SPACE SHELTER EARTH - SSE - B-02 - Of Nature, Concrete, Cracks and Power
Romania, Bucharest 2025
September 17th - 27th 2025
Atelier 030202, Sfânta Vineri St. 11, Bucharest
with: Ada Anghel, Sorin Badea, Liviu Bulea, Annick Bureaud, Cosmin Ciobanu, Alexandra Costea, Marcus Neustetter, Roxana Nicoarā, Alexandra Sofonea, Sabina Suru, Andrei Tudose, Vitaly Yankovy
Romania, Bucharest 2025
September 17th - 27th 2025
Atelier 030202, Sfânta Vineri St. 11, Bucharest
with: Ada Anghel, Sorin Badea, Liviu Bulea, Annick Bureaud, Cosmin Ciobanu, Alexandra Costea, Marcus Neustetter, Roxana Nicoarā, Alexandra Sofonea, Sabina Suru, Andrei Tudose, Vitaly Yankovy
A Journey through the Stratas of Space Shelter Earth - B-02
How many protective layers does a space suit need?
How many layers does a shelter need?
Space Shelter Earth - B-02 - Of Nature, Concrete, Cracks and Power in Bucharest was but a mesh of layers, physical and otherwise, some obvious, others hidden, interwoven together, exhibiting stratas of spoken, untold and forgotten stories, like a geological terrain to be deciphered.
SSE-B-02 consisted of several physical elements and a series of short actions.
The first thing that one would notice was a large structure suspended at mid-heighth above a sort of paved floor. Made of bits and pieces cobbled together, this makeshift Vessel evoked a sailing ship or a spacecraft, depending on how you would look at it and on the shadows it casted on the rolls of paper hanging from the ceiling, delimitating and framing the space of the entire installation. Its outer skin was constructed with light wooden sticks onto which orange or white triangles of semi transparent paper and plastic material had been attached here and there, appearing either like sails or protective heatshield tiles. Walking around it, one would discover a triangle made of leather remains of different colors, shapes and sizes or embroidered plastic circles some with vegetal motifs, like portholes or windows. Inside this structure, a semi-transparent white tarpaulin was concealing a whole jumble of crushed cardboard, survival blankets and other plastic junk. Aesthetically in-between Mad Max and Miyazaki, the ambivalence of the Vessel, undecidably coming or going, both powerful and fragile, heavy and light, welcomed any interpretation, whether melancholic or full of hope.
Paved floor and Forensic Map
Beneath the Vessel, neatly aligned, stood a mosaic of rectangular linoleum tiles, interspersed with sheets of black paper, punctuated by a narrow sheet of green one. Laid upside down, the linoleum tiles showed the white streaks of the glue and cement that had held them to the floor, in a building, elsewhere. Carrying traces of this unknown past, they drew another story. For some, this paved floor evoked a satellite image, with the black lines inherent in this type of imagery, where data can be missing. But of what territory? On another celestial body or on Earth? Was it a promise of an elsewhere or the scars of destruction? Or both, as for Liviu Bulea who found the tiles and "tries to understand how something can break and still show a way forward"? For others, it was the shadow of the Vessel above.
In contrast, another marking on the ground, connected to the Paved Floor, was spreading out in front of a collection of green plants, resembling a potted and overgrown garden. Blue and yellow tape stripes were tracing an abstract motif of lines linking closed zones. They were forming a kind of map, a map of something that had been but no longer was, like forensic traces of a dead zone or the chalk marks drawn on the pavement around a deceased body.
The (Non) Garden
Behind this colored floor drawing, cornered in between the room wall and wooden pallets standing like a fence, as if not allowed to spread, was a little jungle full of plants of all sorts. Looking more closely, this garden resembled a vegetal Noah's Ark with some plants that live inside and others outside, ranging from seeds, shoots, grown ones, huge dead ones, but also a case full of carnivorous plants, and even plastic ones with a series of big plastic banana leaves. Some were plants you could have home but lab plants could also be spotted, growing in vitro, sealed in their glass jars. With plants in pots on the shelf of the venue and others on broken cement blocks on the floor, holding rusted metallic tools, with its cacophony of vegetals, it looked like any garden, indoor or outdoor, however carrying references to Romania with its habits of young plants being raised in empty sour cream pots.
What story was telling this non-garden from nowhere? Had it expanded after a catastrophe from which no human remains and was it regenerating its environment? Or was it brought "elsewhere", precisely by humans carrying with them all what makes "nature" in their world? It did not seem to have been sheltered, though. On the Vessel, carefully placed like a nest on a tree, laid a dried plant: a sample of "The Tree of Life" (Ailanthus altissima), a decorative plant coming from China and one of the most invasive in Romania and all over Europe.
On the opposite wall, were displayed elements of the creative process with drawings, an improbable and undefinable object made of multicolored woolen threads enmeshed with little dried grass and branches, a remain of an action outdoor at the Văcărești (a park on the outskirt of Bucharest), and two sets of photographs.
Playing on its location at Atelier 030202, a gallery located in the foyer of the theater Teatrul de Comedie, the entire installation evoked a theater set where the plot would be carried and told by the decors, the objects and the set up; the actors having vanished, remaining as the ghosts of their acts.
This was reinforced by the actions —or "activations" as they were called, conducted by the Team (1), sometimes engaging the participation of the audience. Those short moments of about ten minutes each provided life to the Shelter, revealing the links and echoes between each of its components.
Opening the evening, the first one was the Wakening of the shelter during which Alexandra Sofonea explored the Vessel, from the inside, between its External Skin and Interior Shell, staying on the Paved Floor. Live drawings and images were projected onto the structure by Marcus Neustetter, playing with the shadows of both the woman and the object, revealing and uniting the whole set that became alive, stretching in the entire room but contained and containing at the same time; actual and evanescent, embodying an elsewhere and an enclosure, real and fictional. During the evening, more projections were proposed, sometimes cancelling the Vessel, making it disappear entirely but for some shadows.
One of the common social behaviors, in all societies, is to sit on a chair on the house doorstep, to chat about, and comment on, the neighbor's lives. In Romania, those gossipers are called țațā (pronounced "tsatse"). Sitting on the Forensic Map, in front of the Vessel and the Garden, Team members played țațā, mumbling inarticulated comments but with proper and accurate intonations. This light and highly funny moment was a powerful anthropological gesture reminding us that sitting outside, in front of one's house, is something we are losing in our modern megalopolis and for sure not possible in Space where the outside is deadly. Where do you gossip in a Space Station? Behind the portholes looking at the Earth? Are the space architects planning some sort of benches in their lunar or martian habitats?
Little known, most of the astronauts' golden visor helmets from the Apollo missions were left on the Moon. Anything that could alleviate the weight for taking off was welcome. They are now considered as cultural heritage on our natural satellite. The Visors made out of survival blankets by Vitaly Yankovy were worn like eye masks by Team as well as audience members. What does reality look like through this filter? For Yankovy, "it was an immersive experience without digital electronic technology, being like avatars in a videogame". From outside, looking at people walking in the room, across the installation, it reminded of characters in some baroque movies or of Geordi La Forge for the Star Trek aficionados.
Shelters can be collective or individual. Together with their life support system backpack, carrying everything that is needed to breathe and operate outside the spacecraft, space suits are individual shelters. Apollo astronauts’ ones had twenty one layers of materials to protect them while on the Moon surface. Twenty one layers that had been carefully, patiently, sewn and glued together by the most skilled workers at ILC, a company best known for its bras and girdles Playtex brand. Those workers were women. The SSE-B-02 individual shelter had only five layers. The inner one, close to the body, was the survival blanket, showing its golden shiny side. The last one was a dark grey, with a sort of moiré effect, rubble bag. They were not sewn or attached together in any manner but, folded in two with a hole for the head, just laid on the shoulders, one on top the other. Floating and moving freely around the body, but also hindering its movements, the plastic sheets were producing a delicate rustling sound for the audience at the same time that they were preventing the performer from hearing anything. Worn and activated by Alexandra Sofonea in the semi-darkness of the Theater stage on the first floor, above the Gallery, it provided a moment of suspended time. Beyond a woman in an unusual seductive but cumbersome garment, in between freedom and heaviness, it raised the undecidable nature of what we were looking at. Was it protecting the human inside or highlighting its fragility? Was it alluding to humans in an unknown future or homeless people and refugees carrying all their belongings in layers around their chest? The action ended by the Team covering the performer with cardboard sheets, building a still fragile shelter but one taken care of by the group, breaking the loneliness of the solitary individual, until it was dismantled too, the plastic layers split, shared, then abandoned, and the humans joining together.
To complete the series of actions, sound works (2) created by Vitaly Yankovy were played during some of them. Based on field recordings of activities undertaken by the group during the creative process, they were concrete and electronic music compositions.
From the Empty Space to the Public Unveiling: the Traces of Memory
The Space Shelter Earth project is based on a specific creative process. Starting from scratch, it is a collective creation by a group of artists and scientists interpreting individually and collectively what those three words —space-shelter-earth— could mean. It is a journey from the Empty Space of a venue to the Public Unveiling of what has been created, in this case the installation and its associated events, before being totally dismantled, discarded and recycled.
During ten days, the Team conducted researches, experiments, discussions, exercises; building things that were most of the time destroyed, trashed, ignored, or hidden. There has been a "village" of small cardboard shelters on what became the Forensic map; a ball of tape that had tied them together and to items in the room was at the heart of the Vessel together with other little hidden objects or marks. Space Shelter Earth - B-02 thereby was a succession of constructions followed by destructions, sometimes reprocessed differently, like in an archeological or geological layering. They were echoing other destructions and the necessity to uncover and recover the memory of a shadowed past. SSE-B-02 was the embodied traces of the unseen and the unspoken. It was about sheltering memory, culture, knowledge, immaterial and concrete, through human and non human elements. What it revealed is the strong cultural and anthropological component that we carry with us wherever we go; conscious and unconscious, the hopes and the traumas, the joys and the scars. Through its many possible interpretations, ultimately, it was sheltering the psyche, the culture and the Erlebnis.
Perhaps, the keystone that holded it together, a bit hidden and discreet although quite shiny, suspended to the wall behind the Vessel, was a found copper metallic roll onto which, like on an ancient tablet, words in Romanian related to the notion of shelter had been hammered by Team members.
Text by Annick Bureaud, Paris, October 2025
(1) SSE Bucharest Team was composed of (in alphabetical order): Ada Anghel, Liviu Bulea, Annick Bureaud, Cosmin Ciobanu, Alexandra Costea, Marcus Neustetter, Roxana Nicoarā, Alexandra Sofonea, Sabina Suru, Andrei Tudose, Vitaly Yankovy. Sorin Badea participated at a distance, hosting interviews in his radio programme at Radio Guerilla.
(2) https://soundcloud.com/vyankovyi/sets/space-shelter-earth-bucharest
How many protective layers does a space suit need?
How many layers does a shelter need?
Space Shelter Earth - B-02 - Of Nature, Concrete, Cracks and Power in Bucharest was but a mesh of layers, physical and otherwise, some obvious, others hidden, interwoven together, exhibiting stratas of spoken, untold and forgotten stories, like a geological terrain to be deciphered.
SSE-B-02 consisted of several physical elements and a series of short actions.
The first thing that one would notice was a large structure suspended at mid-heighth above a sort of paved floor. Made of bits and pieces cobbled together, this makeshift Vessel evoked a sailing ship or a spacecraft, depending on how you would look at it and on the shadows it casted on the rolls of paper hanging from the ceiling, delimitating and framing the space of the entire installation. Its outer skin was constructed with light wooden sticks onto which orange or white triangles of semi transparent paper and plastic material had been attached here and there, appearing either like sails or protective heatshield tiles. Walking around it, one would discover a triangle made of leather remains of different colors, shapes and sizes or embroidered plastic circles some with vegetal motifs, like portholes or windows. Inside this structure, a semi-transparent white tarpaulin was concealing a whole jumble of crushed cardboard, survival blankets and other plastic junk. Aesthetically in-between Mad Max and Miyazaki, the ambivalence of the Vessel, undecidably coming or going, both powerful and fragile, heavy and light, welcomed any interpretation, whether melancholic or full of hope.
Paved floor and Forensic Map
Beneath the Vessel, neatly aligned, stood a mosaic of rectangular linoleum tiles, interspersed with sheets of black paper, punctuated by a narrow sheet of green one. Laid upside down, the linoleum tiles showed the white streaks of the glue and cement that had held them to the floor, in a building, elsewhere. Carrying traces of this unknown past, they drew another story. For some, this paved floor evoked a satellite image, with the black lines inherent in this type of imagery, where data can be missing. But of what territory? On another celestial body or on Earth? Was it a promise of an elsewhere or the scars of destruction? Or both, as for Liviu Bulea who found the tiles and "tries to understand how something can break and still show a way forward"? For others, it was the shadow of the Vessel above.
In contrast, another marking on the ground, connected to the Paved Floor, was spreading out in front of a collection of green plants, resembling a potted and overgrown garden. Blue and yellow tape stripes were tracing an abstract motif of lines linking closed zones. They were forming a kind of map, a map of something that had been but no longer was, like forensic traces of a dead zone or the chalk marks drawn on the pavement around a deceased body.
The (Non) Garden
Behind this colored floor drawing, cornered in between the room wall and wooden pallets standing like a fence, as if not allowed to spread, was a little jungle full of plants of all sorts. Looking more closely, this garden resembled a vegetal Noah's Ark with some plants that live inside and others outside, ranging from seeds, shoots, grown ones, huge dead ones, but also a case full of carnivorous plants, and even plastic ones with a series of big plastic banana leaves. Some were plants you could have home but lab plants could also be spotted, growing in vitro, sealed in their glass jars. With plants in pots on the shelf of the venue and others on broken cement blocks on the floor, holding rusted metallic tools, with its cacophony of vegetals, it looked like any garden, indoor or outdoor, however carrying references to Romania with its habits of young plants being raised in empty sour cream pots.
What story was telling this non-garden from nowhere? Had it expanded after a catastrophe from which no human remains and was it regenerating its environment? Or was it brought "elsewhere", precisely by humans carrying with them all what makes "nature" in their world? It did not seem to have been sheltered, though. On the Vessel, carefully placed like a nest on a tree, laid a dried plant: a sample of "The Tree of Life" (Ailanthus altissima), a decorative plant coming from China and one of the most invasive in Romania and all over Europe.
On the opposite wall, were displayed elements of the creative process with drawings, an improbable and undefinable object made of multicolored woolen threads enmeshed with little dried grass and branches, a remain of an action outdoor at the Văcărești (a park on the outskirt of Bucharest), and two sets of photographs.
Playing on its location at Atelier 030202, a gallery located in the foyer of the theater Teatrul de Comedie, the entire installation evoked a theater set where the plot would be carried and told by the decors, the objects and the set up; the actors having vanished, remaining as the ghosts of their acts.
This was reinforced by the actions —or "activations" as they were called, conducted by the Team (1), sometimes engaging the participation of the audience. Those short moments of about ten minutes each provided life to the Shelter, revealing the links and echoes between each of its components.
Opening the evening, the first one was the Wakening of the shelter during which Alexandra Sofonea explored the Vessel, from the inside, between its External Skin and Interior Shell, staying on the Paved Floor. Live drawings and images were projected onto the structure by Marcus Neustetter, playing with the shadows of both the woman and the object, revealing and uniting the whole set that became alive, stretching in the entire room but contained and containing at the same time; actual and evanescent, embodying an elsewhere and an enclosure, real and fictional. During the evening, more projections were proposed, sometimes cancelling the Vessel, making it disappear entirely but for some shadows.
One of the common social behaviors, in all societies, is to sit on a chair on the house doorstep, to chat about, and comment on, the neighbor's lives. In Romania, those gossipers are called țațā (pronounced "tsatse"). Sitting on the Forensic Map, in front of the Vessel and the Garden, Team members played țațā, mumbling inarticulated comments but with proper and accurate intonations. This light and highly funny moment was a powerful anthropological gesture reminding us that sitting outside, in front of one's house, is something we are losing in our modern megalopolis and for sure not possible in Space where the outside is deadly. Where do you gossip in a Space Station? Behind the portholes looking at the Earth? Are the space architects planning some sort of benches in their lunar or martian habitats?
Little known, most of the astronauts' golden visor helmets from the Apollo missions were left on the Moon. Anything that could alleviate the weight for taking off was welcome. They are now considered as cultural heritage on our natural satellite. The Visors made out of survival blankets by Vitaly Yankovy were worn like eye masks by Team as well as audience members. What does reality look like through this filter? For Yankovy, "it was an immersive experience without digital electronic technology, being like avatars in a videogame". From outside, looking at people walking in the room, across the installation, it reminded of characters in some baroque movies or of Geordi La Forge for the Star Trek aficionados.
Shelters can be collective or individual. Together with their life support system backpack, carrying everything that is needed to breathe and operate outside the spacecraft, space suits are individual shelters. Apollo astronauts’ ones had twenty one layers of materials to protect them while on the Moon surface. Twenty one layers that had been carefully, patiently, sewn and glued together by the most skilled workers at ILC, a company best known for its bras and girdles Playtex brand. Those workers were women. The SSE-B-02 individual shelter had only five layers. The inner one, close to the body, was the survival blanket, showing its golden shiny side. The last one was a dark grey, with a sort of moiré effect, rubble bag. They were not sewn or attached together in any manner but, folded in two with a hole for the head, just laid on the shoulders, one on top the other. Floating and moving freely around the body, but also hindering its movements, the plastic sheets were producing a delicate rustling sound for the audience at the same time that they were preventing the performer from hearing anything. Worn and activated by Alexandra Sofonea in the semi-darkness of the Theater stage on the first floor, above the Gallery, it provided a moment of suspended time. Beyond a woman in an unusual seductive but cumbersome garment, in between freedom and heaviness, it raised the undecidable nature of what we were looking at. Was it protecting the human inside or highlighting its fragility? Was it alluding to humans in an unknown future or homeless people and refugees carrying all their belongings in layers around their chest? The action ended by the Team covering the performer with cardboard sheets, building a still fragile shelter but one taken care of by the group, breaking the loneliness of the solitary individual, until it was dismantled too, the plastic layers split, shared, then abandoned, and the humans joining together.
To complete the series of actions, sound works (2) created by Vitaly Yankovy were played during some of them. Based on field recordings of activities undertaken by the group during the creative process, they were concrete and electronic music compositions.
From the Empty Space to the Public Unveiling: the Traces of Memory
The Space Shelter Earth project is based on a specific creative process. Starting from scratch, it is a collective creation by a group of artists and scientists interpreting individually and collectively what those three words —space-shelter-earth— could mean. It is a journey from the Empty Space of a venue to the Public Unveiling of what has been created, in this case the installation and its associated events, before being totally dismantled, discarded and recycled.
During ten days, the Team conducted researches, experiments, discussions, exercises; building things that were most of the time destroyed, trashed, ignored, or hidden. There has been a "village" of small cardboard shelters on what became the Forensic map; a ball of tape that had tied them together and to items in the room was at the heart of the Vessel together with other little hidden objects or marks. Space Shelter Earth - B-02 thereby was a succession of constructions followed by destructions, sometimes reprocessed differently, like in an archeological or geological layering. They were echoing other destructions and the necessity to uncover and recover the memory of a shadowed past. SSE-B-02 was the embodied traces of the unseen and the unspoken. It was about sheltering memory, culture, knowledge, immaterial and concrete, through human and non human elements. What it revealed is the strong cultural and anthropological component that we carry with us wherever we go; conscious and unconscious, the hopes and the traumas, the joys and the scars. Through its many possible interpretations, ultimately, it was sheltering the psyche, the culture and the Erlebnis.
Perhaps, the keystone that holded it together, a bit hidden and discreet although quite shiny, suspended to the wall behind the Vessel, was a found copper metallic roll onto which, like on an ancient tablet, words in Romanian related to the notion of shelter had been hammered by Team members.
Text by Annick Bureaud, Paris, October 2025
(1) SSE Bucharest Team was composed of (in alphabetical order): Ada Anghel, Liviu Bulea, Annick Bureaud, Cosmin Ciobanu, Alexandra Costea, Marcus Neustetter, Roxana Nicoarā, Alexandra Sofonea, Sabina Suru, Andrei Tudose, Vitaly Yankovy. Sorin Badea participated at a distance, hosting interviews in his radio programme at Radio Guerilla.
(2) https://soundcloud.com/vyankovyi/sets/space-shelter-earth-bucharest
THE RESEARCH JOURNEY
