eduardpopescu

WORKSHOP

The Fakeology Workshop, curated by Eduard Popescu and Emma Cortesi, titled Beautiful Liar: Learning to Tell Lies, will be featured at the INSEDIAMENTI Festival on June 7–8, 2025.

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EXHIBITION

Opening on May 30, 2025, the exhibition Le formule magiche funzionano solo se pronunciate ad alta voce?, curated by Caterina Benvegnù and Stefania Schiavon, showcases the research of the resident artists at MAC Artist Studios.

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WORKSHOP

The Fakeology Workshop, curated by Eduard Popescu and Emma Cortesi, titled Beautiful Liar: Learning to Tell Lies, will be featured at MAC studi d’artista on April 11, 2025.

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PERFORMANCE

The performance The Sweetest Hangover by the collective Valeria Sola will be presented as the outcome of a one-week residency, part of the third edition of MATCH (SSS...), curated by Jacopo Miliani and Stefania Rispoli, at the Museo del Novecento in Florence on February 15, 2025.

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Last Updated 16.06.2025

EDUARD POPESCU

At the core of my work is the delicate attempt to deconstruct the shame surrounding my migration and its lasting consequences. My artistic practice is a composite of performances, actions, and video—a journey nourished by memory.

I regard visual art as a form of return: through words and images, I trace a symbolic path back home, examining the forces that drove me to leave and the transformations that followed. My narrative becomes a shared terrain, inviting reflection on the intersection between individual experience and collective history.

Research, writing, and bodily movement are the tools that animate my practice, giving shape to works presented in both live and visual forms, including performances, photographic series, and video pieces.

CONTACT
Eduard Popescu
eduardpopescuinfo@gmail.com
@eduardpopesqu

+39 3396914654

SELECTED WORKS COLLABORATIONS

SELECTED WORKS

preliminary remarks

I regard visual art as a space of inquiry, a medium through which we can examine our genealogies and transform the personal into the collective. With this awareness, in 2022, I started a research project exploring ways to translate my experiences of migration into video, imagery, and performance. My focus centers on the often-invisible laboring bodies that uphold the cleanliness and functionality of our environments—bodies whose very invisibility sustains the seamless functioning of a world shaped by neoliberal economies.

Understanding knowledge as situated requires acknowledging that research and thought emerge from, and are embedded within, the web of relationships that constitute the multiple worlds we inhabit and interrogate. Reflecting on Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges”—as developed in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1989)—my work challenges the disembodied objectivity typical of dominant academic paradigms. Instead, my research is rooted in a feminist epistemology that embraces partiality and embodiment.

What I seek to articulate begins from a lived reality that directly implicates me. Therefore, I’d like to specify that domestic labor is not merely a subject of investigation; it is formative of my social position and class identity. It is both the origin and the material of my inquiry.

I will transform your bite into a tool to speak my truth
Sterling silver
2025

When the question “Who am I?” turns into “How much am I worth?”, when every procedure of oneself is measured through the gaze of others and even pronouncing one’s name means having to tell one’s origins, then the desire to escape from the present becomes almost inevitable.

“I will transform your bite into a tool to speak my truth”, is a project conducted in direct dialogue with the mother, a domestic worker. An exploration of the silencing force that pushes one to conform: to speak correctly, adopt refined language, construct impeccable sentences, deny one’s class roots, and make domestic work invisible.

I will transform your bite into a tool to speak my truth - installation view (frontal) - Le formule magiche funzionano solo se pronunciate ad alta voce? curated by Caterina Benvegnù and Stefania Schiavon, Padova, Italy

From Bram Stoker to today, the association between the Romanian territory and stories of vampires and ghosts has become almost automatic. This tendency then turns into a suggestion, an imaginative pretext to conceive a tool, a weapon, a form of protection against the transformations we put in place to escape reality.

Thus, arises the urge to envision oneself in the mother’s bite, as a way to gather the strength to finally tell one's story.

I will transform your bite into a tool to speak my truth - installation view (side) - Le formule magiche funzionano solo se pronunciate ad alta voce? curated by Caterina Benvegnù and Stefania Schiavon, Padova 2025.

I will transform your bite into a tool to speak my truth (Process documentation), 2025.

Thanks to: Emma Cortesi, Enrico Cortesi, Giovanni Zulian

produced by: MAC Studi d’Artista, Progetto Giovani comune di Padova

STARE NEL MORSO DELLA CURA.
Lavoro domestico e sperimentazione artistica
March 2025

(WITHIN THE BITE OF CARE. Domestic Work and Artistic Research)

BA thesis

“STARE NEL MORSO DELLA CURA. Lavoro domestico e sperimentazione artistica”, provides a comprehensive analysis of the political, ethical, and philosophical implications surrounding domestic and care work, examining its significance and visibility within the contemporary artistic and performative fields. Through an intersectional lens, the study emphasizes the political struggles tied to domestic and care labor, aiming to trace a trajectory that, through artistic practices, underscores the essentiality of care work.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought up the urgency to rethink political and ethical forms centered on care, as well as highlighting the inability to protect vulnerable bodies, bringing to the fore the invisibility of the work done by millions of women and racialized people to keep the world clean and functioning.
In the post-pandemic scenario, innumerable artistic and cultural institutions—museums, festivals, and biennials—have increasingly placed the concept of care at the center of their reviews, public programs, residencies, and exhibitions, transforming it into a keyword. However, this attention has often taken on a romanticizing perspective, and in a short time, the reflection on care has lost its centrality. For this reason, I have chosen to start a discourse on care without reducing it to a simple metaphor.

From the Latin, cūra, refers to the forms of care and vigilance towards all living forms and their continuous change.
In the English language, the expression take care is commonly used to say goodbye, but, as the philosopher Virginia Held observes, in pronouncing it, we are implicitly stating: “Take care of yourself, because I care about you.” This recognition reveals the network of interdependence, discussed by the American philosopher Joan Tronto, that binds us and that we often tend to take for granted.
Therefore, in reflecting on care, it is essential to affirm that the “crusades of conquest” of some are made possible by the work of marginalized subjectivities. For this reason, thinking and acting with care requires redefining and moving the boundaries of morality, including divergent voices and perspectives.
With this awareness, I have chosen to activate a discourse that highlights the conditions of domestic and care work, still underpaid, taken for granted, and systematically made invisible in the normative configuration of the reality we inhabit.

In my research, I analyze artistic and performative experimentation, selecting examples that, starting from a struggle within their narratives, have successfully brought domestic tasks to the forefront, removing them from the blind spot.

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Try not to cry laughing
Performative reading
30’
2024

“Try Not to Cry Laughing” is a performative reading in which writing becomes a tool to reflect on the limits of language and on failure as a form of resistance. The text plays with the Italian language from the perspective of a young non-Italian artist.

Try not to cry-laugh at Stars are Blind, the Iuav degree show at Bocciofila S. Sebastiano, Venice, 2024.

In response to the question, “Am I speaking to you, or are the voices I’ve encountered speaking?”, memory triggers a disordered stream of thoughts that takes shape as a fragmented attempt at self-narration.
This narration unfolds through the reassembly of images and texts gathered from walls, T-shirts, billboards, messages, songs, tickets, and newspapers, in an attempt to form a letter without a recipient.

Repetition, mimicry, and plagiarism become the methods by which discourse emerges, one that resists the accelerated flow of time and invites us to embrace the unfinished nature of processes and the radical possibility of not having to assert ourselves.

Try not to cry-laugh at Stars are Blind, the Iuav degree show at Bocciofila S. Sebastiano, Venice, 2024.

Try not to cry-laugh (Process documentation), 2024

Thanks to: Valeria Sola collective, Jacopo Miliani

what connects us?
Photographic series
21x14,8 cm
2022 -2023

What happens when you lose your job?

what connects us?, 21x14,8 cm, Italy, 2022 -2023.

Starting from the question “What is the impact of care work on migrant bodies?”, I visited strangers’ homes, art gallery bathrooms, and places of different nature, pretending to be a cleaner: I washed, rinsed, and tidied spaces that did not belong to me.

Care work, deeply rooted in my personal and family history, has been a source of shame for many years. Deconstructing this feeling, “What connects us?” is an attempt to reconnect with a job that has guaranteed my livelihood for years.

“What connects us” is a collection of photographs taken secretly in the places I have cleaned.

what connects us?, 21x14,8 cm, Italy, 2022 -2023.

Thanks to: Alchemilla43

L’appuntamento
ShortFilm
20’
2023

“L’appuntamento” is a video work that documents the act of cleaning the bathroom in the first house my mother ever cleaned upon arriving in Italy. As part of a broader research on caregiving, this piece represents my attempt to situate myself within a lineage of domestic labor and to reflect on the physical and emotional impact such work has on the bodies of those who perform it.

Still from “L’appuntamento”, 2023

I made a conscious choice to re-enter a space whose care and maintenance sustained me for years, reclaiming it through the act of cleaning and filming. The title, L’appuntamento (The Appointment), refers to a reunion between my mother and her former employers—an encounter that took place while I was inside, silently scrubbing and documenting.

What may appear to be a simple record of a cleaning routine is, in fact, a quiet confrontation with a reality I have long kept at a distance, and am only now beginning to uncover.

Short film showcased at the end-of-course exhibition “Buccia Vulnerabile”, Ca’ Tron, Venice, 2024.

Thanks to: Mariana Popescu, Fosco Lucini, Luca Trevisani

That the bottoms of your feet become ears
video
2023

We are often captives of time’s relentless current. “That the bottoms of your feet become ears”, it’s an invitation to pause and to listen with the entire body.
A central figure in the evolution of post-war experimental and electronic music, Pauline Oliveros offers a voice that resonates ever more urgently in an age where time burns and reality trembles. Her words urge us toward slowness, toward silence, and toward the radical act of deep listening.

Still from “That the bottoms of your feet become ears”, 2023

Vulnerability and permeability unfold in the interplay between bodies and the environments they move through: the foot becomes an ear, the ear a shell, the rock grows arms, and the body transforms into a listening system—attuned, porous, and alive.

Short film showcased at the end-of-course exhibition “13 x 9 + 64”, curated by Daniele Zoico, Ca’ Tron, Venice, 2024.

Thanks to: Roberto Cicala, Marta de Lorenzi, Daniele Zoico, Eleonora Bonino

13 days: Walking home
Performance
2021

“13 Days: Walking home” retraces a journey that began more than 15 years ago.
A thirteen-day walk would take me back to the place I left unknowingly: my birthplace.

Thirteen days to experience a feeling and understand what drives an individual to leave their home. The pattern of a scarf passed down for generations is taken up and placed on the carpet.

13 days: Walking home, Ossessione, endcourse exhibition curated by Diego Tonus and Daniele Zoico, Magazzini Ligabue, Venice, 2021.

Walking on this design represents a direct connection to my origins.
The carpet is a display but also a home. I ask this object to take me home.

13 days: Walking home, (Process Documentation), 2021.

13 days: Walking home, Ossessione, endcourse exhibition curated by Diego Tonus and Daniele Zoico, Magazzini Ligabue, Venice, 2021.

Thanks to: Diego Tonus