About

An Annotated Map of Bucharest

‘An Annotated Map of Bucharest’ is an Impulse project developed in the framework of Alina Cristea’s doctoral research Bucharest. The City with One Inhabitant.The City-Me. The basis of it was laid in 2020 together with dr. Mira Sanders and dr. Liesbeth Decan.

The project is threefold and is composed of:

  • A study trip to Bucharest together with Mira Sanders in March 2022 with the scope of a first encounter with Bucharest, guided by Alina Cristea. This was conceptualized as an annotated walk through the city, highlighting important and symbolic places for Alina Cristea’s research, as well as contextualizing these choices, either personal or based on important events in the collective memory of the city.
  • The seminar on ‘Artistic Research Methods: Micronarratives and the City’ given at the local partner CESI - Center of Excellence in Image Studies in Bucharest and on Zoom on April 20th 2022. This encounter between the artists and the PhD students from CESI included: a screening of the video works: Bucharest. The City-Me (fragment), silent china, and Bucharest 8 March 2022, and a conversation between the artists and prof.dr. Ileana Marin from CESI / University of Washington.
  • The upcoming publication ‘Micronarratives and the City’ with contributions by Alina Cristea, Mira Sanders and Ileana Marin. Through photography, text, drawing, film and mixed media, the authors explore the mapping of (micro) situations observed in the city of Bucharest. The use of image and text forms a common thread across the contributions of the different authors: Alina Cristea draws from her research and practice Bucharest. The City with One Inhabitant.The City-Me; Mira Sanders brings in the act of drawing to represent/explore ways of spatial experiences, and Ileana Marin explores the notion of contextualizing walking in the city of Bucharest through a selection of Romanian literary works. This publication is realized by the Grafische Cel (Ghent) and made possible through the support of LUCA School of Arts and the research group Intermedia, KU Leuven - Faculty of Architecture, campus Sint-Lucas Brussels, and Olivier Gevart from Été 78 (Brussels).

Researchers

Alina Cristea is an artist-researcher working with photography and film, currently living and working in Brussels and Bucharest. After having been living in different cities in Belgium and in the Czech Republic, where she studied Photography and Cultural Studies, she became interested in her identity as a Romanian in Europe and in her hometown, Bucharest. This led to the research project entitled Bucharest. The City with One Inhabitant. The City-Me, which combines photography, sound, and text. She is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts in Belgium. Her works have been shown at ARGOS - centre for art and media, L Museum, M Museum (BE), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE) and at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg (AT), among other places. She is a member of the research unit Intermedia (LUCA School of Arts) and of Writing Urban Places (COST Action). In 2016 she co-founded the duo collective DOI (= two in Romanian), in which she experimented with different media and explored the dynamics of the duo together with another visual artist (Ine Vlassaks).

Mira Sanders (b. 1973) studied Fine Arts at Sint-Lukas Brussels and is lecturer / researcher at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels/Ghent. Her oeuvre consists of video works, drawings and installations, in which a constant quest emerges for the places, people and stories they contain. Mira Sanders’ current work focuses on how objects, people or events in physical spaces and on the actual terrain 'inhabit' place. Her visual language consists of meticulous lines, markings, borders, routes, maps, plans and drawings that describe, read spaces, and outline imaginary journeys in an attempt to surpass the limits of language. In 2007 she was one of the laureates of the Young Belgian Painting Award. Her work has been shown, among other places, Galerie VidalCuglietta (Brussels), Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (Paris), ARGOS centre for art and media (Brussels), MDAC Rochechouart (Rochechouart), BOZAR (Brussels), deSingel (Antwerp), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Huize Frankendael (Amsterdam) and CEAC (Xiamen). Co-founder of The Mental Masonry Lab (with Cédric Noël). Mira Sanders obtained her Ph.D. in the arts Over de (on)mogelijkheid om een beeld te vormen van limieten (About the (Im) possibility to Form an Idea of Limits) in 2017.

Ileana Marin teaches interdisciplinary courses at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies in Bucharest. With a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and another one in Textual Studies, she published books on tragic myths, Pre-Raphaelite artists, and Victorian aesthetics of erasure. She is currently working on a project dedicated to artists’ books. Marin has participated in international conferences with papers on the de-humanizing power of art, the artistic legacy of communism, as well as on the materiality of literary, pictorial, and graphic texts. Recently, she has contributed articles on E-Literature and digital arts. In 2013, she co-founded the American Romanian Cultural Society, a Seattle-based nonprofit that organizes cultural and educational programs with a focus on Eastern Europe, especially Romania. Since 2019, she has been in charge of the Doctoral School “Space, Image, Text, Territory” of the University of Bucharest.

De Grafische Cel is a platform for research in the academic Graphic Design course at Sint-Lucas Visual Arts in Ghent. It is founded on the strength of the collective and is based on the proposition that designing is itself artistic research. The Grafische Cel aims to reflect on the practice and position of the graphic designer as someone who, in addition to the visual design of an assignment, is also involved in the structural composition, editing and production process of a project. The Grafische Cel intends to create a platform among the lecturers, students and alumni of Sint-Lucas, the academic world and the outside world and in this capacity occupies an important position in Sint-Lucas. The Grafische Cel also tries to build bridges between various disciplines. For the publication Micronarratives and the City. An Annotated Map of Bucharest, Grafische Cel worked with Fien Vaneenooghe, MA student graphic design, Inge Ketelers & Michaël Bussaer, co-ordinators of Grafische Cel.