Projects

A collaboration with US choreographer Robert Tyree based on the book “Lemur”, developed as a movement-based installation and a dance performance.

The project translated the book’s imagery into choreographic scores and spatial experiments, extending the text into a live, physical environment.

Covering the 2014 IWP Fall Residency, the documentary All Together provides insight into the work of 29 writers from all around the world, their time spent in Iowa City, and the filmmaking process. Each writer contributed to the documentary in some way. Many of the writers assisted in capturing footage to use throughout the film as the cameras were passed from one hand to another.

Directed by Andra Rotaru and Raj Chakrapani, All Together is a Community Engagement project from 2014 IWP Fall Resident Andra Rotaru.

“Photo-letter pairing” is a project made by Andra Rotaru in collaboration with Jared Krauss as part of the 2nd Annual Outreach and Engagement Fellowship, an additional IWP fellowship that is focused on cultivating public outreach and artistic collaborations. The project functions as a connection between the IWP Fall Residents, the local literary community, and the diverse citizenry of Iowa City. Fall residents were not only in communication with community members or writers of Iowa City, but also with tangible objects and intangible ideas such as local buildings, or the atmosphere.

Each resident who agreed to be part of this project wrote a letter to a person or entity in Iowa City. The letters covered Iowa-centric topics and ideas as described above, and were paired with photographs taken by Jared Krauss on a 35mm camera. The letters and their photos were then dropped off into the mailboxes of community members and organizations, or were left by the IWP Fall Residents at specific places such as in the hollow of a tree or in a bird’s nest.

The purpose of the project was to alert the Iowa City community that IWP Fall Residents were here for no less than 10 weeks! The connection between the residents’ letters and their identities was unveiled through the associated photography, strengthening understanding between the writers and the people they interacted with while in Iowa. The connection was further enhanced when IWP Fall Residents took a tour of Iowa City in order to drop off the letters and photos at the appropriate mailboxes or designated spaces. This virtual catalogue features the writers’ letters and photographs, all of which can be displayed from anywhere in the world while simultaneously acting as evidence of the Fall Residents’ presence in the lives of Iowans.

Romanian writers and visual artists Anca Bucur, Ștefan Buzea, Cristina Florentina Budar, Iulia Militaru, Sergiu Nisioi and Andra Rotaru presented in Iowa City (USA) the project "Manifest(are) con(tra) DADA". It was selected as part of the CentenArt cultural financing and partnerships programme for 2016 of the Romanian Cultural Institute, carried out in partnership with The International Writing Program, University of Iowa.

The modules of the "Manifest(are) con(tra) DADA" project consist of an exhibition and a performance, presented at the Public Space One gallery, as well as a roundtable held at Shambaugh House, with guests from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and International Writing Program.

The multimedia magazine Crevice, is a space for literary and visual experimentation.

It opens dialogues between writers and artists, creating a fluid network of collaborations and hybrid forms.

The collage series “Content not Found”, accompanied by a statement and the experimental video “A domesticated horse must be shod”, explores disappearance, erasure, and fragmented perception.

The works play with absence and glitch aesthetics, placing bodies and text in unstable visual frames.

An interdisciplinary art project co-curated with choreographer Cosmin Manolescu, extending the boundaries of literary and choreographic histories.

The project sought to break dance's insularity and open new perspectives for interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

The #dansliteratura module was created as part of the project "20 years | is there a future for contemporary dance in Romania?" which celebrates 20 years of activity of the Gabriela Tudor Foundation. A cultural project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund and realized with the support of the National Center for Dance Bucharest, Cărturești Bookstore, AMBASADA.

“Blind Date” is an illustrated poetry book remixed in techno (Oyio, Paul Dunca, Andra Rotaru, and Sandra Galan).

It represents an intersection between electronic music, poetry, and fashion design—a creative blind date exploring new ways of connecting their equally immersing crafts.

A stage adaptation from the book “Tribar” by Andra Rotaru, performed by Andra Rotaru, Robert G. Elekes & OYIO feat. Paula Dunker.

The performance is a hybrid form combining poetry, electronic music, and movement, presented at Multiverse during the Bucharest International Poetry Festival 2018.

The project offers international audiences a tribute through which Paul Celan's poetry enters into dialogue with contemporary writers. A hundred years after Paul Celan's birth, the dynamics of languages, styles, and perceptions are in constant change and permutation. The historical climate has shifted, society and freedoms have reached new territories.

We ask today what remains the same and what has changed — does Celan's poetry enter into dialogue with the realities, languages, and perspectives of our time?

What is happening in the Romanian poetic space 100 years after the birth of Paul Celan? Does the poetry of a century ago resemble the poetry of our days? Has anything changed? What languages do we use? Does the reader succeed in stabilizing the author's reality? What does language do when it is fragmented by quotes?

The multimedia project “Paul Celan 100: Language Mesh” attempts to answer some of these questions, bringing together 12 contemporary artists from different fields – poetry, visual arts, video art. If in the last century Paul Celan used linguistic signs from diverse fields, neologisms from the sphere of science and technology, as well as quotes that intertwined with increasing complexity, today, the artists in the project have the freedom to displace Paul Celan’s texts and interweave them with their own discourses. The artists offer the international public a tribute in which Paul Celan’s poetry is cited and merged into poetic, visual, and video languages—a unique artistic content, exclusively for RCI (Romanian Cultural Institute) Brussels.

„este iulie. ce te mișcă, pe mine mă lasă indiferent.“

A poetic collage that explores the extent to which the blending, overlapping, or completion of different literary spaces is possible.

This work brings together previously unpublished verses by Andra Rotaru, fragments from the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, short passages from The Journal of Ungrateful Words (Jurnalul unor cuvinte ingrate) by Emilia Ajule, and quotes from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.