I’ve left artistic education in 2016 and navigated it before that with a preference for performative practices and institutional critique. The true test of faith happened outside of institutional walls.
When I finished my education I decided to start a new chapter of my practice on a small scale.
Practicalities briefly got in the way. But rather than let them I decided to incorporate them.
My approach:
Take a side job.
Reflect on what that side job means for you as an artist.
What leads to you needing it?
What does it (full)fill, except for just your fridge?
How much free time does it allow?
Do you remain an artist while performing a job-related task?
Are you willing to give up on being an artist altogether?
And what job fits you?
What do you have access to based on your linguistic limitations?
How do your artist colleagues look at you when you have a side job?
Do they also have side jobs?
And isn’t all this coming from increased insecurity in the labor market?
Isn’t this the fruit of budget cuts within the arts?
And who else is interested in all this?
What about the others, working alongside you?
What is their perception of their jobs?
How does one interpret, through their body and the body of others, the above questions?
All these inquiries added up to my current field of interest. A situation that I insert myself in leads to an acknowledgment of structures, trying to understand them, most of the time to challenge them.
There´s an added layer, as the jury of the Sybren Hellinga prize stated as they didn´t award me:
“Alina Lupu is fighting for a fairer world in her work. She consistently examines the ways in which conditions are set for participating in the economy, or how the economy is shaped, and who is thereby included or excluded, and as a consequence risks marginalization. These are topics of great importance for workers determination at a time when direct transactions seem to become more accessible, but in reality also ever more elusive.”