Urban Episodes: The Drama of Everyday Space
Holding an MA in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Timișoara with additional studies in Naples and Amsterdam, I work as an architect and visual artist in Berlin. My practice moves across architecture, spacial art and filmmaking, fields I explore through a shared lens of public space and the built environment.
My experience includes collaborations with architecture studios, artist collectives, and filmmakers, exhibiting my work in publications, galleries, public space and giving lectures on my early projects.
Relevant projects include ‘MURMURS’, an exhibition on dreams and architecture presented at Women in Architecture Berlin; ‘Circles, Squares, Corners, Moments’ at KINDL Berlin, where I was the exhibition architect and ‘FRAGILE’, an art installation shown at GlogauAIR as part of the Berlin Artist Prize. The public art installation ‘WOMB’ at 48h Neukölln Berlin, was also selected for film presentation at the Megacities Shortdocs Film Festival in Paris and was a finalist at Música x Arquitectura – Open House Barcelona.
Another notable work is ‘The Benches of Ballyloughlane’, a film screened at Palas Cinema in Galway, Ireland and recently featured on NOWNESS, awarded 3rd Prize at the Copenhagen Architecture Festival, and nominated at the Lift-Off Film Festival Berlin.
Across all projects, my visual and conceptual approach combines construction leftovers materials and architectural fragments with motion. These works engage with urban contexts and rely on public interaction and intervention to fully unfold.
My focus is to capture reactions, anticipations when architectural elements that appear, disappear or shift, in the urban space. A familiar path is blocked by a construction fence, someone is looking for a lost domestic furniture, the entrance to a metro station is renovated. These are the kinds of often overlooked moments, urban episodes, that trigger informal reactions from local communities: support, confusion, resistance, gossip. Most of the time, they fade quickly or go unheard.
Inspired by the films of Jonathan Meades, I want to use humor, empathy, and observation, believing that architectural thinking doesn’t need to be dry or elite. My goal is to reflect on how people respond to urban changes: physically, emotionally and socially. What narratives or frictions surface when the city shifts, even slightly?
A previous example I worked on, is the short film, The Benches of Ballyloughane. Two brutalist benches, looking like upscaled Borne Béton Corbusier lamps, had been installed on a beach. I initially focused on their dramatic presence, isolating them from context but after short research, I found out that the real story will emerge from the social commentary around them. Locals were giving playful, critical and full empathy opinions on Reddit for the shared space they now occupied. The film became a dialogue: not just between the two objects, but between design and public imagination. Some months later, as predicted, one bench was covered in paint.
I plan to identify rapidly changing, overlooked urban sites and produce responsive studies: combining video documentation, storytelling and/or minimal interventions using the community voice as the storyteller. They are speculative but grounded in real material and real communities, particular for it’s own space and daily routines. I hope to contribute to larger conversations about spatial justice, public agency, and the ethics of intervention.