found photography, mirrors, sound, and text
Narrating Images / Imagining Stories
Domino Gallery, The Paintbrush Factory, Cluj

untitled is the first outcome from working with an archive of found photography, that would become a long-term project – The Stucks. My work for the exhibition consisted of a selection of 50 photos from the archive, fragments of text and several audio recordings – fragments of conversations. The work was part of the group exhibition Narrating Images / Imagining Stories, curated by Diana Marincu.

One Saturday at the flea market in Cluj we found, together with Dan – a photography collector friend of mine – 26 developed rolls of film. We started scanning them and realised they were vacation photos belonging to the same family – mother, father, and two boys – covering more than a decade. The scanning process was slow, I think it took me about two months to complete it. With each roll I entered more into the life of this family, of whom I knew only what was caught on film; an intrusive act that I compensated by always keeping a distance from the images, as a viewer who observes but doesn’t touch. The images, though, are very personal, and I could not help but wonder who these people are, where they are now, if they still live, where are all the places the photos were taken. I began to write, to anchor myself this way during this disclosure process, and to invent fragments of biography for this family. When I finished scanning, I met with Dan again and recorded our conversation as we randomly went through the photos, approaching and moving away from the images, stopping on details, making connections with personal details, references to films or artworks, allowing our personal imagery to cross with the images captured in those 250 photos.