Proper way to see a landscape, 2023

10 monotipuri pe hârtie din fibre de cânepă 11 g, dimensiuni variabile (48 x 94 cm, 50 x 60 cm și 47,5 x 56 cm)
1 point-sèche și laviu de tuș pe hârtie din fibre de cânepă 11 g, 94 x 37 cm

Irina Motroc traces with fine lines on paper the transformation of a place almost abandoned by people and reclaimed by nature. The 11 works in printmaking techniques that make up the installation Proper way to see a landscape are informed by photographs that the artist took in the village of her grandparents, in the south of the country. Most of the houses here are in disrepair after their residents have either gone to work abroad, moved to other parts of the country, or are no longer alive.

Looking at images of the abandoned houses, Irina noticed a similarity between the pieces of plaster still on the walls and fictional maps inside which boundaries of territories were drawn. “I thought about the way these houses degrade to the point of total decomposition, and to the pieces of plaster as matter that will recompose the landscape, redraw it,” she says. For the 11 new unique prints – ten monotypes and one drypoint mixed with ink wash -, Irina draws “territories” from the initial photographs and adds abstracted landscape drawings.

The granularity of the images encapsulates larger narratives about migration and social mobility, the constant reconfiguration of territories through new borders, the shifting attention from center to margins, and nature’s persistence in re-appropriating what humans have abandoned – an idea also discussed in her previous installation Aici am stat (2023). This connection between natural and man-made space inspired the formal appearance of the installation: thin branches support the prints around which the visitor moves.