Once upON the Danube
Once upON the Danube is an itinerant artistic research project and multimedia exhibition developed along the course of the Danube, conceived as a journey through cultural memory, identity, and transformation. Structured as an experimental film scenario in which the participating artists become the protagonists, the project investigates the river as both a geographical and symbolic axis connecting prehistoric heritage with contemporary artistic practice.
The residency unfolded across multiple locations situated along the Danube route — from Drobeta, Lepenski Vir, and Vinča, through Belgrade, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, and Regensburg — exploring traces of Mesolithic and Danubian cultures through direct experience, documentation, and artistic intervention. The resulting works combine video installation, collage, photography, sound, and visual diary fragments into a layered reflection on ephemerality, collective memory, and the relationship between landscape and inner transformation.
Within the project, I presented Juxtaposition, a photographic series that explores how contemporary urban reality merges with personal identity through reflection, shadows, and collage. Rather than depicting the river directly, the works translate the Danube into the visual language of the city — through storefronts, commercial facades, windows, and layered transparencies. Reflections simultaneously capture interior and exterior spaces, reality and projection, generating fragmented compositions in which architecture, consumption, and human presence coexist within unstable visual surfaces. The series functions as a meditation on visibility, transformation, and the fluid intersection between personal identity and the commercial landscapes shaped along the Danube.
I also developed The Journey Upstream, a mixed-media installation incorporating photography and organic materials reconstructing the symbolic trajectory of the residency through collected objects, photographs, and organic fragments assembled along a suspended blue thread representing the river itself. Combining documentary traces with intimate and symbolic elements gathered throughout the journey, the installation transforms travel into a cartography of memory and presence. Everyday gestures, found objects, natural remains, reflections, shadows, and moving lights become markers of a poetic passage through territory, balancing the ephemeral and the permanent, the natural and the urban, the personal and the collective.
Through this work, the Danube emerges not only as a physical location but as a metaphor for becoming, continuity, and inner transformation.
My contribution to the experimental film component of Once upON the Danube took the form of performative interventions centered around intuitive communication with the symbolic “spirit” of the Danube. Through tarot-based performances developed in different locations along the route — including Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Bratislava, and regions of Hungary — I approached the river as a living cultural and emotional entity, addressing questions concerning memory, transformation, lived experience, and the messages it might carry across time.
Rather than functioning as divinatory acts in a literal sense, these performances operated as intuitive and psychological frameworks through which personal subconscious resonance could connect with the layered historical and symbolic charge of the river itself. The process became a form of inner attunement — an attempt to access the emotional frequency embedded within the landscape and collective memory surrounding the Danube.
As part of the film, I also interacted performatively with the expressive architectural space of the riverside art museum, engaging with its atmosphere as an extension of the river’s presence and energetic imprint within the urban environment.
The final exhibition took place on September 14, 2025, at Umspannwerk Etzdorf (UW Etzdorf), Striegistal–Chemnitz, Germany, within the framework of Chemnitz 2025 — European Capital of Culture and the European Heritage Days / Tag des Offenen Denkmals. The project was developed in collaboration with Rebel Art Galerie and F15 Art Collective.
Participating artists included Daniel Loagăr, Alex Manea, Filters of Perception, Gizella Popescu, Oana Zâmbet, and Andreea-Eliza Petrov, alongside invited international collaborators.
Once upON the Danube was co-funded by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the CANTEMIR Programme for international cultural projects.
Gallery
Photo Credits:
Andrei Stan
Marius Adrian Gheorghe
