Ideas for Planet Earth

Biographies

Adina Marincea & Ioana Bălănescu

Adina Marincea is a researcher at the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, where she monitors and analyses the discourse and manifestations of far-right groups in Romania. She occasionally publishes her research in the press, taking an anti-fascist, feminist and anti-authoritarian stance in her writing and activism. She believes in community organizing and the importance of a Togetherness as a response to the individualistic and competitive capitalist culture that is eating away at our souls, bodies, minds and planet.
Ioana Bălănescu is a queer individual seeking to explore narrative expression through a decolonial, feminist, anticapitalist, and antispeciesist perspective. She makes films and occasionally publishes texts with Cenaclul X.

Adrian Șonka has been an astronomer for more than 20 years, during which time he has watched the sky and learned to observe many types of cosmic objects: variable stars, asteroids, planets, occultations, etc. He currently observes asteroids and planets through the telescopes of the “Amiral Vasile Urseanu” Astronomical Observatory and those of the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy. He gives astronomy lectures at the Observatory, in schools, bookstores and wherever he finds other passionate people who want to learn more. He studied physics and communication, but because astronomy is not taught in school in Romania, he learned most of it on his own, out of passion. In 2020 he finished a PhD in physics, specialising in planetology-asteroids. He can be found at the “Amiral Vasile Urseanu” Astronomical Observatory where he gives presentations and astronomical observations with the public. From time to time, he also organizes outings with groups of astronomy enthusiasts. He is constantly writing about astronomy and astronomical observations on his website, www.sonkab.com. He has published three books on astronomy with Nemira and Nemi Publishers, The Little Astronomer’s Guide to the Universe (2018, 2023), A Walk through the Universe (2021) and The Exotic Universe (2023).

Alexandru Solomon 
After starting as Director of Photography on fiction films in the 1990’s and working with other artists on experimental videos, Alexandru shifted towards documentaries. His long features – such as The Great Communist Bank Robbery (2004), Kapitalism – our secret recipe (2010), or Tarzan’s Testicles (2017) – travelled worldwide to festivals or on television, covering political stories in hybrid, creative ways. His latest film, Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife, premiered in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition in 2023. In 2016 he published his monograph “Representations of Memory in Documentary Film”. Alexandru is teaching at the University of Arts in Bucharest and is the president of the One World Romania Association.

Bogdan Iancu is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Political Science, SNSPA, where he teaches courses in visual anthropology, ethnographic practice, material culture and the sociology of the everyday. In 2011, he received his PhD in anthropology and ethnology from the University of Perugia. His research interests include: traditional ecological knowledge, rural and urban material culture and housing, visual ethnographies. In the last ten years, he has coordinated or been involved in research projects such as: The Home Package, Ipostaze and Ethnographies of Quarantine in Pandemics, Hydrobiographies – Sadova-Corabia Irrigation System, OPEN GARAGE (coord. Alex Axinte).

Călin Boto is a film critic and curator. He has written reviews and essays for numerous local publications, including Films in Frame, Scena9 and Revista Arta, and is currently collaborating with the Swiss publication Filmexplorer. Associate curator of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), he has also made film selections for the multimedia projects of the Image and Sound association (silent cinema), the ART200 Queer Art Festival and the AICI.ACUM (2022) exhibition of the Scena9 Residency. Member of the International Federation of Film Critics and alumnus of several European film criticism, history and curatorial workshops such as Sarajevo Talents, Locarno Critics Academy, Collegium (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone) and RAW (Short Waves, Poznań).

Cătălin Moise: I grew up with a passion for film and film criticism, and when I was 19 I went to Berlin to study art, philosophy and other humanistic subjects with the aim of applying them to filmmaking. After 4 years I came back, made a few short films and then accidentally ended up making YouTube video essays on topics often connected to the things I studied in one way or another.

CUTRA is a queer & feminist editorial platform. It exists as an online magazine (www.cutra.ro) and as a printed one. The first printed issue appeared in December 2018. The fourth, in October 2022. CUTRA is the result of our collective effort and care. CUTRA is anticapitalist and antifascist. CUTRA is well documented, intuitive, pop and radical, imperfect. Our editorial collective is formed by ♡ Ali Venir, Nanci Nanculescu, Lavinia Ionescu and  Iris Horomnea ♡

Dan Perjovschi lives in Bucharest and Sibiu. He draws critically with humor directly on the walls of art institutions around the world commenting politically, socially and culturally on the daily life of global society. His black and white drawings are visual editorials. He has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern London, MoMA New York, Macro Rome, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Reykyavik Art Museum, Vannabbe Eindhoven, Ludwig Cologne, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Nasher Museum Duke University or Kiasma Helsinki and group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Liverpool, Castello di Rivoli Torino, MoMA San Francisco, MUAC Mexico, MAM Warsaw, MCBA Lausanne or MOT Tokyo. He has participated in Documenta 15 and in art biennials, Istanbul, Venice, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Sydney, Lyon, Dublin, Iasi, Timisoara and Jakarta. He received the George Maciunas Prize in 2004, the ECF Princess Margriet Prize, Amsterdam 2012 (with Lia Perjovschi) and in 2016 the Rosa Schapire Kunsthalle Hamburg Prize. Perjovschi is the laureate of the Gheorghe Ursu Human Rights Foundation 1999 and of the Civil Society Gala CERE Participation 2016. From 1990 until today he publishes drawings in Revista 22 București. Since 2010 he has been doing the art project in public space Ziarul Orizontal in Sibiu. Since 2009 a drawing installation is permanently in NTK National Technical Library Prague.

Delia Grigore, born in 1972 in Galati, is a prominent Romani writer, researcher and cultural activist. She is the President of the Roma Centre Association “Amare Rromentza” and a doctoral lecturer at the University of Bucharest. She is a member of the “Barvalipe” Academy in Berlin and the “Costache Negri” Writers’ Society in Galati. Delia Grigore has been awarded numerous national and international literature prizes, including the “Amico Rom” International Creative Competition. She is the author of several books and studies on Roma culture, the coordinator of the Roma literary cenacle “Amare Rromentza” and the editor of a series of Roma books. Her life mission is to promote and develop the Rromani culture in all its dimensions and to promote the Rromani ethnic identity globally.

Elena Stancu & Cosmin Bumbuț
Journalist Elena Stancu and photographer Cosmin Bumbuț have been living in a caravan for ten years and working on documentary projects. In the first five years, they have published on their website, Teleleu.eu, reports on extreme poverty, domestic violence, life in Romanian prisons, the medicine crisis in the medical system, the lack of access to education for children from vulnerable families, racism and discrimination in Romania.
They have made two documentary films, The Last Boilermaker (2016), which tells the story of a young Roma family who go to France to look for scrap metal at the dump, and The Residents (2018), about the first centre in Romania for inmates with mental illness. In 2017, they published the book Home, on the road (Humanitas), about the people they met on their travels.
Since January 2019, they have been documenting Romanian communities in Europe – Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. So far, they have published more than 90 stories about Romanians picking strawberries in Spain, caring for the elderly in Italy, singing on Europe’s big stages, treating patients in hospitals in England, building ships in Denmark, working in tourism in Portugal or teaching at universities in the Netherlands. The stories of Romanians in the diaspora will be published in a book to be published by Humanitas at the end of their project.

Fridays for Future is an international youth movement that started in August 2018 in Sweden in response to political inaction on the climate crisis. The movement reached Romania in March 2019, as a growing number of young people mobilised to demand their right to a livable future. Since then, Fridays For Future Romania continues the fight for immediate action to tackle the causes and effects of the climate crisis, as well as for proper information about the phenomena we are witnessing. Ștefania Bodescu has been part of this movement since 2021. She is an activist, artist and filmmaker, and believes that the climate movement is home to an incredibly brave, creative and caring community of people whose story deserves to be told and heard.

Ionela Pădure is a 36-year-old Rromani from Țăndărei, Ialomița, a graduate of bachelor and master degrees in Romania and abroad, currently a PhD student at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris and a founding member of the Popular Centre for Research and Documentation. An activist for Roma rights with a focus on the right to education since 2005, she has actively participated in various educational projects and programmes implemented at national and international level, programmes that have had as direct beneficiaries young Roma. She has extensive experience as a trainer in courses and workshops on Roma culture and civilization for an audience mainly composed of teachers and local actors, both from the country and from abroad, skills she also acquired in the undergraduate program in Roma Language and Civilization, graduated in Paris. His contribution addresses the theme of the image of the Roma in literature, music and fine arts, combining the theoretical part of the literature with the experience of his own representation in a photography project, implemented in Romania.

Irisz Kovacs (b. 1999) is a theatre director and photographer. She has collaborated with theatres such as Reactor de creație e experiment Cluj-Napoca, Teatrul German de Stat Timișoara, Teatrelli, Teatrul Metropolis, Apollo111, Teatrul “Andrei Mureșanu” Sfântu Gheorghe. For the performance “8 fathers” at the State Theatre of Constanta she was nominated for the Uniter Award for Debut.

Katia Pascariu (b.1983, Bucharest) is an actress, performer and cultural activist. She graduated from UNATC (2006) and from the University of Bucharest – Master in Anthropology and Community Development (2016). She works on the local and international scene, mainly in theatre, but also in film and performance projects, collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams. For over 10 years she has been involved in social and political theatre projects, participating – together with the artistic collectives Replika, Macaz Coop., Vârsta4, DramAcum or as a guest – in the development of community-educational artistic programs. She supports artistic workshops of educational and community theatre and manages as cultural manager ADO Association projects. She is also part of the artistic collective of the Jewish State Theatre in Bucharest.

Lavinia Braniște is the author of the novels Mă găsești quando vuoi (Polirom, 2021), Sonia ridică mano (2019) and Interior zero (2016), the latter translated into German, Polish and Spanish and adapted for the stage in Romania (Replika Centre) and Germany (Freies Werkstatt Theater Köln). Lavinia wrote texts for two plays, Dreaming Voices (r. Nicoleta Lefter) and Exeunt (r. Bobi Pricop), and for the most recent film directed by Vlad Petri, Between Revolutions, awarded this year’s FIPRESCI prize in the Berliale Forum section. Since 2016 he has also started publishing children’s literature: volume 5 of the Rostogol series from Arthur Publishing recently appeared. Other titles: Sora lui Colăcel, Anatol and Greogor at the airport, Duminică și alte povestiri cu Iosifel, Cofetăria, Melcușorul, Moș Columb’s escape, Chițibuș’s lab, etc. Lavinia studied foreign languages in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest and has a master’s degree in literary translation.

Leta Popescu (b. 1989, Galati) is a theatre director who has been working on Romanian stages since 2013, and by 2023 she will have directed or been part of the creative teams of over 30 shows. She has performed in national (Cluj, Sibiu, Târgu Mureș, Timișoara, Craiova) and municipal (Galați, Arad, Gheorgheni) theatres, but also in private, independent venues such as SAC Malmaison, Reactor-Cluj, Fabrica de Pensule Cluj, Replika-București, Apollo-București. She is interested in contemporary Romanian (and Hungarian) language drama, but also dramatizes prose/poetry from the same universe on her own. She also writes texts for stage such as (IN)CORECT and Vrabia. Leta Popescu tackles in her performances the themes of the present, without making a militant kind of theatre, but trying to detect the vibrations of the lived world together with the artistic team. She finds it harder and harder to accept any thesis launched without a doubt and says that “humanity plays tricks on all ideologies”.

Luiza Vasiliu
Journalist. Former editor of Dilema veche, reporter and editor of Casa Jurnalistului. In 2016 she co-founded the publication Scena9, which she coordinated for six years. She has written about astrophysics, Holocaust, communism, human rights. Finalist for the European Science Writer of the Year award for her investigation into the experimental practices of orthopedist Gheorghe Burnei.

Marina Martínez has a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from the University of New Mexico (2021), a degree in Geology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2013) and a Master’s degree in Astrophysics, Particle Physics, and Cosmology from the University of Barcelona (2015). She was introduced into Meteoritics at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), where she was part of a research group for a few years (2013-2016). Her love for rocks and minerals and her passion for outer space made Meteoritics her perfect field. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and is an international collaborator at the Center for Advanced Sample Analysis of Astromaterials from the Moon and Beyond (Chip Shearer, P.I.), from the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI, NASA). Her main research is focused on exploring the mineralogy, petrology, and cosmochemistry of extraterrestrial material to learn about the origin and evolution of different bodies in the solar system, including primitive asteroids, Mars, and the Moon. She is interested in the action of primordial water in the solar system on minerals and organics, and the importance of volatile elements in the evolution of planetary systems.  

Nicoleta Esinescu
She is an author and director. Lives and works in Chisinau. She is one of the founders of the theatre-slavery, a political, feminist, queer theatre collective in Chisinau. She writes about the traditional family, patriarchy and homophobia; the Holocaust in Basarabia; recent history and repressed memory; working conditions and precariousness; power relations between East and West. Her most recent plays have been staged at the Spălătorie-Theatre, Chișinău; Reactor for Creation and Experiment, Cluj; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Theater Rampe, Stuttgart; Schauspielhaus Graz edited at “l’Arche”, Paris and “Idea”, Cluj.

Ramona Duminicioiu is a peasant from Ionești commune, Valcea county. She is the president of the Eco Ruralis association, which represents the interests of almost 20 000 farmers nationwide. She is a member of the steering committee of the Ukrainian Rural Development Network (URDN), a public union of over 2 million Ukrainian citizens. She is involved in the coordination of a regional alliance (BILIM) for the development of Agroecology and implementation of Peasants’ Rights in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Between 2016 – 2020 she was part of the steering committee of the peasant confederation Via Campesina Europe (ECVC). Between 2017 – 2021 she was part of the steering committee of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism for the relationship with the Global Committee on Food Security (CSIPM-CFS). In 2018 he served as an expert in the last negotiating session of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Rural People (UNDROP), adopted in the same year in the Human Rights Council in Geneva and subsequently at the UN General Assembly in New York. On the farm in Ionești, Ramona grows vines, maize and vegetables with her extended family.