UTI VÅR HAGE
Created together with Miriam Vikman, Gällivare, October 2018.
NORTH-NORTH
Maramureș, Romania, 2016
Performance installation made together with Alexandru Sima, Dumitru Gurjii, Markus
Larssons, Torbjörn Ömalm and Erik Lindeborg.
FLYING FLOORS
The project started as a way of expressing the phenomenon called “Culture shock”. Culture shock describes the impact of moving from a familiar culture to a new one.
Flying Floors is a project that embraces two different cultures as a whole, the Swedish and the Romanian culture, by exposing different parts of their identities.
The aim of the project is to raise interest in discussions about cultural identity, traditions and habits by presenting an exhibition that consists of a set of paper or porcelain houses that carry as their themes different Romanian traditions with deep roots, such as dance, clothes, patterns, healing and myths. Each house is hung from the ceiling above the tables of a cafe, bar or restaurant and has a lamp inside of it. Apart from lighting the room, the lamps display shadow images on the exterior of the paper/porcelain houses, an effect created by adding different layers to the paper or pressing sheets of porcelain in molds. A paper house doesn’t last forever but hopefully the subjects that they carry with them have a longer lifespan and will find a route to pass through people.
SALONUL MAGIC
Salonul Magic is a collaboration with the Swedish piano player Erik Lindeborg. All the efforts put in this project are guided by a common aim of the two, a closer connection between Sweden and Romania through the field of art.
The project started in the winter of 2011 after a visit to a small city in the middle of Transylvania called Sighișoara. Erik, deeply impressed after the trip, in a few days composed ten fantastic songs that over one year have been recorded, mixed, printed and packed in a colored pop-up cover made by Diana. The first event of the project took place in Stockholm in the cozy Lederman Theater during a hard Swedish winterstorm. Diana’s exhibition, Erik’s music and some Romanian traditional food warmed and delighted the guests until midnight. As Erik wrote in the cd booklet “I think it will be an amazing year”, the collaboration continued. In the spring of 2013 they engaged and inspired each other to a second event, Salonul Magic 2. New art pieces and musical compositions were created and showed in the most suitable place from Stockholm, the Jazzistan music club.
Over two years, Salonul Magic project has been going forward only with trust, appreciation and encouragement and all the support from friends and family.
For all that, I, Diana Butucariu, see this project as an amazing journey where we can build up many other stops and I want to thank Erik and everyone that has believed in it.
Making off cover/poster Salonul Magic
EMPTY HOUSES
The project reflects on the language transmitted by an empty place. Working with ruins of houses and observing them I thought that the subject could be placed in the area of a negative space, but later on I was able to see their content and the continuing life of an abandoned place in the absence of humans. I call them empty places but they are deep in my own perception.
I started by making a research on the development of the house structure and I noticed that the fireplaces have a central role in it. During the history, the fire place kept its importance in the first steps of building a house but also in the last ones. If a house burns down or starts to degrade, the chimney is a piece that usually remains intact. In the old times there were many associations with the long black tunnel that unites the inside of a room with the outside world. It could be a passage for mythological creatures to enter to your house or it could connect you as an individual with the community, a connection between sky and earth, a channel of communication or a sign for the presence of life.
In letting the smoke produced by burning leaves, branches and wood, stick to my ceramics pieces I wanted to illustrate this hidden act and drag a mystical feeling over them. The appearance of the black smoke adds a certainty to the myths that would be dissolved in the air if the porcelain constructions weren't there. The uncontrolled deposit of smoke is the border between presence and absence
INTERPLANETARIUM
New Small House album Adam Fransson's Interplanetarium features a series of 300 unique hand-printed posters by Romanian artist and Small House co-founder Diana Butucariu.