NON

Bucharest is not a city, but a succession of overlapping cities. Each era has left traces in the consciousness of its inhabitants, archiving in personal memory communism with its transition, chaotic capitalism, and the digitalization of the present. Although apparently different, they all share the assault of rules and customs that shape lives and leave deep marks. Using analog photography and artistic intervention, the project Bucharest Overlaps explores these dimensions as visible scars, collectively tolerated through acceptance and forgetting. It is, at the same time, a radiography of a society and an invitation to reflection, to slowing down, to listening to the inner rhythm of the city. Viewed this way, Bucharest becomes a living archive: a collection of memories and reminiscences, gaps and mismatches, noises, silences, and unease. The project investigates the tension between the monumentality of buildings and the everyday forgotten inside them. Massive walls become windows to the interior and surfaces for projecting memory, visual fragments, and urban sounds. The image is not documentary, but evocative; it does not reproduce, it interrogates; it does not assert, it questions. The central focus of the research is Calea 13 Septembrie, a space full of history and personal memory for the artist. From Dealul Spirii and the Revolution of 1848 to the construction of the House of the People, this place concentrates historical and aesthetic tensions. Today, between massive blocks and luxury hotels, silences, shadows, and fragments of urban memory sneak through, which the artist reinterprets through the photographic lens. Beyond the exterior city, the project also probes the domestic interior – the living room of childhood and adolescence, preserved intact by the artist’s mother. This space, a social core and a symbol of the family’s status, becomes in adulthood a badge of continuity, a layer of memory loaded with significance.