Râsu'-plânsu' Interventions

Râsu′-plânsu′ Interventions expands Łuczakowska’s photobook into a living, participatory installation exploring how everyday interventions in Romanian housing express agency, belonging and resistance through an evolving archive of readers transformations.

Gallery: Centrul de Resurse în Fotografie, Bucuresti; Artist: Aga Łuczakowska; Curator: Daria Radu

Râsu′-plânsu′ Interventions is a project that expands the photographic book Râsu′-plânsu′ into a participatory and evolving installation, that treats the photobook as a living structure to be inhabited, modified and reimagined.

The project originates from Aga Łuczakowska′s research into the transformations of Romanian housing after Nicolae Ceaușescu′s systematisation programme. Relocated into standardised apartment blocks, residents responded by enclosing balconies, claiming parking spaces, personalising entrances,
planting gardens between buildings and creating informal boundaries. These everyday interventions became expressions of agency, belonging and resistance.

During the production of the book, the artist experienced a similar tension between intention and imposed form. Thus, she began intervening directly in a printed copy through drawing, collage, insertion of new materials, annotations, photographs, and found objects. This led to the evolving archive of interventions made byboth invited artists and readers who are encouraged to transform their own copies of the book. The exhibition therefore functions simultaneously as a photographic presentation, an archive and a platform for participation, all centering the photobook.

Further extending this intervention, the mesh prints borrow the visual language of street banners and transform Aga′s images into a painterly experience when observing them up-close. At the same time, the metal sheet used as a backdrop for the images of the interventions expands the usage of street-foundmaterials.