I’ll be late tonight
I made this autobiographical work while I was living in a gated expatriate residence in Russia, between 2012-2020. In that secluded housing community, hosting expatriates from different countries, men and women performed traditional gender roles, with families being organised around the breadwinner/homemaker model. During the long winters, while the husbands were at work and the children at school, the expatriate women would spend most of their time inside their homes.
Given the patriarchal social structure of the expatriate community, I was trying to make sense of the notion of power in marital relationships and its dynamics, following the changes brought by the family’s migration. As an expatriate woman, the feelings of displacement inherent to the process of migration were exacerbated by the isolating nature of housework and the sense of confinement in the domestic space.
To some extent, and in many cultures, every wife becomes a housewife and sociologists agree that generally, women make more adjustments for their marriage than husbands do. The expectations are that women will take over the main responsibilities related to childcare and most of the domestic duties, even when they are in paid employment, an inequality that is more prevalent when women become mothers.
The economic dependency on their partners, coupled with a lack of acknowledgement and value in capitalist society of the role of women as homemakers and stay at home mothers, affect the psychological well being of the housewife. These often unspoken aspects led me to question the extent to which our identities are socially constructed and which are the implications on women's sense of self and identity being primarily identified by their role of wives and mothers. In the particular environment of the expatriate community, the aspirational ideal represented by the hegemonic masculinity was the most socially valued form of gender identity.
The consensual nature of this social mechanism became a central point of my research. I was investigating the idea that the pressure to conform to gendered assumptions and expectations was contributing to women internalising personal codes of behaviour that encouraged the perpetuation of the same gender-biased hierarchy. The projection of perfection extending to femininity, home and an idealised nuclear family made me examine my own constructed identity in relation to others.
'I'll be late tonight' is challenging the myth of domestic bliss and addresses the idea of home as a place of resistance, from a subjective experience, where identities involve a performative, and ultimately isolating act.
Stillness
These observations on the earthy and the celestial are the result of a quiet contemplation on the nature of space, an understanding enhanced by a state of stillness and immersion into the metaphysical.
Through the lack of human presence and man-made elements, the images constitute both manifestations of the sublime, and a meditation on our own existence within the vastness of the universe. The removal of distractions that normally clutter the landscape, preference for abstraction and simplicity of form, facilitate the perception of the very core of the landscape, seen as an union of metaphysical dualities including earth and sky, light and dark, mind and body.
The proposed visual language in Stillness is meant to convey a sense of harmony of one’s existence on both the universal and microcosmic scale, and to provide an experience that ultimately transcends the boundaries of the purely aesthetic.
Present Continuous
This work explores the possibility of a temporally extended present, a refuse to embrace liminality. The awareness of the transiency of physical world led to an attempt to memorialize fleeting impressions made by the passing of moments in time.
The images question the medium’s capacity to suppress the present and create memories of its own. My intention was to suspend the present by capturing present moments in an archetypal space where the temporal distinction between past, present and future is blurred.
In this space, the awareness of passage of time stems from reflecting on our memories of what has happened. But as the act of recording the present on camera unfolds, comes the apprehension that the perceived present is already past.
Dark matter
As we are bound by our senses in our perception of reality, reality itself is an illusion, an interplay between light and darkness, visible and invisible.
This project is an illustration of the duality of reality, as much as an exploration of an inner-universe.
Initially I was drawn to the mutability of water and started photographing different bodies of water. I was observing how its physical qualities were subject to change with each passing second.
In the water I could see the opening of an abyss. Without light and colour, it turned into a mass of dark viscous fluid.
I looked at it until I didn't know what I was looking at, where I was or what I was. Disorientation. Void. Timelessness.
Early Days
Having very few images from my own childhood, this project has grown from the existing gaps in the representation of that time of my life.
An excursion in the past, to my hometown in Romania, triggered a dialogue with my personal history and an exploration of the complex relationship between place and identity. What role plays place in the formation of identity and to what extent the place itself is invested with meaning by members of its communities?
It is said that ‘place makes memories cohere in complex ways.’ (Dolores Hayden).
Having left my home country about 20 years ago, in summer I went back to Iasi, the city where I was born and lived until adulthood. I wandered around the neighbourhood where my family used to live. Long standing legacy of the communist era, the apartment buildings make a sort of labyrinth, where grass and trees grow wildly between the cracked concrete and on the unpaved ground around the buildings.
The emotional bond we have with the place is inexorably related to the narratives we hold from the memories of the places that shaped us. For years, the summers came and went, friendships were made and broken. The concrete city slowly revealed itself to me; it took many years of exploring it.
It is this place with its harshness and softness that made me who I am. The story of my hometown is a story about resilience of man and nature.
