RADU CARNARIU: Freedom / Imponderabil

Freedom is an oversized straitjacket sewn from old school maps recovered from the archive of the “Octav Băncilă” National College of Art in Iași. Cartography, language of borders, control, and orientation, becomes a symbolic instrument of oppression. The borders cling to the body, territorializing it with a prêt-à-porter constraint. The fragility of paper contradicts the clinical rigidity of the form. Control appears total, yet the material is vulnerable, like a fragile truth, like a borrowed certainty. Suspended, the straitjacket seems to float, like a satellite drifting between worlds, in a black space constellated with coins: an accounting sky suggesting that freedom is always negotiated between territories, rules, and invisible costs. Installed in Departures, just before the ritual of security control, the work does not ask whether we are free, but how much freedom costs, how long it lasts, and who controls it.

Next to it, Imponderable evokes the symbolism of flight through a paradox. The balloon stuck to the ceiling, usually associated with lightness and ascent, is handcrafted from barbed wire, a material of interdiction and wounding. The hanging thread is a tricolour ribbon, a sign of national identity which, in an era of polarization and disinformation, can completely shift its meaning.

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