ZARAFE
ZARAFE is a metaphor for the Iranian artist endurance, creating and surviving through art in daily routines, with constant emotional battles, managing to thrive and grow. Internal and external restrictions are nothing but a place for evolution. ZARAFE is an essay on hope, resilience and love.
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Satılık
An olive grove becomes a shelter where contemporary dance explores care, interdependence, and ecological attention. Choreographers and dancers team: Serenay Oğuz, Nurşah Yılmaz, Hoorya Naghieh, Tutku Çekigil from PAL Izmir.
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Geologic
The series explores the tension between control and chance. Expired film becomes an integral material of the process, its chemical instability introducing unpredictable shifts, distortions, and traces into the images.
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Balance
Edges merging, the island between the Black Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Essay by Bogdan Ghiu (Slopes of the same spring) Mircea Sorin Albuțiu is a photographer and artist-researcher from Central and South-Eastern Europe who travels incessantly, practicing, exploring and experimenting with the forms of road photography, with the relationship between photography and lived space, space which is worked upon, produced, taken over by people: space-history. Places and their people, the people of places – or how space becomes place and path. In all of his projects, the camera does not just “catch” and capture images, but enters into a relationship, inserts itself, “devices itself”, engages existentially, vitally, with places and roads, in other words, with the people who civilize the space which, as such, is a desert in itself, a non-place (cf. Marc Augé). Photography becomes one with the place: it becomes the place itself. Albuțiu proceeds through montages practiced as super-images of “synthesis”, the resulting hyper-image becoming a symesthesia-synthesis of careful and inspired, extremely precise joinings and pairings. Symbolic maps with faces and landscapes, in which the countries are in fact (through a vertical “montage” between stairs, this time, completing the first in a cross shape) the faces of people and the faces of places. Photography as a meeting place. In this project, the photographer-traveler pauses on a peak or more precisely on an ideal and imaginary, intellectual and experimental crest, a topos atopos of his career, which we must already speak of in terms of work, and a supreme place of vision, that is, a point of visualization for an idea and a spirit of the place: at the crossroads of waters, of the great and small waters of that hyper-place which is Europe. Defining Europe as a crossroads of waters, as a crossroads from where the falsely divergent destinies of this ideal, synthetic place spring, flowing and flowing. What is Europe? A balance. A balance of waters, towards East and towards West, a balance now, once again, in a balance of its history. The European history (as it is: crisscrossed, zigzagging west-east, “W-eastern”) of the Romanian word cumpănă arrived in Romanian on the shores of the old Slavic noun kopana, it seems, from Campania, like balanță and clopot, campana. The richness of the European hydrographic basin (with its alluvium hailing from all parts) of the European-Romanian word cumpănă, seems to me to best define this project-poem: a mass scale, a traditional mechanism for extracting the phreatic water that unites us, from wells, but also in concentric circles, as I said, weighing up and keeping the balance (like Europe is doing now) despite feelings of disorientation — as we are all doing are across the world in this new moment of history. Thus, let us do the work of weighing in order not to let ourselves grow disoriented from the flow of our common, shared history — diverted from the course of our history. Europe: a cumpănă — or a balance (of waters), a balance (equilibrating, weighing, judging) found and placed in the balance. A balanced balance. On his panels or boards – in which we must perceive hyper-images (of intellectual synthesis, therefore more related to the regime of vision than just that of sight: in the case of an artist, a photographer, you need vision to see and to be able to be seen), hyper-images intended for the supreme metaphorical visualization of a hyper-place. The artist balances East and West, recreating Europe as an ideal archi-place. He glues, joins, juxtaposes, places in contiguity, creates ideal neighbors, and, by way of communication, places and brings people of those places located at the edges face to face, at the natural limits of the continent, where land does not end but flows aquatically into the sea and the ocean. These are two edges of Europe, two of its geographical “extremes”, located at the confluence of waters into the great planetary waters, where Europe continues, on and like water, in the world: the Rio Lis from Portugal into the Atlantic Ocean and the Danube into the Black Sea, through its great Delta. The Danube, Europe’s river par excellence, is more European than other European rivers (than the Rhine or the Rhone, for example), given that it crosses and unites Europe across borders (and thus is often politically instrumentalized as a border), defining it and fixing it — if only through the great capitals that emerged and grew on its banks. The situation of the Danube (which is the ancient Istria) for Europe as a defining place, precisely through its (im)balance, has already made it (as we remember, we must remember) the “object” of an interrogation, not incidentally poetic to the extreme, of the great and absolute German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who, in his great poem-hymn precisely titled thus, Der Ister (The Istria), meaning “The East”, reflects that “Yet the river almost seems/To flow backwards, and I/Think it must come/From the East./Much could/Be said further” (trans. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover). Much, indeed, could be said about this situation, the geographical contradiction serving precisely as a definition for for Europe. (And there is still much to be said – and has been said, but I won’t repeat what here – about the interpretation to which Martin Heidegger subjected the great Hölderlinian poem in 1942, an interpretation that itself seems to go the other way, turning as per the logic of rivers.) In Europe, rivers flow the other way, crisscrossed and in chiasmus, East is West and West becomes East, in the sense that rivers are roads but also, alas, borders to be crossed. From Central and South-Eastern Europe, Mircea Sorin Albuțiu tells us, therefore, that Europe is in itself and as such central, a crossroads of waters and roads, an ideal peak of balance, of balancing East-West, West-East, the great, archetypal poetic lesson of its emblematic river is of flow in reverse and in fact of cross-wise flow, completing a process of Europe’s historical birth (through incessant invasions and permanent nomadism), from East to West, through the reverse flow of its tutelary river. Junction, an ideal point of intersection and balance, of crossroads – of all-encompassing, global vision, demonstrated by the present project-poem meta-shows –, not only horizontally, but also vertically, between up and down, between elevated and lowered: a single fountain spreading its waters in balance, temperate, waters pouring down slopes symbolically and thus embracing land. But the vertical balance of springs as well, as mentioned, which rise to draw water from the depths. The waters of Europe flowing in reverse and thus intertwining mark and embody the immaterial and purely spiritual line which delimits in order to connect photographs from two ends of Europe that compose Albuțiu’s hyper-images, the two plates of the European basin and the two terms of the metaphor in action that is Europe, the continent-myth, the continent-poem. Chiasmus, χιασμός, khiasmós, khi, X, cross, intersection. Rarely have I encountered such a profoundly European project as this on my crisscrossed, winding, W-Eastern European roads. What does this project show us? Through its connecting compositions, that make the East osmotically embrace the West in liquid, as two sides of the same medal (and not just coins)? Differences, but also similarities, identities and contrasts, but nothing extreme, limit, radical, even if hailing from extreme conditions. People’s faces. Gazing at the images, we might speak of a European people, a European tribe rather than a river, a here or there (groundwater feeding the surface streams) of the national borders which anti-European, identitarian tensions sometimes cling to, and which in turn freeze the fluvial flows in the form of mineralized and dried-up identities (be it pond or lake, for Europe knows no inland seas). The meeting of edges and the “margins” of Europe: the inhabits of these images and of these non-limiting limits, gates and thresholds of Europe, could very easily exchange places, following the lesson of the great Istria-Danube River. The rivers of Europe define the Old Continent in a greater capacity, more efficiently, more generously, more universally than the dry lands they traverse, irrigate, and fertilize. Waters set land in motion. The waters of Europe, the rivers and inland streams and the seas and oceans that send it out into the world, balance out Europe, diluting a territorial and chthonic — and thus morbid and maniacal — vision of a dry and static Europe. Both a reverie and a journey, the present project, supremely representative as it is for Europe, proves not only visual, but downright visionary. By offering a visual metaphor of Europe, this isthmus crushed between the great Asia and the great Ocean might prove itself a Noah’s Ark, inviting us to a reversal in perspective (like the Danube that flows in reverse), plunging us in a state of dreaming and revisiting Europe as a united archipelago of lands, bound together by its large and little flowing waters that redefine it not so much as a Continent, but as a Great Island in A Middle between seas and oceans (dry land in the environment of waters). It is thus a true Copernican reversal of the (ego-geo-centered) vision of Europe, from its waters to its land, in harmony with predominantly aquatic realities themselves, open to the future of the Earth. Travel photography – through which the inhabitants of the nodal point where two European waters meet in the planetary sea and ocean send postcards to themselves, looking at each other and seeing each other together, reunited – becomes a journey and encounter.
Read moreFire Orphans
Portugal experiences thousands of rural fires every year, particularly during the hot and dry summer months. Although the number of fires varies considerably from year to year, some years cause exceptionally large areas of land to burn. For example, by 04 October 2026, Portugal had recorded 8124 rural fires and approximately 74244 hectares of burned land, according to Portugal’s Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF).
Clouds Over Kyiv
Intense days marked by a wide range of emotions: smiles, laughter, and deep sorrow. In Kyiv, people continue with their jobs and daily routines. Bistros and cafés serve drinks as if life were unfolding in ordinary times. Yet beneath this apparent normality, a constant pressure lingers in people’s minds. The air raid alarms repeatedly remind us that this is still wartime. People no longer seem to react physically to the sirens, but the tension remains within. Even in moments of calm, the mind cannot fully rest. Clouds Over Kyiv explores the fragile coexistence of everyday life and the persistent presence of war: resilience and exhaustion, the silence behind ordinary gestures, and the emotional weight carried invisibly through the streets of Kyiv. Clouds Over Kyiv is not only about war; it is about the emotional landscape of people learning how to continue living beneath its shadow.
When Borders Get Indistinct
The documentary film When Borders Get Indistinct was made as part of Camine în Mișcare – Moving Fireplaces, a project organized by the Prin Banat Association, part of the Timișoara 2023 Cultural Program – European Capital of Culture. The premiere of the film When Borders Get Indistinct took place on February 24, 2023, at Cinema Victoria in Timișoara, to mark one year since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Filmed in 2022, in Romania, Serbia and Ukraine.
O Întâmplare Cu Jazz
In 2017, I had the privilege of meeting Miriam Răducanu, a pioneering figure of modern dance in Romania. Between March and November, during numerous visits to her apartment in the Floreasca district of Bucharest, we developed an artistic collaboration inspired by the music of Miles Davis, particularly his iconic composition So What. Deeply inspired by Miriam's creativity and presence, I filmed a series of her performances based on this musical theme. The resulting film captures the atmosphere of our collaboration and offers audiences an intimate glimpse into her artistic world, preserving the spirit of our encounters and the unique dialogue between dance, music, and film.
Framing A Romanian Landscape
Inspired by Robert Frank (The Americans), I travelled eleven thousand kilometers in 2021 to photograph my homeland following the blessing and quality of light in conjunction with people, communities, landscape and architecture.
4 days in July
Gărâna Jazz Festival celebrated its 30th edition in 2026, marking three decades of musical improvisation, community and artistic exchange in the Semenic mountains. This series is neither a selection of “best images” nor a chronological archive of the festival. It inhabits the spaces in between, the moments when musicians relax, rehearse, wait, observe, or exist beyond the stage and the spotlight. I chose the trumpet as a recurring visual motif, an instrument that feels inseparable from breath, voice, and identity. As Louis Armstrong once said, “You blows who you is.” For me, these photographs are less about documenting jazz than about recognizing something of myself within it. They are fragments of attention, curiosity, and presence; an attempt to photograph not only what happened, but how it felt to be there. In the end, this work is a portrait of a festival, but also a self-portrait, shaped by the people, sounds, silences, and encounters that drew my eye.
Kristin
According to reports published after the storm, up to 8 million trees fell in the municipality of Leiria as a result of Storm Kristin, which struck during the night of 27–28 January 2026. Local authorities estimated that about 27% of all trees in the municipality were lost. The damage to forests in the wider Leiria district was described as unprecedented in modern times. The storm's strongest winds hit central Portugal, particularly the Leiria region, where vast areas of the famous pine forests were flattened, roads were blocked by fallen trees, and power infrastructure suffered severe damage. Some reports also estimate that more than 22 million trees fell across Portugal as a whole, with Leiria being the hardest-hit area.
The Host
"The wind from Sfiștofca rustles the stories of the past, of ancestors, of dance, of song and wine, of many people, of frosty winters, of recent past, of how everything grew silent, in the meantime, as if in a moment. The village, which Mircea has explored extensively – as if feeding on it – has a wide high street, walked by one man at a time, from time to time; and smaller ones, some of which lead nowhere." Ioana Bursan Savin
