Suzana Dan

Suzana Dan: “Why do I keep these object in my life?”

She is one of the widely known plastic artists of Romania, being the originator of The White Nights of Galleries, a steadily growing event ever since 2007. For the DespreLocuire [OnDwelling] exhibition, Suzana Dan has proposed a debate on our relationship with the sometimes invisible objects surrounding us.

Vlad Odobescu: What sort of experience do you propose to visitors?

Suzana Dan: I’m going to propose a personal experience, i.e., my own relationship with those “unneeded” objects we tend to pile up and which take more or less room from our living or even work space.

How did you come up with this solution?

It was my response to a challenge that I gladly accepted, but which proved in the end to be more comprehensive than I thought and which was something more demanding than lying on a shrink coach. Perhaps it happened because once I started looking for and collecting them from all around the house, I found some that may have given a proper answer to the question: “Why do I keep these objects in my life”? Otherwise, I would have simply collect and display them in the exhibition, which would have had an exotic content, no doubt. But I chose instead to justify why they are stuck with me, and a short answer would be: because they are cute. This cuteness is also accounted for in the text attached to this tiny project.

What do you think a good place for living in should look like?

I perceive it as a place that contains the ‘basics’. So, it should be a cell endowed with a work space, a leisure space, a space for sleeping, for storing things so that they will not fall down and crack your head, a space for preparing your food, a space that provides cleanness of living, and last but not least (or it should be first and foremost) one generously lit and surrounded by nature, much-much nature. For me, this is a good place for living in.

An ideal place …. Now, we step into that realm in which we dream castles. When I was a little girl, I dreamed of owning a palace that would look exactly like the Brașov railway station. The main hall, in my dreams, was the ball room and I would see myself climbing down all those steps dressed up in an awful baroque crinoline, and outside on the platform zone, there was a vast lawn with a swan lake in the middle. Each person has his or her dream palace …. Of course, once I grew up I became wiser, so, I’d rather have a good place for living in than a palace, no matter how magnificent it looks like. Even in a dream, because not by a long shot could I own the Brașov station. I believe that deep down each of us thinks that just a ‘room of one’s own’ is good enough, if there we can reconnect with our own selves and put our own lives in order to face the outside ‘storms’.