All-inclusive. The Iași Collection

Since years, I take photographs in the cities where I live, for longer or shorter periods, as a way of more closely observing the small details of daily life. There are cities like Bucharest, where these details are an infinite resource: architectural oddities, urban improvisations, elaborated parking reserve systems, improbable juxtapositions of ruins and shiny novelties, colours and cars, shop signs and people, all the world in a small corner of a city. The photographs I take are my way of recording my own passage through these places, as a witness, but they are also my way of making a city more familiar, beyond the big boulevards, monuments or landmarks.

On the occasion of the residency for which I was invited by tranzit .ro/ Iași, returning to a city which I never really had the time to make „mine”, I took the opportunity of explore it more, with my camera as my diary recorder. Yet, for the first time, enjoying the colours of the Autumn, the richness of so many textures of a city living in several centuries at the same time, a more calm rhythm of life, the mix of humour and nostalgia that can be encountered from the centre to the more secret corners, I decided to go a step further from the usual photographic documentation. I made a selection of the frames I took and turned them into watercolours. As if to preserve these views for longer, to make them more precious, to show their ephemeral relation with the memory of the city’s inhabitants but also to make them more personal.

I returned from Iași with the desire to apply the same operation to the city frames (compositions, as I called them so far) I take in other places. So that all-inclusive becomes a method.