Adina Mocanu & Alexandra Sand (RO, 1992) - visual artists working as a duo, using mainly media as performance and video art. For them, public space refers not only to the urban space, but also to where, all together, the various forms of self-awareness manifest and create a collective awareness.

Works description (with photographic documentation atacched below)

Hay Trip – performance, 2014

One day, when we were travelling through Maramureș, we saw a woman on top of a haystack and a powerful performative feeling came up to us. That woman, was out from time and space due to her action, an action with an imagistic that stays as a metaphor for infinite freedom and as new horizons of the contemporary world, for the union between past and future. In order to create a connection with this action, we climbed on the same haystack and we stayed for couple of hours, in a meditative way, trying to feel the world from that point of view.

Untitled (supermercato) – video, 2013

In August 2013 we travelled in Reggio Calabria, Italy. First of all, our intention was to produce some public space interventions and actions, but we found ourselves in the position of walking for hours without meeting any people and this fact really change our perception of this town which seems to descend from the magic realism. So we decide to create a video in which we deconstructed the landscape that is behind us, we deconstructed the human absence-presence.

Untitled (the energy's cycle) – performance and video, 2016

Rome, a city with history, with visible remains of the passing of different civilisation, a city with marks of evolution at each different level is now our starting point and given background. We explore the city in a self-reference approach due to the ‘Cité idéale concept’, a concept with different meanings in the XXI century, formed and changed by the presence of all the people who pass through that space through the time, a worldwide society (a universal city trough his simple presence).

Untitled (l’autre) - performance and installation, 2016

As performance artists the only tool that we have is our body and our energy – it’s no camera, no image to be manipulated, and no objects to rely on – we are alone with ourselves in the attempt to and encourage the viewers to discover a new way of being in reality. The idea of producing two casts - statues of our body in natural size came from the curiosity to see this singular tool that we have. As humans, we cannot live outside our body, we cannot exist outside us and we cannot see ourselves from outside. Before using the statues in the performance, we let them inside the Villa, in the statuary group ‘Niobe’ so they could ‘charge’ with the energy of the place.

Untitled (Cynisca) – video, 2016

The video Untitled (Cynisca) started from our attempt to represent antic sport games in performance using the space of the Villa Medici. We adapted each space to each sport, through composition and juxtaposition. For example, in the Chapter 3 (Tag of War) we used the panorama of the Villa Medici – the tag of war between us symbolizes the ‘fight’ and ‘dialogue’ between us as contemporary artists and the past artists and architects that created the panorama.

We are taking the sports that we never practiced and we are creating performances in which we are treating them really ‘seriously’, entering in the state of mind and the energy specific of those sports. Evidently, the whole aura of the performance becomes absurd and ludic, producing a break into the common reality.

We were aspiring to create a bridge between two histories and two utopias. In our action, a ludic, absurd and strangely atmosphere is created by the fact that we are acting as professional sport women, which we obviously are not. We are simple people doing a simple action, but we are doing it being conscientious about us, about

our performance and its output to the world. The ludicity as a form of subversion is our main tool for breaking the reality of the viewers.