ReFACEREA: Victoria Zidaru

Refacerea (“remaking”) presents the work of Victoria Zidaru, a Romanian artist whose four-decade-long practice explores ritual and spirituality, through natural materials. The title signals both a gesture and a method: a resilient practice of remaking, in which fractures become sites of renewal and continuity. Every element: plants, handwoven textiles, and inscribed words, are deliberately considered, and olfactory components are incorporated to heighten presence and attention, shaping a fully embodied sensory experience.

The installation unfolds as a living organism. Towering columns of hay—some over seven meters—rise through the space, acting as conduits of energy, while others are braided into sculptural forms. Herbs release delicate scents; inscribed words echo like mantras. The contrast between the white of handwoven cloth and the darker tones of hay underscores the visual and haptic power of juxtaposed textures and varying thicknesses of weave. Structure, weight, and rhythm emerge from meticulous control of materials, producing a poise and archetypal beauty that govern the space.

For Zidaru, resilience is a practice: turning constraints, material, social, and personal, into structured, meaningful form. Born in Liteni, Bucovina, and marked by her father’s political imprisonment under communism in the late fifties, she forged an early appreciation for plants and the ‘natural’ world as a means to find solace and as a medium of contemplation. This relationship evolved into a symbolic vocabulary of healing, where herbs, textiles, and scent are ritualized through acts of weaving, binding, inscribing, and releasing olfactory traces. Her practice draws equally on Bucovina’s ritual traditions and Christian mystical theology, Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas, the greening force of divine vitality, and Herrade de Landsberg’s Hortus Deliciarum, where botanical imagery embodies wisdom and interconnection. Within this framework, sage and fennel act as purifiers, handwoven cloth becomes a vessel of continuity, linking past traditions with present practice and inscribed words establish rhythm and attention. Resilience emerges as a process of care, repetition, and transformation, where vulnerability is reorganized into endurance.

Against the backdrop of humanitarian crises, ecological unraveling, and the estrangements of technological speed, resilience emerges as a pressing and unsettled question: how do we reorganize and endure? In moments of rupture, patterns of shared memory and symbolic structures resurface, offering frameworks through which both self and community may find orientation. Resilience is thus inseparable from the relational networks in which it is enacted, not only a personal strategy, but a process embedded in rituals, rhythms, and the consciousness of a wider collective.