The exhibition brings together intimate chronicles of women trapped in the middle, between survival and fantasy.
In the last two years, we have met over forty women who have helped us understand who are those choosing to leave their villages. Working abroad has a purpose: to build a house inside which they can feel safe. A home only for them, for their children, where they can live in peace without the abuse and inequalities of a state that seems to have abandoned them.
Coming from a system that cannot meet their basic needs or guarantee justice or safety, women in rural Romania build the necessary image of a better place, under bluer skies. Most of the time this place has foreign names.
These forty women have witnessed the feeling of alienation that often brings them back home to divided families or abusive relationships. They are the ‘invisible class’. They are the women of the other half of Romania, the rural Romania and they are without a doubt fighters. In their daily struggle for survival, in which happiness is unattainable neither "here" nor "there", women in Romanian villages rarely allow themselves to live for themselves.
Multimedia exhibition by Andreea Bortun, Brindusa Nastasa and Claudiu Popescu
Givers Coffee House, Bucharest
9th - 23rd December 2019