Cristina Filimon
Dimineața (Morning), 2023
Digital Pigments Prints on Hahnemühle Satin Paper, 118.9 cm x 84.1 cm, Framed
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Artist Book, Edition of 100, Self-Published, 2023
I am a Romanian artist living in London. Dimineata (Morrning) is a visual narrative on themes of memory and the transient nature of human condition. I explore the aesthetic appeal and metaphorical complexity of the ruins of post-industrial communist architecture in Romania. Within an established genre of dystopian landscape photography, in contrast to voyeuristic practices of “disaster tourism”, I enter this realm as a migrant artist revisiting a home country. The journey becomes both psychological and physical, as I consider the presence and absence that are inherent in these spaces and in my identity; and how all the places we occupy, are a stage set for history, politics, and cultural beliefs, destined to be reclaimed by nature.
Titles of the works come from words found in the photographs, discarded objects, signs, or graffiti marks left on the surfaces of buildings as traces of the relationship between people and the environment. The title of the series was found in a book, left open on the pile of debris of an old train station, and comes from an 1852 poem by a Romanian poet Vasile Alecsandri about nature and a tranquillity of the morning, connecting notions of the Romantic wonderer and the sublime with the psycho-geographical contemporary framework from within which I set out.
Untitled, 2023
RO, 2023
Iron, 2023