In a world of flow and inconsistency in which the concepts of solid, vertical, transcendent no longer find the meaning and place, we try to upgrade ourselves in the perspective of a multitasking existence with stratified pursuits and constructed affects, with re-mixed love affairs slop in the flow of whose perpetual passage has become our only certainty. We dilate, we alter to overcome, we proudly build virtual identities on the perishability of our own self.

Water, time, river of affects, memory (referred to by Heraclitus and Bergson, today sung by brokers-poets of financial flows), that is the paradigm we are using to re-construct ourselves, in which we sink by running away from causality, trying to recover even a virtual freedom.

In this context, the artists of the project On Words, Water and Things aim to analyze the recent crisis of the subject, of subjectivity. Starting from the already invoked metaphor of the river, particularly the Danube as a political connection between the East and West, between communism and post-communism, their endeavours will comment on the new positionings of the individual towards nature – technology, on the old born-built dichotomy.

Whether it is the paradoxical confrontation between the earth born of alluviums (Shimian) and the one disappeared through technology (Ada Kaleh interpreted in the Heideggerian register of the standing reserve / Bestand), a struggle supplemented by a meditation on the connection between time, flow and streaming, as in the case of Lucian Bran, whether it is the way in which the will of power of the dethroned man makes way for the force of agents-things (things that in Jane Bennett via Deleuze interpretational key become the main characters and indispensable elements in the process of redefining the identity) as in the case of Andrei Mateescu, Nita Mocanu & Marius Stoica projects, the footprint of the new post-humanist paradigm remains visible. Sometimes these comments are of social and political value – see Raluca Paraschiv’s approach to a frozen Europe on the threshold of Brexit, or that of Lucian Indrei, dedicated to a black and white Romania of swans floating in the mouth of the garbage dump. The in situ approach of the artists Olivia Mihălţianu & Stoyan Dechev redefines the idea of ​​the garden-nature towards a conceptual space of ideas and analysis, simultaneously re-loading the concept of cultivation with a series of socio-political connotations.

And as there is no alternative, we are left with taking possession of this world of becoming-nature, of becoming-machine, of vibrant matter, of adaptability to a re-mix of love and virtual identities.

Artists: Lucian Bran, Lucian Indrei, Andrei Mateescu, Olivia Mihălțianu & Stoyan Dechev, Nita Mocanu & Marius Stoica, Raluca Paraschiv.