner landscape of ones own thoughts and attitudes.
Middle-realm / Dwelled / Anastasia Dumitrescu
Entwined with personal memories and marks of our manufactured environment, a geography of nowhere is brought to surface. A liminal fictional narrative where imagination, memory and perception exchange functions and unfold into the journey of a nomad wanderer. Places are made after their stories. They emerge from discourse, from acts of naming. Nowhere emerges silently, and it would be like a dialogue with us builders and performers of a landscape in which meanings are not fixed but constantly emerge and alter.
Oscillations / Dwelled / Anastasia Dumitrescu
