On Thursday, July 9, at 7:00 pm, Etaj artist-run space opens Apart Apartments, a duo exhibition by Elena Preda and Daniel Semenciuc.

Apart Apartments reflects on the ways the spaces we inhabit gradually come to shape our relationships, identities, and memories.

“For three years we split our lives between two studio apartments. Unirii to Costin Georgian, and back again. ‘So, when are you moving in together?’ Not yet. We each need space to paint; we’re both attached to our independence. We meet in the evenings. Wherever we cook stuffed peppers, that’s where we end up sleeping for the next two nights.

Summer is unbearable here. There are so many lakes, yet you can’t swim in any of them. The public swimming pools are awful. We escape to Vama Veche, just the two of us, like tourists in a foreign country. There’s no room left for our towels, so we rent sunbeds, paying 70 lei just to listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘Changing of the Guards’ on the beach. By now, even that is gone. In 2025, Stuf closed, and our collective melancholy reached its final stage.

Hope in this city, and in this part of the world, keeps evaporating. It’s beautiful here—especially in autumn and winter, when the cold wind blows and IOR Park or Carol Park are almost deserted—but even then it feels as though we’re wasting our lives. We keep dreaming of taking flight, of teleporting ourselves to a kinder city, to more peaceful and prosperous times. To Berlin, where there are lakes you can actually swim in. Or to London, where museums are free and there are no far-right extremists. Or to Igualada, Spain—the town where Bucharest’s manhole covers come from.”

(Excerpt from the exhibition text.)