The Country Is All Leaves and Flowers

The Country Is All Leaves and Flowers (2021-ongoing)

^{‘The Country Is All Leaves and Flowers’ follows the route of a future motorway in Romania, an infrastructure project intended to connect the underdeveloped eastern region of Moldova with Transylvania. In a country with relatively few motorways, the construction of the A8 has become a politically charged symbol of progress, modernity, and alignment with Western Europe. It promises not only economic acceleration, but also access to a different historical temporality — a transition from backwardness and trailing behind to contemporaneity.

The project traces the motorway before its materialisation. Working with a view camera, the artist positions herself directly along the projected line of asphalt, consistently pointing the lens westward, away from her hometown, Iasi, and towards the imagined direction of expansion. Each photograph identifies the precise location where the motorway will eventually cut through the terrain. Motivated by the imminent flattening of the undulating landscape, the work proposes that anticipation reshapes perception. These landscapes are viewed with prior knowledge of their inevitable alteration and therefore operate in a suspended temporality — they are documents of a present already marked by its future. The land can remain intact only inside the flat space of the photographs, where the motorway exists as projection, desire, and political promise, but not yet as form.

Both infrastructures of circulation, the motorway and the medium of photography reorganise space and time. The first compresses distance and produces temporal acceleration; the latter interprets space through the movements of the view camera and liberates time from its chronological flow. The project brings these two regimes into dialogue and introduces the logic of velocity into the static photograph — in several images, the artist uses a softer focus in order to recreate the sensation of land sliding backwards as the vehicle advances forward at speed. In others, she simply captures the land rehearsing its own transformation, through tyre marks, freshly dug soil, or inexplicably flattened patches in a wheat field, small gestures that, in the context of the series, become premonitory. Ultimately, these landscapes are structured by agricultural cycles and ecological rhythms, whose temporality conflicts with the linear arrow of infrastructural progress.

Install shots: Paulina Korobkiewicz}

^{Photo London, Booth J02, Discovery Section, 2026}