Paper RePlant_Family 2025
During my 2-month international residency in Libken, I continued my participatory projects Rural Art Gallery and Aphrodite. In addition, the residency enabled me to embark on a new path of exploration, which was very much in its context. After the initial taming of a new place detached from my daily routine, I significantly expanded the direction of my activities.

The residence ‘into the fields’ gave me a personal space for carefully experiencing family mourning, accepting the passing of time in the context of nature’s processes of continuous transformation. On the other hand, the prevailing trend in social media of displacing the aging process, slowing down or disabling the body, definitely distances and contradicts the laws of nature. This dichotomous experience became the pretext for the creation of the Paper RePlant project – family, objects made of what is rejected by both nature and technological progress. Old, decayed branches disheveled me and captured me by drawing the traces of passing time left on them. In an analogous way, I was moved by the abandoned inoperative parts of furniture, appliances called to improve human life.
The fashion for staying as beautiful, healthy and active as possible for as long as possible starts innocently with improving one’s appearance. We grasp at the promise of a long healthy life, and as we get older, we interfere more and more strongly with the biological mechanisms of the body. Transplanting, implanting, replacing cavities all are available at our fingertips. External interference with beauty paradoxically becomes the accepted canon of beauty, which is difficult to achieve naturally. Aesthetic medicine procedures, often lead to an exaggerated, handicapped body.

Cleveland exhibition: paper RePlant_family tree

The project Paper RePlant_family tree, I continued the same year during a month-long residency in Cleveland, at the largest center dedicated to paper art in the US – the Morgan Conservatory of Papermaking and educational foundation. This conceptual endeavor uses paper as a medium to reflect on the transgression of materiality, the aging process, the passing of time but also, the building of family bonds in the context of nature.

Each object-member of the RePlant family is given its own history, narrative and personality in the family album I am creating (paper version and online 2026).