Solarium. The Forever Garden 

A greenhouse in the dark

Solarium is the conclusion of three years of doctoral studies on topics such as installation and archives. At the same time, Solarium. The Forever Garden brings to fruition several themes that are central to Andreea Medar’s practice. She builds from successive strata of references and meaning an open space which is permanently transforming. A place where the dialectic of the dynamic between the three dimensional reality of the installation / exhibition and the emotional and concrete realities of a place of origin and belonging allow for multiple nuances and directions.

The installation is a mobile garden, open in several directions, in antithesis with a site-specific intervention: it retraces, regardless of place or time the protective space of an extended shelter. Such a space is defined primarily as a place of safety, which forms / pre-forms the experience of all other spaces, as it re-shapes and re-sizes the relationship with the outside everyday – always tensioned by threats such as the loss of tradition, the dissolution of a community, the overwriting and loss of identity.

The open garden therefore becomes a metaphor for an enclosed space, and this projection is possible because the recollection of a past tense, where the image is formed in the synthesis between the immemorial and the memory (Gaston Bachelard, Poetica spațiului, Paralela 45, 2003). The function of this space grows to contain both a past that is compressed and a future that is dystopian.

Even if the very substance of the fluorescent plastic plants, and their existence which unravels between dematerialized transparency and darkness are contrary to the fertility and vitality they evoke, Solarium is a recalling, a conservation of origin and heritage that goes beyond the emotion and allows for distance and for lectures in alternative, often surprisingly convergent ways – reveries of dissolution and persistence. 

Mălina Ionescu