Ballad of Import-Export:
On Gas and Grapes
Exhibitions
15.03.25
• Design Academy Eindhoven, finals
Eindhoven, Netherlands
What could Gas and Grapes have in common? Two seemingly unrelated entities, but both crucial commodities, circulating in the flow of international trade that Moldova is navigating in the present, in a period of economic and political uncertainty. The project reveals how economic and political abstraction become material, and how the political is always personal.
The project consists of two chapters, a gas-pipe sound installation, that narrates the mundane complexities of gas import, and a grape processing machine, revealing how the grape becomes a commodity for export.
1. When Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left behind a vast centralised network of pipes that distributed cheap gas, as well as an economic, informational, and spiritual vacuum, filed by chaos and corruption, that continues in the present.
The installation consists of a a multi-channel sound and voice narration, carried through gas pipes and vibration speakers, and made audible through metal cone openings. It exposes the polarised informational landscape of the current energetic crisis in Moldova, through an archive of anonymous social media poetry-traces, reflecting the energy infrastructure as dismembered into inputs and outputs, a psycho-geographic layout meant to encode a haunted reality of souls living in a state of continuous anticipation, for futures that never arrived, in between temporalities.
2. The grape fortune-destemmer machine, is a mechanically-powered object, inspired by local Moldovan wine-making tools in rural areas. By spinning the grapes, the machine acts as a fortune telling tool, that reveals the loss of intangible undocumented heritage of grape harvesting and processing, as a community building act, in the face of emerging globalized automated agriculture practices, like the automated grape harvesting tractor
The project consists of two chapters, a gas-pipe sound installation, that narrates the mundane complexities of gas import, and a grape processing machine, revealing how the grape becomes a commodity for export.
1. When Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left behind a vast centralised network of pipes that distributed cheap gas, as well as an economic, informational, and spiritual vacuum, filed by chaos and corruption, that continues in the present.
The installation consists of a a multi-channel sound and voice narration, carried through gas pipes and vibration speakers, and made audible through metal cone openings. It exposes the polarised informational landscape of the current energetic crisis in Moldova, through an archive of anonymous social media poetry-traces, reflecting the energy infrastructure as dismembered into inputs and outputs, a psycho-geographic layout meant to encode a haunted reality of souls living in a state of continuous anticipation, for futures that never arrived, in between temporalities.
2. The grape fortune-destemmer machine, is a mechanically-powered object, inspired by local Moldovan wine-making tools in rural areas. By spinning the grapes, the machine acts as a fortune telling tool, that reveals the loss of intangible undocumented heritage of grape harvesting and processing, as a community building act, in the face of emerging globalized automated agriculture practices, like the automated grape harvesting tractor
