Ecology, nature, climate change, the anthropogenic era, dizzying technological advances and, above all, the human position in all this entanglement represent one of the most pressing themes in contemporary art, but also the deepest anxieties on a personal level.

Finding myself in this paradigm, I recently began to delve deeper into Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), which offered me a more optimistic vision of the future of the planet and tempered my unease. We often forget, because of the anthropocentric blinker through which we look at the world, how intimately intertwined our existences are in the complex ecosystem of living. Whether we want to or not, we participate in an extended kinship, between humans and non-humans, in which the solutions to the ecological crisis cannot be singular, but emerge as a constellation of visions and collaborations.

The “Nature After Nature” exhibition, hosted in October at Timișoara Garrison Command, can be read as an x-ray of the Romanian artistic scene faced with the ecological crisis, but also as a form of artistic dialogue and making kin. Beyond an analysis of concepts such as eco art, land art or earth art, curators Raluca Oancea, Cristian Nae and Ileana Pintilie aimed to observe whether the ecological discourse mobilises a certain generation of artists or certain types of practices and media. As it comes out, the interest in nature crosses generations: from the first environmental actions in the 1990s to the new posthuman research, the concern for the relationship between man and nature has transformed and diversified, while maintaining a common line of empathy, observation and care.

In one of the exhibition wings, the historical dimension was visible through the presence of key works from the local artistic heritage: the experimental film Film for April. Remetea (1981) by Constantin Flondor, works presented in the exhibition “Earth” (Timișoara, 1992) curated by Ileana Pintilie, such as Geta Brătescu’s Earthcake or The Appropriation (of Land) Committee by Dan Perjovschi. These have been complemented by contemporary projects that extend ecological research into the post-photography area — such as those of Iosif Király, Andrei Mateescu and Aurora Király, the first two being conceived in the context of the artistic research of the Danube area DPLATFORM (2015–2018), one of the first archival researches undertaken with posthumanist theoretical support and phenomenological interest in nature itself, for itself. The more than human forest and trees, immortalised by Aurora Király in a sensitive and personal key, resonate with two projects that place landscape painting somewhere between installation and film: Liliana Mercioiu-Popa’s installation, built in a conceptual register of noncolor, takes famous landscapes from which she eliminates the human figure, aiming to transform natural elements from passive backgrounds into the main actors of the image. In counterpoint, Ana Maria Micu’s hyperrealist painting and accompanying film celebrate color, light, and detail, inviting the viewer to get lost inside the image, where the gaze becomes a pure sensory experience.

Another important segment of the exhibition was that of activist-focused projects, which explore practices of decolonising nature and community reconnection. The series of actions coordinated by Andreea David, in the context of the restitution of a segment of the IOR Park, exemplifies the idea of ​​making kin by creating a community of artists and residents around unprescribed spaces, located between urban and natural — liminal, wild places, but full of potential. The fascination with such concepts gave me the opportunity to resume a project very dear to me, carried out together with Andreea Medar and Mălina Ionescu, in the Văcărești Natural Park. Our collaboration, started in 2021, explores this ambiguous place, a space shaped by human interventions, urban failures and abandonment, but partially recovered by nature and provisionally protected by the status of a reserve. Among the recent ruins of this hybrid landscape, we tried to check in ourselves, through a series of non-invasive and speculative land art interventions.

A final series of projects — stylistically consonant with the installations presented at the SIMULTAN festival, a partner of the event — propose forms of life and memory that circulate between analog and digital. Floriama Cândea cultivates decellularised plants in transparent test tubes that make visible the limit between organic and artificial, while young artists from Iași Cătălin Marinescu and Radu Marțin explore, each in a different way, the tension between organic and digital: if Archive.exe reconstructs personal and collective memory in the unstable space of data, Parasite imagines an artificial ecosystem in which biological processes are transposed into code. Dragoș Dogioiu’s work, Tangled Swarm, also falls into the same conceptual zone, recording the invisible traces of technological control in relation to natural life forms.

The variety of media and artistic approaches in “Nature after Nature” constructs a map of interdependencies and a lucid proposal to view the world as a network of relationships in constant transformation. At a time when distinctions between natural and artificial, human and non-human, living and inanimate are dissolving, art becomes a space for making kin: for learning, repair, and coexistence. The exhibition does not offer definitive solutions, but creates a fabric of perspectives that invites us to assume our belonging to this common entanglement.

“Nature After Nature” [Timișoara Garrison Command, 01–18.10.2025]. Artists: Dan Acostioaei, Matei Bejenaru, Josépha Blanchet, Ole Blank, Irina Botea Bucan, Eglė Budvytytė, Geta Brătescu, Floriama Cândea, Zoița Delia Călinescu, Lorena Cocioni, Giulia Crețulescu, Suzana Dan, Andreea David, Dragoș Dogioiu, Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter, Constantin Flondor, Lavinia German, Cosmin Haiaș, Michael Höpfner, Mălina Ionescu, Iosif Király, Aurora Király, Ana Kun, Kopacz Kund, Andrei Mateescu, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Martin, Andreea Medar, Liliana Mercioiu-Popa, Mircea Modreanu, Ana Maria Micu, Marina Oprea, Raluca Paraschiv, Tudor Pătrașcu, Dan Perjovschi, Dan Vișovan/Bogdan Rața, Claudia Retegan, Cătălin Rulea, Sergiu Sas, Ovidiu Toader, Miki Velciov, Mihai Zgondoiu. Curators: Ileana Pintilie, Raluca Oancea, Cristian Nae.