In July 2025, the residency of Nico Angiuli took place in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest. During the residency, the artist engaged with a changing rural landscape through encounters and reflections. The outcome of this research was the presentation of a series of elements translated through the body and fire in a performative action which, like an alchemical ritual of transmutation and recomposition, invites reflection on “ce arde” (“what burns”), on what is lost and consumed, but also on what endures and transforms.
How did you conduct your research during the
residency?
In the spring of 2025, I
was reading again The Second Body
by Daisy Hildyard, which describes how each of us possesses both a
local, situated body — flesh-and-blood, perceptible — and, at the
same time, a global body that acts at a distance, where every gesture
produces effects on distant lives and territories. This condition of
doubleness is intangible, yet no less real because of it. The
research emerged from this condition of doubleness.
A few months earlier, within this perspective, I had attempted to disappear into the landscape, to “become landscape”, dismargining on the island of Evia in Greece, inside a forest that had burned only months before.
By “dismargining” I mean the possibility of reaching a threshold where the boundary between body and surroundings vanishes. Poetically, for me, this means attempting to align oneself completely with a place, to become part of it, absorbed within something larger that does not overdetermine itself around the subject, but instead encompasses it.
In Brădet I focused on the ways local people express their rootedness, on material forms of knowledge still widely present: gestures and practices connected to hay, milk, wood, shepherding, and food. I also tried to perceive those presences defined through their visual absence — yet still deeply present — such as bears or wolves.
In this context, becoming landscape meant moving with the rhythms, materials, and tensions of the place. An attempt to temporarily recompose the fracture between the local body and the global body, revealing the point at which the global body places the local one at risk.
What were your reflections in relation to the
context?
The context reveals a tension between two systems: on
one side, dense local practices grounded in subsistence, manual
labour, and proximity; on the other, a global pressure introducing
products tied to intensive monocultural production, standardising
even taste itself, without any rooted relationship to the territory
at any stage of the supply chain except that of sale.
I remember an employee of a recently opened hypermarket in Întorsura Buzăului speaking about the blandness of the tomatoes sold there compared to those produced locally. Once again, two bodies coexisting. The work positioned itself within this space of friction, between what resists and what is consumed.
How did you select the elements used in the
performance?
The chosen elements
emerged through the process of getting to know the place, or were
gifted by the people I encountered: freshly milked milk, slănină,
salt stones for cows, wood, manure, guinea fowl feathers.
I searched for elements already traversed by specific tensions of use and meaning. In this sense, each element already carries within itself a linguistic dimension and a precise ecology of making — a complexity that expresses and condenses what risks disappearing: forms of knowledge and practices born from a profound relationship with the context in which they are enacted, tied to a particular scale of making.
During the performance you collected these
elements from the participants’ hands, ate them, burned them, then
chewed the charcoal to create a paste used to write on a cloth. What
meaning do these actions hold?
Burning is an act that can
carry many meanings, but it evidently generates a transformation of
physical state. Chewing, for me in particular, means obtaining an
element capable of summarising the essences of all the investigated
practices: in this way, I bring together all the elements into a
single formal entity, which I can transform through chewing and
return as language.
A central role is played by fire, around which you invited participants to sit, almost as part of a collective ritual. This element also recalls the rural habit of burning pruning remains and cut vegetation, and of gathering around a fire.Yes, and fire is not only destruction. In many agricultural contexts, burning prepares the ground, clears space, and makes new fertility possible. I am interested in this ambivalence: something disappears so that something else may emerge.
What do you mean by “ce arde” (“what
burns”), the words written on the cloth?
“Ce arde”
indicates an ongoing process. Practices burn when they lose
continuity. The relationship between body and environment burns under
pressure. What we once believed capable of defining us also burns;
what remains are ashes, which can still speak.
Perhaps dismargining is also connected to this. Becoming landscape means accepting no longer being a separate and stable body, but rather a permeable matter, exposed to transformation. In this sense, “ce arde” concerns not only what is consumed, but also what continues to mutate in order to keep existing.
