Saturday, July 29, 2023, at 18.00 PM, in 5 locations in Constanța.
- “On the Same Line” is the 3rd artwork, part of Mentoring and Production for Emerging Artists programme (public art stage). This component includes 6 artworks produced individually or in groups by the emerging artists selected.
- The artwork is inspired by pandemic times and is a symbol of freedom and connection among people in difficult times.
- Previous stages: mentoring and the exhibition Back to Where It All Began. Art in Public Space is the final stage of Accelerator programme, which will be finalised at the end of September 2023.
- The project is financed with the support of EEA Grants 2014-2021 within the RO CULTURA
People of Constanța and tourists present at the seaside are invited on Saturday, July 29, 2023, at 18.00 PM, to take part in the launch of “On the Same Line” kite installation, presented by artist Lucia Ghegu.
The artwork consists in an installation of paper hand-made kites, tied to a wooden frame, that will be placed in squares or pedestrian streets. Passers-by are invited to take a kite and fly it. They can keep it or return it to the stand.
At 18.00 PM, the artist will be on site in Constanța’s Rotterdam Park – the main location of the happening – while additional kites will also be installed in the following locations: an area of the Casino Cliff, Southern and Northern pier and Termele Romane Street.
Lucia Ghegu’s project is informed by a previous gesture: during the 2020 lockdown, she flew a kite from the window of her apartment, aiming to reach out to her neighbors. A poetic and striking gesture that serves as a symbolic reminder of freedom and of our tenuous relationships with one another across physical distance. For the project “On the Same Line”, Lucia Ghegu appropriates her own gesture and replicates it in Constanța. This transition from private to public is a crucial element of the project, since it is not just reflecting the period of time that heavily affected emotional and physical exchange between people, but directly brings people together again.
After engineering, graphic arts and product design studies, Lucia Ghegu earned a research scholarship at Accademia di Romania in Rome (2018-2020) during which she developed an artistic project on the impact of post-communist migration on the Romanians living in Italy. In her recent works that include both large-scale drawings, light installations and objects on the border between sculpture and product design, she is interested in architectural space, mobility understood as fluidity, migration, community, identity, constant tension between expectations and reality, but also the poetics and aesthetics of the image. Lucia frequently chooses drawing as a solution against the hyper-technological trend, a quick and spontaneous note that mediates the transition from idea to object and documents the process.
The 6 public art projects are connected under the concept “The Artist, the Work and Everyone Who Comes to It” created by Tevž Logar, curator of the exhibition Back to Where It All Began at Gaep, on view during February-May 2023. The exhibition is now available online.
Tevž Logar: “The exhibition introduced the idea of how companionship bonds or joint agency for an objective can create innovative formations within the program. The project `The Artist, the Work and Everyone Who Comes to it” serves as an umbrella structure which shows how a complex dynamic between those involved can result in individual or collective projects that go beyond the idea of traditional exhibition in a white cube space and rather address the relationship between artist – artwork – public – public space. Since we are talking about the idea of public space, the six projects conceptualized by the participating artists are not merely projecting the tendencies related to individual or collective artistic approaches, but they firstly address, comment, and engage with different communities and their specifics in various cities in Romania.“
The first 2 public art projects of Accelerator were: “The Library for Public Games” – online activation presented by Maria Mandea (June 25) and “Full of Merit, yet Poetical / Auto-destructive Traces”, performance by Ana Maria Szöllösi in Timișoara (July 14).
The public art projects to follow after Lucia Ghegu’s “On the Same Line” installation are:
- Bucharest, August 5, Roberta Curcă, Full of Merit, yet Poetical / Self-destructive Traces
- Bucharest, August 17, Andrei Arion and Delia A. Prodan, Lose a Step
- Cluj-Napoca, August 25, Lucia Ghegu, Full of Merit, yet Poetical / Self-destructive Traces
- Oltenița, September 3, Alina Ion, Treads of Solitude
- Bucharest, September 5 (on-site), Maria Mandea, The Library for Public Games
- Pitești, September 7, Stanca Soare, Full of Merit, yet Poetical / Self-destructive Traces
- Cluj-Napoca, September 11-17, Stanca Soare & Larisa Petcuț, Joint Lines