Curatorial Notes

Andreea Medar’s work for Art Fair Philippines titled Leftovers From The Future is a follow through of Solarium: The Forever Garden project. Through these works, she holds on to her family’s 150-year old tradition of gardening in Racoti, Romania.

In her past project, Medar creates an installation that recreates the garden in its ideal state when her grandfather was still able to tend to it. This second iteration, is a snapshot of the garden one year after it has been abandoned; when Medar returned to the place and saw some crop vegetables surviving along with wild plants.

Medar takes the salvageable essence of the garden and immortalizes it using clear plastic sheets patiently hand stitched with threads that glow under UV light. She traces the stems and veins, and makes them appear like luminescent skeletons or distant ghosts of the plants. The installation is envisioned to be mounted in different places and different times, as an attempt to eclipse the cessation of the existence of her village's heritage.

Racoti is a countryside village where Medar spent her childhood. After the communist rule in Romania, children were often sent off to their grandparents because of the unstable economic situation. Medar grew up in an ancestral house where she watched the women create everything by hand. “This is how I saw the transition. Because the villagers started to replace the beautiful traditional objects with new ones,” Medar observed. This led her to choose to use the specific clear plastic that is used in the countryside to cover the traditional hand woven tablecloth. This material is symbolic for Medar, like vitrines in a museum. Since the women in Racoti cannot fit traditional sewing into their lifestyles anymore, the plastic echoes the push and pull between efforts to protect and a surrender to the inevitable loss.

The project reveals Medar’s progressive perspective on heritage: it suggests that she does want to put her village’s tradition in that glass case, instead she seeks to discover the areas of equilibrium where past and present merge to result in a shared, crucial time.

Leftovers From The Future embodies Medar’s hopes for the continuity of lost tradition. “It was interesting to see how the garden survived alone without a gardener. And in my imagination, those plants will survive and will travel through time and space to a post apocalyptic future in which they will connect the viewers and my family members from the past,” she elaborates.

Words by Carla Gamalinda

About the Artist

Andreea Medar (b. 1990 Târgu Jiu ) lives and works in Timișoara, RO. Her practice includes objects and environments, sculptures, media installations and video. Since 2017 she also works in collaborative projects with Mălina Ionescu, an artist, curator and art critic in Romania. Her images rewrite her own personal imagery in associations of contrasting elements, in projects in which she investigates themes such as the family history, the rural community, ritual, change, dissolution and persistence. She received The Grand Prize at the Young Romanian Artists in Contemporary Creation 2021 contest. Her works are in the permanent collection of the The National Contemporary Art Museum of Romania (MNAC), Bucharest and The Art Museum of Timisoara.