The New Empire

The New Empire is an ongoing visual exploration of our unnatural relationship to nature. It navigates the uneasy space where control, care and damage coexist.

Started in 2017, initially as a personal exploration of her own relationship with Nature and Home, Cîrlig’s journey evolved into a broader inquiry into humanity’s bizarre connection with the Earth, looking at themes like: the concept of wilderness and the ways we interact with nature, the sensuality of flowers, science and research, the possibility of plant-trash kinship.

Cîrlig embarked on a poetic quest, documenting national parks, botanical gardens, forests and beaches, the resilience of plants to adapt and fight for survival amidst plastic waste, as well as scientists struggling to slow down the decline of the biosphere. Her documentary approach gradually shifted, incorporating apocalyptic landscapes and fantastical flowers, blurring the line between fact and fiction. While engaging with themes central to science fiction - environmental crisis, control, colonization, and the Anthropocene - Cîrlig’s images reflect the unsettling realities and essential questions shaping our present world, while exploring speculative futures of space exploration and nature’s magical and untapped power. 

Should the Earth become inhospitable to human life, might plants evolve and mutate to reclaim it, restoring humanity to its rightful place within the vast scale of the universe? Faced with imminent extinction, will humans seek new spaces to conquer, inhabit, and tame? Does humanity’s imperial mindset toward Earth and future worlds ultimately lead to its downfall? 

Welcome to what might be. Welcome to The New Empire.

(from curatorial text written by Julie Bonzon for The New Empire exhibition in Bucharest)

The New Empire project has been presented in 2025 at the Paris Photo Fair, in the Voices section, curated by Devika Singh, and at the Noorderlicht Biennale-Machine Entanglements. Past exhibitions include: solo show with Anca Poterasu gallery curated by Julie Bonzon (2024), Timișoara at the Art Encounters- My Rhino is Not A Myth Biennale, curated by Adrian Notz (2023), Creative Europe Forum (Paris, 2023), Nature Future European travelling exhibition (Cologne, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Berlin, Prague, 2022-2023), Kommunale Galerie- Crossing the Same Circumstance exhibition (Berlin, 2021).