Distance is the premise of correspondence and it has been a big subject and obstacle in the lives of me and my colleague. Firstly a gap year between high school and university for me, me choosing another university far away from his choice, then him finishing earlier and moving to France. So the only solution was to keep in touch over the marvelous internet. I got lucky when I was accepted for the Erasmus Exchange and spent my second-to-last semester studying in the Netherlands, which is quite a short distance away from France, and Paris, where my friend move to in the summer of 2019. Therefore a meeting would be impossible to miss. It is interesting to think of this as a culminating point in any sort of correspondence, be it ours or somebody else's. After a long time of exchanging words, thoughts, pictures over a great distance, we finally managed to see face-to-face and embrace each other. That happened in late October of 2019.
What resulted in those few days took the form of a little art project we elaborated together.  Now as we look back on it, what we managed to do stands as a much more tangible memory of those days spent together, reunited, a result of that exchange of ideas that we kept up, despite the distance. After the whole ordeal, my friend proposed that this should remain as a tradition, that we should do it every time we have the chance to meet. He told me that it feels more like a proper interaction between friends that also work in the same domain, that it feels like that's how artists actually come together and exchange information, reducing the distance to almost nothing, therefore that information materializing.

The starting point of the collaborative work was a few ideas shared in one of the courses I was attending in the Netherlands, more exactly subjects like the ever-changing and temporary nature of the world and the absurdity of man considering itself separate from nature. He liked them and we set on creating in my last couple of days there.
Among the numerous building sites that we saw on the streets of Paris and its periphery, we contributed with something born on a building site of our own. We exercised our responsibility on our self-granted “human” rights and looked at nature as a somewhat equal entity to us, with the right to take things, especially things that belong to nature. That meaning everything. Including us, our bones, and the bones of our creations which are also made up from natural material.
We took a few objects we saw fitting and buried them in cement. That is because the images that we conjured up in our minds when we thought about “what would the world look like when humans will completely disappear?” were the cement skeletons of our houses, of our hives. We attached to the freshly made block of cement our words, so that anybody who will have contact with it will know what the story of our cement is.

“The objects that are embedded inside this corpus are alterations of the matter that surround us - borrowed things from nature and modeled, by humans, in hopes of appropriating them to us. They are not meant for humans, we do not deserve them, because we already own everything. They are meant to be revealed from their shell by nature itself in the moment it decides it wants them. Because in the end, everything belongs to nature, and when we will all disappear, anything that is valuable or nonvaluable for humans will return in the same row with everything, in nature.”

Knowing what objects are buried there is not for us to tell. They are owned by nature and if it wants to uncover them for all to see, it is its will.
We left the block in the park of Cormeilles-en-Parisis. Nature owned it before it was made, while it was made, and nature owns it now, even if it was picked up by janitors or other, it is still owned by nature. And it will return to nature whenever it wills it.
It is inevitable.

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Andrei Oiegaș

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