Irina Botea Bucan

Irina Botea Bucan has been developing a gardener-artist-educator-researcher methodology that consistently seeks to question dominant socio-political ideas and centralises non-human and human agency as a vehicle for meaning. Performance, reenactment, simulated auditions, elements of direct cinema and cinéma vérité are combined in her artistic approach. Within what she calls a ‘roommate filmmaking process’ participants are encouraged to negotiate a working structure that proposes equality for everyone involved. Choosing to act in diverse contexts, such as: academic institutions, alternative galleries, gardens, museums, art biennials, film festivals and generic community centres; she is currently focusing on the decentralisation of cultural discourses and the possibility of sustaining creative differentiation that arguably exists outside of a dominant hegemonic system of values and critique. Since 2013, she has been collaborating with Jon Dean, developing workshops, films and installations, as well as a garden and residency space called ‘Casa Radesti’. Currently she is faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths University in London titled ‘Unfinishing the Cultural Houses’.