Cultivators of life
Visual Harvest: Documenting Community Gardens near Bucharest
2025
In 2025, I was invited by curator Adelina Luft to contribute as illustrator to tranzit.ro/Bucharest’s Cultivators of Life program — documenting gardens, caretakers, and emerging ways of relating to land.
The initiative builds upon the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, exploring intersections between ancestral and indigenous knowledges, soil cultivation, biodiversity conservation, and artistic production. It aims to articulate a new lexicon for human–land relations through residencies, workshops, garden-based public events, and a culminating exhibition.
As one of three young harvesters documenting these processes, I contributed through illustration alongside writer Irina Bobei (text) and photographer/videographer Gabriela Cozma (photo/video). Our role was to gather fragments — visual, textual, oral — from the events: sowing documentation, seasonal exchanges, embodied expertise, and the quiet politics of tending land.
https://ro.tranzit.org/en/project/0/2025-04-28/cultivators-of-life
I documented four community-hosted gatherings in gardens near Bucharest (spring–summer 2025).
My approach began with live pen sketching on site, followed by months of refining the material — part editorial record, part intimate mapping of gardener–garden entanglements. I chose the dot as the primary unit: not decorative, but elemental — a contact mark, a plant cell analog, an index of soil scent and deliberate stewardship (care for your patch of ground). From the position of initial outsider gradually becoming acquainted, each dot registers a discrete impression: hesitation, recognition, memory shard.
The result: four A3 graphic sheets as collages of first-contact fragments — visual propositions assembled from what struck me most sharply, offered to those who have not yet entered those spaces. They carry the weight of provisional, attentive looking: no embellishment, only marking what is actually there, what is being tended, and what is quietly at stake in these small acts of repair.
I was warmly welcomed as a guest in each garden and by its gardeners; those spaces and people became truly dear to me. Finishing the works post-events let me relive those atmospheres, and they will continue to do so as prints on my walls long after the project ends. If they stir a similar sense of connection in others, the purpose of this illustrated project will be fulfilled.
Me and my sketchbook in Ana's garden, at the beginning of the project. Photo taken by Irna Bobei.