Captured by reality

Mixed media installation
2020 – 2022
Working technique: construction – assembly
Work technique: inscribed concrete slab, needle felting & textile, collage spun wool, cotton textile material, jute twin, in-depth writing inserted in the extruded plate
Photography: Corneliu David, Mihai Theodor Sava

Sometimes, it looks to us and, even more, it proves to us that the entire reality surrounding us, our life too, “hangs on a string”.
“Captured by reality” aims to bring to the fore the human being and its state, actually our state, our status, and our situation confronted with a borderline state of facts: the pandemic phenomenon of COVID-19.
The raw, rigid reality in which we exist, in whose core lies, like a burning stigma, the sign of the nowadays history, became a pedestal where is displayed and exhibited the fragility of our existence.
The deliberately and strong contradiction between the rough, clearly delimitated form (full and particularised by the millions of needle stitch) and its ephemeral, frail content tries to signal and make possible the comprehension of the human tensions, the imbalance, the lack of any stability through which the man passed, the major transformations sustained by the human and social realities of that dramatic period.
In the above view, the grounded body print of “Captured by Reality” looks like a gravestone. The image refers to the idea of camouflaged trauma, and that is because, like many other humans, in that period I just fought and manage to survive, living every day like another proof of resistance against the threat of death.
That is why the work is a personal answer to that situation, a new anchor in real which becomes a stand-by attitude concerning a given situation and its results, its consequences.