The exhibition “Landscapes of Care / Peisaje ale îngrijirii”, an exploration of the intimate and shared spaces of Bucharest—its balconies and courtyards between apartment blocks—viewed as places of memory, resilience, and community, will open on August 29 at The Institute space, Combinatul Fondului Plastic, Bucharest.

The exhibition aims to show how, during the communist and post-communist periods, these seemingly banal spaces became forms of adaptation and quiet resistance, but also hubs of community life and mutual care. Balconies—often enclosed and transformed into interior gardens—and courtyards reinvented by residents as meeting places and spaces of continuity, still bear the traces of those transformations and remain part of the city’s living memory.

A finalist project in the local competition for the 2025 Architecture Biennale.

Landscapes of Care was shortlisted in the national selection for Romania’s participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and continues its trajectory as an exhibition where architectural research intertwines with artistic expression. The project becomes a manifestation at the intersection of architecture and art, drawing public attention to essential themes of everyday life, memory, and resilience in the postsocialist city.

The project is conceived by Dr. Iulia Stătică, based on her research as a lecturer in Urban Design at the University of Sheffield, author of Urban Phantasmagorias (Routledge, 2023) and former Marie Curie fellow at UCL. Her work explores how domesticity and gender shape postsocialist urban spaces, using ethnography and documentary film to bring to light latent histories and hidden layers of the city.

“Landscapes of Care is an exhibition that brings together, in curatorial form, several layers of my research developed over the years in an interdisciplinary way, through a dialogue between ethnography, documentary film, and visual arts. The exhibition offers a glimpse into how residents—particularly women—have appropriated two fundamental domestic spaces, balconies and urban courtyards, highlighting a genealogy of these places expressed through affective and caring practices, but also as responses to political and social pressures.” – said Iulia Stătică, initiator and curator of the project. 

The exhibition unfolds across two complementary spaces:

• The first room – an immersive installation inspired by enclosed socialist balconies, with video projections and soundscapes that bring the intimacy of apartments and their opening toward urban courtyards into the exhibition space.
• The second room – a photographic archive documenting the transformation of Bucharest’s courtyards, from pre-socialist gardens to inter-block spaces, featuring images recovered from personal archives and photographs from the 1980s and 1990s by artist Ion Grigorescu.

The exhibition is a curatorial project developed in collaboration with architect Tao DuFour (co-curator), visual anthropologist Adrian Câtu (DoP, video & sound design), and guest artist Ion Grigorescu.

Written by Aura Marinescu | 27 august 2025, 13:13

Photo:  Balta Albă, 1980, Ion Grigorescu