“It is not so rare to see projects about climate change or ecology nowadays. So I could say this work is about garbage and no one would bat an eye. Or about sustainable thinking, or about the local water management and the environment. I even imagine a visitor thinking “ah, this is about the many health benefits of clean water in urban ecosystems” and they wouldn’t be wrong at all. We could think this climate change business could still work out fine in the end. But let’s just consider that, at least for now, we are simply adrift. I propose this as a better option than having something on paper that doesn’t really match reality. There is no fixed position because we are all on the move to some random shore, out of space and out of place, heading wherever the current takes us.

On a sunny day in Timișoara, I walked along the Bega canal and picked up a couple of things that did not look like they belonged there, trash that floated on the water for some time and looked like it was there to stay – unwanted ghosts of a synthetic past. But if this is our ecosystem now, why judge them so harshly? These random things turned into protagonists, whom I lended my voice to in order to let them tell the story of their presumed demise, of their turning from something-needed into something-thrown-away-and-forgotten. A bubble tea cup that played a small part in a teenage romance, a plastic bag whose friendship with a little fish proved fatal, a chocolate wrap that covered a schoolboy’s favorite snack… The innocence I put into the writing of these characters is an attempt at shifting the blame of their impact upon the environment towards the bigger structural lack of ecological education of the population and institutions that manage the public space and natural constructed landscape. This mission explains the expansion of the work into the public transport system: over the duration of the exhibition, the sound works are available to listen via QR scan in all the vaporettos offering transportation on the Bega river, thanks to the support of the Timișoara Public Transport Society.” – Larisa Crunțeanu

Adrift/ Vapporeto

26.09-30.11.2023

Curated by Anja Lückenkemper