original text from Mihai Gui

My personal approach to the project is based on smaller interventions that can happen at distinct moments. The practices that I favor at this moment are oriented more towards creating action and interaction through my work rather than actual works or their documentation. What I consider to be the final stage is the interaction with the environment and people that my project is exposed to.

To that extent, I can highlight three distinct phases of my project that were based on my personal experience at the moment of developing, but oriented externally, toward an indistinct public. All works share this common terminal point of my letting them loose in the external world and thus I consider to be part of one common entity.

The first intervention (A) was based on my travelling from Romania back to the Netherlands. As my current general practice is oriented towards and deals with migration and refugees, I used this mindset to tackle the rights and limitations of international travel that my European citizenship grants. I attempted to potentiate a reflection on what these mean and how they become key subjects in current politics. To that extent I bought chewing gum in Romania, ingested it in the departure airport in Cluj-Napoca, chewed it for the duration of the flight and then attached it with a message stating “This piece of used chewing gums has more right to travel through Europe than we give asylum seekers and refugees…” on a public wall in Eindhoven Airport. 

The second intervention (B) found its core in my move from Breda to Rotterdam towards the end of the week. When packing my belongings I came across over a set of 20 CDs that were part of my photo archive. They all contained images ranging from 2012 until 2013, before coming to the Netherlands, of my daily life, friends and existence at that moment. As I considered those moments to be part of a past existence, I decided in these circumstance of renewal to donate them to anyone that might have a use for them. To that extent, I arranged them in one of the more visible parts of Valkenberg park in Breda in an installation of sorts, available for anyone to take should I stimulate their curiosity

The third and final intervention (C) took place at the end of the 168h work week, on a Sunday. Having packed all of my belongings to move to Rotterdam the next day, and considering what my hopes for moving out were, I decided to echo them in the real world. For that I employed the use of 200+ fortune slips individually extracted from fortune cookies that I then left on a public bench. As it was a slightly windy day, they slowly trickled away and spread out over the neighboring park in the course of the following half an hour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All three of these projects function in basically the same way, as firstly a personal experience that subsequently gets focused in an action and then autonomously lives on in the environment this took place in. The main challenge would then be to consider or somehow assess the way in which this final step engages. Given my strategy of “abandoning” the projects in public, this tends to become irrelevant as in itself it tends to be a reflexive experience where my going through the action and creating the possibility is more relevant that it coming or not coming to fruition. Hence it plays a cathartic and active role for me regardless of (or even
despite) its status.

Having considered this, in a broader sense the sum of the projects is a reflection over the ephemerality of art practices in general and the way they may succeed or fail to communicate with an audience and how this engages with the artists’ egos to both feed from and back into it.