class="">AR(t)EST II (video presentation)

“AR(t)EST is a project that actress Vero Nica and visual artist Andu Dumitrescu started in the middle of the lockdown. It set off on the 20. of April and continued until the 20. of June 2020, and it brought together 64 people in the cultural field, visual artists, curators, theatre people, choreographers, who all shared one picture from the lockdown time, alongside a text. All these materials were published on Facebook ad Instagram, every day at a certain hour.

Visual artists manage to bring forth spectacular images even from confinement. For their part, the texts altogether shape a map of subjectivities, this time an interactive one, from the pandemic. Once confined to their homes, in their jammies, people seem to have taken off not just their clothes but also their social personas. A luxury, considering the rhythm of the past few years.

The particular conditions the pandemic created have brough a certain distance and detachment, weirdly tangled up with the air of intimacy from each person’s home. At home, your guard is down. Life is made up of details which, outside, would have been irrelevant. But the personal tone of each author, their rhythm, their concerns and distractions, all these create the journal of an artistic collective spirit during the pandemic. Honesty, authenticity, home environment and passion are all put together into an experience for which, until now, there has not been any proper context.” – Cristina Rusiecki, theatre critic

AR(t)EST II is a multimedia installation curated by visual artist Andu Dumitrescu which comes as a natural follow-up of the project, an escape from the online which intends to reunite both the artistic interventions as well as themselves.