I've been invited to create new work in glass this summer in a very special place in Sweden. Since my arrival in Boda at the Glass Factory, up until my departure a week later my time and mind were flooded with amplitude of thoughts and curiosity. I was lucky to work closely with a very kind and gentile curator, Maja Heuer, who trusted my instinct towards glass politics. Time becomes suddenly precious when a curator genuinely believes and risks. Maja did that so perfectly and with an eye for what this experience can mean for the future of The Glass Factory. Being invited there meant that I will collaborate with one of Sweden's esteemed artists, Åsa Jungnelius, for whom I have only admiration and love.

Åsa meant a lot for my establishment in Boda and had been a close link to my performance work. We agreed that one of her installations will be shown in the gallery space of the factory and so we did. Before leaving Romania, I've been thinking of her works and made notations to a specific one, called "A study of the relationship between the hole and the pole". This particular piece has moved me from the first time I saw it on the web. I've been traveling to Sweden with this work in mind. It had occupied my thoughts before meeting it in reality. What strikes me vis a vis this work is its frankness and capacity to enmesh romanticism and philosophical dissertation with my research on chronic occupation of time, action versus duration and anti-duration and political evidence.

The thought of collaborating with an art work gave me a perfect conceptual frame in which to insert the machinery of pending works. Noticing its grandeur, the relationship between me and it, empowered a couple of films to emerge as starters, including instrumentations using complicated installations with video projectors beaming from the hotel's window into the near forest etc, works that are still in process.It become a very interesting co-performer within my project, and a very present one in my future work.

At the heart of the Glass Factory is the hotshop, a place where the core of my project was objectified, with the major help of two amazingly talented and dedicated people, who became my friends, Bjorn Friborg and Christopher Ramsey.

These two guys have made a wonderful job in its difficulty to fix my face into life masks. They've been so cooperative and careful with the whole process of casting and then with the glass process, that every day of work with them was flawless. We’ve been surpassing formulation and began implementing in a blink of an eye. Bjorn, a Danish guy, very uplifting, sensitive and caring, very interesting in his performative approach to blowing glass; had been collaborating with many artists among others Fredrik Nielsen. He had found time to help me with advices and so home like food, when working for the performance.

Christopher’s attitude towards my work and the project initiated in his studio was more than welcoming, with a calmness and readiness mixed with a warm character. He's been studying design in America and since then had made a name for himself close to glass making. Together with Maja, they were my family for the whole duration of the residency.

In the second part, I will write few observations regarding my experience with glass.To have a better understanding of the conceptual frame of my project I have to quote myself:

”There are two important conceptual triggers vis a vis Pending Works machinery. The first questions the reliability of the event and its performativity within a fluctuating timeline. The second refers to the cathexis of time and action versus duration and anti-duration and political evidence. Ultimately the chief interest in Pending works lie in the dialectic between evidence and the event as transformative of each other. I am very much interested in the idea of the chronicisation of time, and how this chronic time contaminates the work’s informational cue, and transitivity.

I've been very much interested in the idea of creating life-masks at twenty-nine years old in order to perform their time over and over again; if possible to create a sort of medium out of a specific age. The logistics of this idea were very much in the hands of Chris and Bjorn, reason why I tend to say that it was a collaborative project not a solo one. Therefore I have found it very intriguing to travel to Sweden to have two people embed my corpus for eternity at twenty-nine. It is a colossal action that implies criticality towards time and medium. Very rarely one gets so close to someone else in capturing its true image; life-mask is the only medium to do that.

For this reason we've been attentive to all the details possible regarding composite materials and burning process to make this thing possible for others to see. It takes 500 degrees to heat up so history can accommodate this moment in time. Moreover there is of course the importance of the material itself, as it is alive and stubborn at times, in one word a mass of tension, that needs to be respected and carefully maneuvered. Even if at first glance this medium may look unattached to my métier, it has a very important feature that establishes it close to the more common ones in my practice, and that rests in its meditative nature, its relentless mediation, and fragility. These are very important notions in my work.

If there is a conclusion that needs to be marked, it would refer somehow to the importance of devising the concept and to the collaborative nature and its instrumentation. I’ve learned that approaching another material or medium takes time and understanding, and last but not least a dose of humbleness. I’ve chosen the best material out there that will constantly talk back to me and possibly to others. Glass has all I got at 29

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