Șona AIR (Artists in Residence), artistic residency program of Ștefan Câlția Foundation that aims to support artists and creatives in the development of their own projects, announces the guests of the pilot edition 2024, which started on February 26: Sorina Vasilescu (Vaselina), illustrator, graphic designer and comic book author, and the duo Maria Mandea and George Marian Preduț, part of the collective of artists and architects Super: Serios who get involved in the public space through playful strategies.
The selected artists will work for two months on their projects, being hosted in the Blue House in the village of Șona (Brașov county), a house restored in 2011 by the Ștefan Câltia Foundation.
A project co-financed by AFCN, Șona AIR approaches the model of individual residencies, addresses artists from various cultural fields, both Romanian and international, and supports interdisciplinarity and collaboration, offering artists space, time and financial resources to complete projects.
The Șona AIR residencies will take place biannually, in spring and autumn, and the 2024 edition, which only has national participation – and from 2025, it will also address international artists -is curated by Monica Dănilă, the residencies coordinator.
“The Șona AIR Residence aims to create a favorable environment for research and creation, facilitating interdisciplinary exchange and interaction with local resources.[…] As a pilot project, we aim to explore and implement various methods to identify a sustainable model for both the residency program and the rural context. We focus on attracting and working with creatives from diverse cultural fields to understand what specific needs there are and how a residency can accommodate them.”, Monica Dănilă – coordinator of the Șona AIR residency program.
“Art residencies are a tool through which ideas can settle and take on new forms, which in turn can create cultural and social value among rural communities as well. The urban perspective on rurality as a place of peace and reconnection with oneself is in flagrant contradiction with the rural perspective, often in economic and social depression, faced with a lack of direction. The context that the village provides, mirrored by the particularity that the residents bring, can create new ways of looking. The residency program also tries to create a context for understanding this dichotomy.” – Matei Câlția, director of the Ștefan Câlția Foundation.
Sorina Vazelina, graphic designer, illustrator and author of comics, a graduate of the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara and of a master’s degree in Graphic Arts at the University of Arts in Bucharest, trained as an artist in the editorial offices of Scena9, DoR, Vice, but also through collaborations for various cultural materials. In recent years, in parallel with her work as a graphic artist at the Youth Theater in Piatra Neamț, Sorina has developed works that combine comics with social topics and, sometimes, with wood sculptures. As part of the Șona AIR residency, Sorina Vazelina will work on assembling 40 pages from the volume of comics dedicated to the subject of death in various cultures and periods.
Maria Mandea, an artist and researcher working with the game medium, and George Marian Preduț, an artist working with the photographic medium, members of the Super:Serios collective, will develop a collaborative artistic research project within the Șona AIR residency.
Maria Mandea studied Product Design at UAUIM (2017), developed a doctoral thesis on game design at UNArte, teaches at the Art of Game Design master at UNATC Bucharest, and in 2017 co-founded the design studio Super:Serios, where she develops playful-performative games and installations. She is the vice-president of the Artistic Laboratory Association, co-founder of the Știrbei47 space, and in 2023 she initiated the Game Institute. Over time, her works have been exhibited at the Bucharest National Museum of Contemporary Art, the Ars Electronica Center, or in public spaces in cities such as Bucharest, Timișoara and Matera, Italy.
George Marian Preduț, an artist who works with textiles and analog photography, studied Arts and Textile Design (UNArte Bucharest) and Psychology (SNSPA Bucharest). As an Erasmus student at the Faculty of Arts in Grenoble, he developed a project focused on public-private space called “Balcoane”, a project also exhibited at Unagaleria. At the Art Quarter in Budapest, he documented the work of resident artists, the photographs being exhibited in 2018 in the exhibition Progress. His photographs capture landscape, architecture and art in public spaces from an observational, poetic and subversive perspective of the seeing eye.
This autumn’s residence of Șona AIR (Artists in Residence) will host the artists Alina Manolache, filmmaker, author of films on the border between documentary and experimental cinema, and Nicoleta Moise, writer and journalist, whose work practice combines archives, video and text to make lesser-known stories or events visible.
About Ștefan Câlția Foundation
The Ștefan Câlția Foundation was established in 2016 and aims to promote substantive projects from visual culture, support organizational development and develop the sustainability of projects in which it is involved. The Foundation’s activity also materialized around an increased interest in the care and valorization of the heritage of the work of Ștefan Câltia, social and conservation actions related to the village of Șona mainly, but also to the south of Transylvania in the secondary.
