STRATA|B is a photo-text work that approaches several streets of old Bucharest as a living, constantly eroding manuscript. The project is grounded in research carried out more than a decade ago. I photographed fragments of posters, graffiti, layers of glue, paint, and decay, then processed each image through an algorithm that extracts colour palettes and verbal metadata. From this process emerge the project’s core elements: word-landscapes that resemble involuntary Dada poems.
These texts do not function as captions but as translation devices between the photographed walls and the abstract colour grids derived from them. They retain residues of place, time, and systemic language, rearranged into new, often absurd constellations of meaning.
The work includes excerpts from the photobook: documentary photographs, algorithm-generated colour grids, and pages of chance-poems. Together, they form a kind of mural archaeology—preserving what is usually erased, scraped off, or painted over. The project asks how urban traces are translated, who remains legible in the city, and what disappears beneath the next layer of fresh plaster. The photographed walls, as recorded and interpreted here, now exist only as archive and memory.
The project is part of the subtheme Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.
Author
Omnia Photo
OMNIA PHOTO is a Romanian cultural association that also operates as a publishing house specializing in contemporary photography and experimental visual art albums. Its primary mission is to promote visual arts, with a particular emphasis on both contemporary and historical photography. The association's most recent photo book, “Fântânile Olteniei MMXVII / The Water Wells of Oltenia MMXVII,” received recognition at Romanian Visual Awards 2024.
Author
Cristina Irian
Cristina IRIAN is a research-based artist, visual arts researcher, and curator who works with collections, photographic archives, and multimedia materials. She studied sociology (Trento & Regensburg), visual anthropology (Bucharest & Perugia), and holds a Ph.D. in visual arts from UNARTE Bucharest.
Her artistic practice, guided by the motto “No one left behind”, focuses on objects of memory, integrating photographic material into contemporary art pieces. Cristina has participated in over 50 exhibitions in Romania and abroad and is a member of Romanian Fine Arts Union and Futures, European Photography Platform. As part of her experimental endeavours in visual research and new technologies, she published the photo book „STRATA / B” (Omnia Photo, 2020, https://omnia.photo/2022/02/23/cristina-irian-stratab-ebook/).
Subsequent experiments conducted between 2016 and 2020 resulted in two object-books - “The Seven Poems of Cristina Irian” (available on Versopolis, Poetry Expo 2024) and “The Eighth Poem of Cristina Irian” - created in collaboration with artist Mircea Bochiș.
