Tatiana Fiodorova (Republic of Moldova) presents several series of drawings documenting the present life of some disadvantaged social categories – especially elderly women – from countries in the sphere of influence of the former Soviet bloc. Also results of workshops with children from the “Save the Children” Center for Counseling and Support for Parents and Children, whose parents work abroad, the drawings and objects produced and exhibited at Borderline Art Space imagine a better future, questioning the capacity of artistic intervention to produce instruments through which it can overcome the bottlenecks and limitations of social imagination imposed by economic precariousness. In the exhibition, they will be accompanied by video projects documenting poetic actions made during this collaboration. In the continuation of the opening and in addition to a dialogue with Cristian Nae, the curator of the exhibition, the artist will hold a workshop open to the public.

The lives of ordinary people, and even more so of the most precarious of them, are most often unnoticed. They are constantly pushed to the outskirts of cities and thus remain, many times, invisible. The documentation of their precarious existence, subjected to a silent form of social violence, raises issues of ethical representation and aesthetic function of the documentary image. Her crochetes, in most cases portrayed in pen on toilet paper, sometimes accompanied by poor-quality photographic images, seek to recapture the fragility of the people they represent through the approaching manner of the artistic medium. The portrayed characters, extracted from the murmur of anonymity, but also from their immediate social context, are singularized, thus regaining the lost dignity in their everyday lives. From simple extras on the shooting platforms of post-socialist societies, these characters become, shortly, actors of their own lives.

These series of images, made in Chisinau, Tbilisi, Transdniestria and Russia and exposed for the first time in Iasi in a way that highlights the contrast between poverty and economic welfare, become the background of the artistic project conceived and realized for this exhibition. Exploring another social category, the Iasi project addresses the issue of economic migration, a social phenomenon that affected about a quarter of the population of Romania and the Republic of Moldova in the last three decades.