my eyelids no longer protect me
2025
On the night of October 30, 2015, the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest caught fire, a national tragedy that exposed the deadly consequences of corruption and institutional neglect. A decade later, I return to this unresolved trauma, not to reproduce its imagery, but to confront the ways it has been narrated.
Through the use of fragmented storytelling and manipulated imagery, the publication blurs the boundary between truth and fiction, referencing my own witnessing of the footage. A movable light source invites viewers to engage actively, transforming spectators into investigators.
The accompanying video installation extends this engagement, both as an act of protest and a critique of the limitations of visual media. A hand-made curtain, replicating the one from the club, acts as an object of remembrance and grief.
This work is not a reconstruction, but a refusal, an insistence on critical engagement with how we see, remember, and respond to tragedy.
It’s 2020, and I have moved away from my computer screen. The pixels that form an image on its surface are too painful to be perceived. An open wound is throbbing digitally, and I cannot look anymore. I am sobbing. I have just discovered Alexandra Furnea’s blog. Her words penetrate my skin. She is one of the survivors of the Colectiv blaze in Bucharest. It was the 30th of October, 2015, when her body melted. I could have been her, and yet I wasn’t. My skin doesn’t have scars, nor does it carry the pain of corruption. But in her text, I am her. I want to be her for a second. I have to be her to understand her fully. And yet I cannot. I feel so small behind this useless computer screen. So powerless.
excerpt from my research paper “my eyelids no longer protect me”
