International Cultural Exchange Program in Urban Art
June - September 2025 | 5 European cities
Artists from Romania and the Republic of Moldova
How real is REAL?
This is the question that traveled across Europe this summer and autumn, together with eight artists selected by the buchARTest Association, within the project Artist on the Go – a pilot cultural exchange program dedicated to urban art, co-funded by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Program.
The pilot project brings together both emerging and established artists from Romania and the Republic of Moldova, who participated in five landmark urban art festivals, creating a platform for artistic mobility and intercultural dialogue—where words themselves become art. The theme of this edition, “How real is REAL?”, explores the power of text in a world dominated by visual manipulation, fake news, and fragmented realities. From linguistic games to typographic works, the artists created murals, installations, and street interventions that innovatively reframe context by embedding “false friends” between Romanian and the languages of the partner countries. Examples include the word “NU” (Romanian: no; Dutch: now), or “TOT” (Romanian: whole; German: dead). Through this interplay, the project brings a new semantic and cultural dimension to mural art, showing how linguistic shifts can become powerful tools of artivism.
ToT ToT ToT
Alex Baciu
The work explores a linguistic and philosophical paradox through the word “TOT”. A term that in Romanian means “whole”, a continuous present; in German, “death,” an absolute end. This linguistic overlap becomes the basis for a visual and philosophical dialogue: between life and death, presence and absence. “TOT” turns into an image, a symbol beyond language or culture. Water becomes the central element: both giver and eraser of life. The word is stripped to its essence, becoming universal through form. A single term that holds all we are, all we lose, and all that remains.
A PACE OF PEACE
OCU
The work shows menstrual blood as a political climate, a ritual intelligence, and a planetary act. It challenges inherited hierarchies of purity and control by returning to one of the body’s most ancient and misunderstood rhythms. Blood is not violence, but continuity. It flows instead of erupts, offering rhythm over silence, connection over control. By centering the menstrual cycle, the piece challenges hierarchies of purity and domination, proposing peace not as absence, but as a living pace (“pace” In romanian = “peace”) the body remembers. And so the work becomes a planetary proposal: To trust again in rhythm. To reclaim the act of bleeding, not as harm, but as memory, as voice. To remember that peace is not an absence, but a rhythm the body already knows. To imagine a world that flows like a cycle, not bleeds like a wound.
DECEPTIVE REALITY
Delia Cîrstea & Roper
The work is composed of three interconnected pieces that, both abstractly and figuratively, confronts the impact of social media and mass media in distorting our perception of reality. It visually explores the effects of false information and media manipulation, which create a world where the appearance of truth is misleading, and authentic reality becomes difficult to recognize. Together, the works invite viewers to a critical reflection on truth and on the way they consume daily information.
DECEPTIVE REALITY
Delia Cîrstea & Roper
The work is composed of three interconnected pieces that, both abstractly and figuratively, confronts the impact of social media and mass media in distorting our perception of reality. It visually explores the effects of false information and media manipulation, which create a world where the appearance of truth is misleading, and authentic reality becomes difficult to recognize. Together, the works invite viewers to a critical reflection on truth and on the way they consume daily information.
DECEPTIVE REALITY
Delia Cîrstea & Roper
The work is composed of three interconnected pieces that, both abstractly and figuratively, confronts the impact of social media and mass media in distorting our perception of reality. It visually explores the effects of false information and media manipulation, which create a world where the appearance of truth is misleading, and authentic reality becomes difficult to recognize. Together, the works invite viewers to a critical reflection on truth and on the way they consume daily information.
PERSONA
Dmitri Potapov
The work begins with a simple idea: that each of us wears a mask, a façade, a role. “PERSONA” speaks about the tension between the image we present to the world and the reality we carry inside. Here, the word “PERSONA” cuts through the portrait, both literally and conceptually, and it divides the image. The face is fragmented by letters, reflecting how we only ever see parts of one another. The self becomes layered, edited, performed. At the center, a hand offers a mask. It is not hiding, it is revealing. A gesture of choice, of courage. To hold the mask means to acknowledge it. To take it off means to risk being seen. The mask looks almost alive, because our roles often become hard to separate from who we truly are. “PERSONA” does not provide an answer but invites for reflection. About ourselves, about others, about truth, and about the wall.
THE THREE PHASES OF FREEDOM
Alex Baciu
Clouds, like people, are never still. For this artwork in particular, the cloud shifts through three states: as itself, as a bird, and finally as a flag. Each form embodies a stage of freedom. The bird with its plunging gaze over the world, the flag as the symbol of a free state, and the cloud as the most fragile, interchangeable presence, able to appear and vanish, to cry, to brighten, to darken. It is an immaterial mirror of human emotion. Within these transformations lies a question of perception: do we see a cloud, a bird, a flag, or the freedom we long to project onto them? Between distortion and recognition, symbol and sentiment, the work asks: How real is REAL?
WORDS THAT BURN
Denis Nanciu
Words to sculptural presences. Cut from metal, marked by fire, polished, and oxidized. Each piece is both a fragment of poetry and a manifesto, addressing fragility, resilience, and social justice. They do not whisper, they insist. Short and sharp messages that pierce the noise of everyday life: Trust Rust speaks of the erosion of trust and the fragility of human bonds; NO / NU becomes a universal language of refusal and resistance; BAN POVERTY transforms the human silhouette into a space of protest, demanding dignity and equality. The choice of burnt and corroded metal is deliberate. It speaks of values under pressure, of truths that endure even when worn down by time. The words are heavy, material, persistent, signs that cannot be ignored. The series is at once poetic and political: an invitation to look, to reflect, and to recognize that, once embodied in matter, words can carry the weight of memory and change.
STOLEN HELMET
IRLO
The work presents the stolen Geto-Dacian Golden Helmet of Coțofenești, as an icon, a wound, and a question of belonging. Once a treasure of the ancestors, it now circulates as a shadow of Romania, provoking international disputes and silences alike. The Dacian wolf, once a weapon and a banner, now wanders the world as a seeker. Not of conquest, but of what was lost. The mural transforms pursuit into ritual, asking whether art can recover what history erased. Between theft and memory, between absence and reappearance, the work stages a dialogue on cultural survival. This is the second chapter in a series about stolen heritage, where images do not accuse but insist: that what was taken still breathes through symbol, through story, through vision.
WORDS OF FIRE AND CLAY
Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu
The work inscribes words not on paper, but in matter. Clay molded. Heat burned. Above 1000 degrees, carried by fire into permanence. Fragile as any shard that can break, yet enduring as long as no hand chooses to destroy it, each phrase becomes both object and sign. A tension between fragility and weight, between ephemerality and permanence. The fragments talk about wars, genocides, broken promises, borders drawn and redrawn. Poetry touches politics, memory collides with silence. Installed on the walls of Helsinki, these ceramic inscriptions punctuate daily life with questions rather than answers. Multiple languages. Romanian, English and Finnish layering the city into a palimpsest of voices. Words glazed by fire become witnesses: ‘THE SKY IS A WITNESS’, ‘BORDERS ARE MAN MADE, SO IS (IN)JUSTICE’,. The city listens to its walls. Fragile objects, permanent signs: they cannot force agreement, but they demand attention.
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Partner organizations
This project is cofinanced by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Programme - a funding framework for cultural projects intended for the international environment. The Romanian Cultural Institute cannot be held responsible for the content of this material.