Monumental Bills

The Monumental Bills project connects archives of images of abandoned, refurbished, privatized, or repurposed monuments with the artist's personal narrative thread. It highlights the condition of heritage buildings along the train route from Iasi to Bucharest, a route the artist regularly travels to work in the capital. Heritage buildings serve as testimonies to history and cultural diversity. Medieval castles, Byzantine churches, aristocratic palaces, and traditional peasant houses mark the cultural and social significance through diverse architectural forms. Protecting and preserving these edifices is crucial in sustaining collective identity, yet authorities, in most cases, sideline these buildings in terms of investment if they are not located in touristic or commercial areas. Many of them have been sold and privatized, neglected and overlooked. The buildings can be seen in the distance from the train carriages traveling on the Iasi- Bucharest routes. The monuments themselves are metaphors for centralized cultural investments and the lack of allocation of funds to marginal areas in an inefficient economy. The form of this project involves exploring image archives, along with the mapped route through on-site viewings of online maps, printed on receipt paper, extending for several tens of meters, resembling vines, reflecting the green protrusions that often surround decaying buildings. The prints are complemented by a video projection of abstract objects that resemble boulders, digitally constructed from facets of the buildings.

Link to video: https://youtu.be/EZEbiGU2syU

Project exhibited in:
Frozen Narratives: A Collection of Lived Moments, CAV Gallery, Bucharest, Romania, October, 2024
MULTISPECIES, Working Artspace and Production, Bucharest - Casa Avramide, Tulcea, April-August 2024.