If mapping a city means bringing it into the realm of the known, the stable, and the predictable, Unmapping introduces deviations, drifts, dérives, exceptions, suspensions, situations that temporarily remove zones of the city (public spaces and institutions) from the ordinary, the everyday, the familiar, from their implicit mapping, in order to create spaces for reflection, unfamiliarity, unknowing and openings for new possibilities – unmapped zones.
Unmapping practices are inserted as subtle interventions in the social, aesthetic, and affective textures of the city and, in a self-referential way, also in the Unmapping process itself, through deviations from the usual ways of collaborating, working, and presenting. Unmapping proposes a collaboration based on productive alienations – artists are amplified on their own paths, in the proximity and with the support of others, producing unpredictable interactions between different processes and practices. For the presentation, over the exhibition context, the process will continue in the Indecis space but also in the city, with the exhibition changing and evolving along the way.
We are Sleepers: Florin Flueras (performance, visual arts, theory), Eliza Trefas (dance, performance, visual arts), Traian Chereches (visual arts, sound art), Diego Agulló (dance, theory, philosophy), Smaranda Gabudeanu (dance, performance), Martina Piazzi (dance, performance), and Vlad Brăteanu (visual arts). We mostly collaborated in Art Opening (research and presentations), in Fictions, my body (platform and festival) and Unearthings (research, exhibition, publication) projects. We also gravitated around Somn (sleep) - a Bucharest art space for deep and relaxed departures, for falling asleep to artworld’s commercial, ideological, and spectacle imperatives. We have some common interests like exploring relations between environmental collapse, spirituality and the art world's implicit certainties and realities. Through Unmapping we don't plan to harmonize our perspectives, but to allow ourselves to productively diverge, accepting and amplifying each other's perspectives and deviations.
A Sleepers’ project, initiated by Florin Flueras, produced by PETEC, financed by Centrul de Proiecte Timișoara, supported by Minitremu, Arte Factum, Indecis and SOMN.