Urban Space, 1998

Site-specific installation — forest, wood, paper, wire, household paint

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In 1981, my seventh year, the first great change in my life took place—I moved from my grandparents’ countryside house to Bucharest with my parents. The garden is almost a major character in my life. I am a product of green spaces explored in solitude and warm sunlight, animals and birds’ silences, and the noise of the wind under the trees. In this Eden, nothing was forbidden to me. Since I was pulled from the garden—carried sleeping across the border—everything changed, as if I had died in the garden and come alive again in a bleak and remote place. Some transformations, such as leaving behind the familiar and finding yourself in an uncertain, seemingly desolate landscape, can leave you feeling disoriented, with a sense of dislocation, adding to the contrast: life and death, beauty, and barrenness. (Excerpt from Notebooks, My Little Garden, 2023 — A. F.)