A Trace Of You

In the standardised grey apartment blocks of Communist Romania, potted plants served as subtle acts of resistance, bringing warmth, colour, and life to otherwise austere and impersonal spaces. They were small gestures of individuality, a quiet way to assert presence and humanity within a constrained environment. This work engages with that history through a photograph taken during the Communist era, discovered in an antique store. Three men pose playfully with a potted plant, treating it as if it were a family member or a pet. Using the chlorophyll printing process, the photograph is transferred directly onto living leaves collected from the very apartment buildings where such plants had once stood, quietly inhabiting windowsills, tables, and corners of daily life. This creates a dialogue between medium and subject: a plant reproducing itself through the traces of human memory. Not all prints endure fully. These imperfections evoke the erosion of memory, the fragility of lived experience, and the gradual fading of historical moments. The work reflects on domestic life, resilience, and temporality, and meditates on the ways both lives and histories persist only in delicate, fragmentary traces.