PAST PRESENT. Fragments of memory. Bucharest-Pompeii-London

by Ioana MarinescuIoana Marinescu with Smaranda Găbudeanu and Iulia Mărăcine

PAST PRESENT is a moving archive; a research project in motion, gathering history and evolving at each stage of its development. Its components include photographs, the written word, the spoken word, videography, soundscape, living bodies and dance choreography.

Its primary author is the architect and photographer Ioana Marinescu who recuperates cultural memories that have all but been forgotten, exploring ways to bring them to life.

Marinescu, Găbudeanu and Mărăcine are joined by collaborating artists – film maker Laurențiu Calciu, choreographer-performers Andreea David, Hennie Lee and Eliza Trefaș, actress Katia Pascariu, dance choreographer Hanna Gillgren, dramaturg Phoebe von Held, architect Thomas Goodey, and sound artists Doru Apreotesei and David Crawforth – who collectively sculpt images that allow participants, and their audiences,  to inhabit an imaginary space, connecting past with present, remembering with forgetting.

PAST PRESENT. Fragments of memory: Bucharest-Pompeii-London represents a consolidation of many years of research, which are stamped into the galleries of Beaconsfield  by inter-disciplinary processes and the physical presence of the collaborators, leaving an exhibition; but the process is not over. In Autumn 2023, the project returns to Romania with evolutions in Bucharest and Timișoara, European City of Culture 2023.

Beaconsfield’s exhibition runs across all galleries until 12 August. 

Read Joyce Glaser’s excellent review here. (Please note that PAST PRESENT performances and installations are choreographed collaboratively, and that ‘exhillation’ is a word invented by artist-curator Naomi Siderfin in the context of her PhD research, to reflect the complexity of processual artworks, and the curatorial focus of Beaconsfield.)

Read PAST PRESENT newspaper here.