EXPERIMENTALIVING LONDON

I could say I met Stefan Cosma in a lab-like environment called the High School and I continued my acquaintance with him and his friends trough several flat-oriented events/parties at his place in Colentina, Bucharest. The High School was a laboratory shaping our minds and bodies for the better or for the worse. At the Colentina parties Stefan Cosma began a social and media mix that announced his present commitment to a holistic lab-like structure due to be officially enacted in Ibiza this year.

The place, be it a home, apartment or flat is always a temporary base for Stefan Cosma. Being temporary, restricted in time calls for changes, mutations and dis-locations. His living-space is always connected to momentary (also momentous) events such as the interrupted faculty terms, training at Fabrica in Italy and the fruitful Ibiza experience.
Stefan Cosma is never totally dis-connected from his former, previous living spaces. He always returns to his Colentina home-base, to his parents in Germany, to Ibiza and now to Vlad Nanca’s 2020 home-space. His flat in London was an intermediary space between Ibiza and Bucharest. It became a sort of testing ground for a bigger project involving the objects, lights, angles, multimedia equipment, photo models, and time-zones of his day-to-day living. Now we can all enter this place.

Returning can be a tricky event. It always has the promise of a comeback or the sweet-sour taste of the proverbial starting anew from scratch.
Dis-connection from real life environments is always announcing other self-replicating connections. In the wake of leaving one place behind, we got the mobile phone exhibition Suicide of Life by Stefan Cosma and curator Cosmin Costinas. As such, issues like the displayable format and multi-functionality come to the forefront.

Home-galleries have always been with us (see early examples in Cluj).
The 2020 home-gallery is another outgrowth of a former renovated living space: Vlad Nanca’s and Kate Smith’s apartment. The mini-gallery (see Ioana Nemes’s Chasing Myself exhibition) was also hosted inside the home-gallery. In the end it’s a question about who is hosting who. It’s a former derelict space hosting a new-white-washed-version hosting a gallery.
The first show hosted a fake tele-shopping extravaganza with various artifacts collected from the Bucharest open-air markets (Obor) by Stefan Cosma and Bathukan. These were artifacts on the way to extinction even if their design seems timeless. Meanwhile even the above-mentioned flea-markets seem endangered with the rise of new, clean, specially-designated mall-like structures.
Beyond the clarification and the functionality of such hosting tactics it is important to recognize certain trends: investing in downtown real-estate, independence vis-a-vis Art University and Museums, lingering gallery aesthetics(white, well-lit, accessible, central) and a fusion of the living space with the exhibition space.

In due time we could look forward to a complete (if open) compilation of texts tracing the separate histories of home-galleries in Romania, in different cities and at different times. Thus having the possibility to focus on the practice of opening-up different spaces such as former derelict or under-used spaces, garage’s or phone-booth’s, fridge’s, or small, mobile box-shaped exhibitions (such as the one proposed by curator Erden Kosova). In the near-future we may witness the rise of home-gallery collectors auctioning for the whole space as such and its separate, internal elements.