Larisa Crunţeanu

An interview by the curator Sandra Teitge with the artist Larisa Crunţeanu.

You recently had a show at alpha nova & galerie futura in Berlin entitled to slip, to slide, to glitch – a sort of duett with artist Sonja Hornung, curated by Katharina Koch and Sylvia Sadzinski. The exhibition comprised video works, textiles, text and sculptural elements and explored moments of control, disruption, destruction and restoration in the production of landscapes through so-called green capitalism.

The starting-point of your artistic research were open-pit mining areas in Germany and Romania. You were interested in how the desire for an ecological and just transformation collides with ongoing, profit-driven extraction processes. 

A series of large-scale cyanotypes made on textiles and hyper-coloured fake plants – species used to recultivate former mining landscapes – transformed the gallery space into an imitation of a forest.

On one of these cyanotypes, the figure of a female body can be seen.

This subject/ figure has been appearing in your work for quite some time now.

Who is she?

Paresthesia. She is me, or a sort of me, who knows more than I do. Since I started making these full body cyanotypes I’ve experienced a new set of pains and aches in my body, because I need to lay still for long times in order for the textiles to expose properly in the sun. And this is how I came to name her Paresthesia, which is actually a medical term for the sensation of pins and needles that everyone experiences at least once in their lifetime. It has many different causes but it can also appear without a cause. It usually appears as a skin or a whole limb sensation, but can also affect the perception of one’s own body proportions or equilibrium. Funny expression, “pins and needles”, come to think of it. In Romanian, we have two words for it: one cute, furnicătură (coming from furnică, meaning ‘ant’) and one macabre, amorțire (coming from mort, meaning ‘dead’). I believe in German this feeling is simply described as “itching” but also as “walking ants”, similar to the Romanian language. 

Back to Paresthesia. She is made of surface, a continuous surface, always in two dimensions, stretchable beyond the horizon. When the sun is strong, she turns into a cut-out from the landscape. A missing block of information, pure non. She has been with me long before this body of work. And I like to think she will still be hiding or strolling or stretching some piece of earth long after I’m gone too, my wise shadow.

It was my good friend and longtime collaborator Anja Lückenkemper who pointed out that Paresthesia has been creeping into my work for a couple of years now. She pointed to the video work No Image No Camouflage, where the shadow was a literal cut-out from a landscape I was moving through. I wrote several descriptions of this work throughout time. Recently, I found one of the oldest, where I was quoting Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series, some Animal Planet stock, Videodrome by David Cronenberg, and an episode of the softcore porn TV series Emanuelle as inspirations behind this work. 

Wow. Quite a mix, I must say.

There is something common in these references, though. They all try to capture the wrapping and warping of space around a character, and I have an intuition that Paresthesia might come from the same desire to depart from oneself in order to learn where that self can sit and act in this world.

At a first glance, working with this weird nondescript body shape might seem an ‘apolitical’ approach, but I suspect it is not, is it?

On the contrary! I think Paresthesia gave shape to a need to address highly political problems like the place of the female body in the (corporate) workplace or the feminization of nature, or the projection of female identities on bodiless technologies like virtual maps and digital assistants.

Do you like my humor? Should I turn it down a notch?

This is a quote from the first work from the Didona series. It consists of three guided tours produced between 2021-2023 in Cluj, Osnabrück, and Bucharest. The tours are run by a digital female voice (named Dido after the founder of Carthage in Greek mythology) who belongs to a subjectivity excavated from a far away future and guides people alongside existing or dried out bodies of water. The catch is, her timestamps are all messed up so she knows where she is, but not when, which allows for the story to unfold over a very wide timespan. And because she’s a disembodied voice that guides people’s attention to various visual or aural elements in their surroundings, she has this quality of a shadow that creeps up and morphs according to the terrain she is mapped onto.

It was while wrapping up this series that I started my latest collaboration with Sonja Hornung, almost ten years after our first exhibition together. As a consequence, I entered our project with the conviction that besides the conversations we were having amongst each other, with fellow artists and various other people invested in those (post)mining areas, we should engage in a conversation with another type of subjectivity, too. As you mentioned, we were already dealing with a very heavy context: the destruction and production of landscape in postmining areas, some of those in Romania. For me, this was very emotionally loaded.

How so?

I’m afraid this will take us back to a childhood memory, as well. In 1990 and 1991, in the freshly ‘democratic’ Romanian state, miners were asked to come to Bucharest and reestablish an order disturbed by those who contested the newly installed ‘president’ through very violent means. Though we were not living in the capital, I remember the TV running for days without end, while my family debated in clouds of cigarette smoke whether we should emigrate or not. In my eyes as a child, this mass of miners’ bodies represented a raw force, beyond human. The TV anchor would say that they could restore order and defend presidents against a whole nation if necessary. The adults in the room would nod in accord. I think this is the moment I first understood that my lived reality is not run by my parents only; there are bigger forces at play. And I should fear those forces, as they can be violent and unpredictable.

A second important moment in our local politics and my political awakening were the protests of 2012-2013 in support of Rosia Montana, a gold mining area that was under threat of being completely destroyed and exploited by a Canadian company called Gabriel Resources. They were using the much contested cyanides. These street protests were the largest we had had in Romania since December 1989. We also learned a lot about local activist groups and ways of organizing towards political change. For me, it was furthermore a moment when I was getting more familiar with the work of politically engaged artists and writers like Veda Popovici, David Schwartz, Mihaela Michailov, Maria Drăghici, Ioana Păun and others involved in structures such as the Political Theater Platform and Gazeta de Artă Politică.

There’s never a sky above miners’ heads.

Coming back to your collaboration with Sonja, you mentioned you engaged with another subjectivity as well.

So that subjectivity got another female name, Hélène, a fixeuse who was supposed to guide us through the couple of post mining areas we were interested in, but she failed. Or she did not fail but rather got derailed.

Is her derailment present in the exhibition?

Yes, and even more so in a film we are currently wrapping up and which is probably going to premiere next year. Besides this, another thing to come out of this project is a publication we’ll be launching this autumn, featuring texts and research materials of our own, but also other artistic, theoretical and interview-like contributions from Elisa Bertuzzo, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Eva Durovec, Barbara Marcel, ~pes (Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Pablo Torres), Madeleine Anderson, Stefanie Daniella Roth, Judy Rabinowitz Price, Ulrike Gerhardt and Dragoș Hanciu.

You are working across mediums, but also across disciplines. Particularly writing, both fictional and theoretical, seems to have an important place in your practice (as seen in your recent book Protocols of Singularity). Can you tell me more about this?

Most of the works mentioned involve writing. I’m not sure if it’s 100% fictional writing, as a lot of it is inspired by or a dramatization of real past events. That is to say, it’s not all made up. The book, on the other hand, had a different logic. Real events from my past became premises to work out different ideas and concepts at the time I was writing it.

One could call it autotheory?

Yes. 

Are there any particular concepts you feel are close to your artistic practice?

For sure, but for space considerations I will simply list them here: Deleuze’s porosity of the self, Deleuze & Guattari’s concepts of assemblages, the friend as conceptual persona, ritornello, Stiegler’s hyper-synchronicity, Paolo Virno’s preindividual sphere, individuation, and  invention of a catastrophe, Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic category, Heidegger’s infinite surface, Catherine Malabou’s minimal concept of woman, Ursula le Guin’s carrier bag theory and imaginary community, Roland Barthes’ myth, Marshall McLuhan’s anti-environment and horseless carriage syndrome, George Perec’s ideas about space, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s poethics, the category of the impolitical in Roberto Esposito, Karen Barad’s queer thinking in relation to physics and metaphysics, the ideas about imposture and collectivity by Michel Serres in The Parasite, Tristan Tzara’s approximate man, Andre Lepecki’s co-imagination, Patricia Reed’s non-trivial art, Negarestani’s Geist, and many more. To be honest, I’m not sure if they infuse my practice or if they shift my position towards my practice while I’m at it. I have a muddy relation with theory. Because whilst these texts are semi-stable forms, my practice and myself are not. So whenever I revisit a concept or a text, its effect is actualized and thus it hits differently. Maybe it would be more effective to picture these different concepts and authors as moving gravitational points. Points that push me further towards other points that can be theory but also other artists’ works, or social phenomena, inventions, historical moments, etc. I see it as a cosmic movement, where large, celestial bodies can compete in their gravitational influence over a smaller object in such a manner that it sets it on weird trajectories. Those trajectories can potentially end in an orbit around nothing (see Lagrange points and space highways). This is to say, I work with theory that lets itself be captured in individuations of a personal cosmology. This is personal only insofar as it is a record of the experiences I have lived as an individual. And plural as it is formed by ideas and events generated by others that I have no control over.

Since you mentioned other artists’ works, are there any artists in Romanian art history that you look back at for inspiration or that have informed your practice?

Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Wanda Mihuleac, Ecaterina Vrana have been a source of inspiration and admiration for a long time, Gellu Naum and Isidore Isou are two surrealist figures I keep returning to, Marion Baruch and her umbrella brand NAME DIFFUSION whom I discovered and obsessed over a couple of years ago and, though not Romanian, Marisa Merz and her terribly delicate pair of shoes crocheted out of copper wire (Scarpette, 1975), which I recently saw live for the first time and it made my heart jump.