As part of  NAG (White Night of Galleries) 2020 (October 2nd – 4th ), at Atelier Gallery 030202 in Bucharest, the second stage of the AR(t)EST project took place, (event coordinated by the actress Vero Nica), its escape from the online environment. An installation composed of photographs, video and sound, curated by the artist Andu Dumitrescu, which aims to bring together both the interventions of the participants and the participants themselves.

“Beginning in full isolation, on April 20th , and continuing until June 20th, AR(t)EST brought together 64 people from the cultural area, visual artists, curators, theater people, filmmakers, musicians, choreographers, writers, journalists, who shared  photos from the reclusion period, which were accompanied by a text. They were all published on the FB and Instagram accounts of VAR Association, every day, at a fixed time. The guests managed to bring spectacular images even from isolation. In turn, the cumulative texts formed a map of subjectivities, this time a non-interactive one because of the pandemic. While staying at home in pyjamas, people seem to take off not only their work clothes, but also their social faces. Being condemned to isolation, they were forced to reflect on the essential things of life, too: a luxury, if we think about the recent years’ pace. The special conditions of the pandemic have brought a certain distance and detachment, strangely mixed with the air of intimacy in everyone’s home. At home, the guard is down. Life is made up of details that in the outside world would have been considered irrelevant. But the sum resulting from the personal tone, in which each author comes with his syntax, rhythm, concerns and with his amusement, configures the collectivity’s diary in times of pandemic. Honesty, authenticity, domesticity and passion are joined together in a totally different context than before.”  Cristina Rusiecki, theater critic.