Artists: Laura Cinti, Ida Hiršenfelder, Andreea Săsăran, Sabina Suru
Scientists and research consultants: Andreea Ciobotă, Mihaela Ciobotă, Théophile Humann-Guilleminot, Carmen Maximilian Simona Neagu, Roxana Nicoară, Mihaela Stancu, Mihai Stoica
Research partners: Institute of Biology Bucharest, 2Celsius
Curator: Andrei Tudose
Art–science consultant: Claudia Schnugg
October 9-28, 2025 - Atelier 030202, Bucharest, Romania

In a moment defined by the climate crisis and its profound ecological and social fracturing, the notion of boundaries - be they disciplinary, perceptual, or physical - is undergoing a critical re-evaluation. Soft Thresholds, the concluding exhibition of the Otherwise Residency, frames artistic and scientific inquiry not as separate domains, but as mutually permeable fields of knowledge creation. Questioning boundaries that often appear rigid and hard to breach, the exhibition explores the fragile balance between the relentless drive of human development and the intricate, self-sustaining logic of natural ecosystems.

The threshold is more than a fixed barrier, allowing entrance to a liminal space: a conceptual and physical opening for movement, transformation, and emergence. Drawing on anthropological and ecological understanding, the threshold is not a point of division, but an area of potential, where rules are suspended, and new forms of knowledge and coexistence can be negotiated. This shift in perspective reframes boundaries as permeable membranes, where the very act of crossing creates meaning, enabling us to recognize and account for the unseen processes, non-human perspectives, and parallel realities that shape our shared world.

In this context, the threshold creates a space for critical reflection, encouraging open conversations around acts of survival, quiet resilience, and adaptation, through multiple scales of perception. Moving across these scales, the artworks in this exhibition encourage us to step into spaces where boundaries blur, and to imagine coexistence differently - from the sound of a single bird to the spectral traces of atmospheric change. How can cities be reimagined as environments that support both human and non-human life, redefining our responsibility in shaping spaces of shared survival? What would it mean to recognize cultural heritage not only as a human legacy but also as an ecological one, where memory, biodiversity, and landscape preservation are inseparably linked? How might acknowledging the agency of microbial and other unseen worlds transform our collective understanding of wellbeing, resilience, and interdependence on a planetary scale? What social and political changes could emerge if the hidden impacts of extractivism are made visible, forcing us to confront the costs of our infrastructures?

The four works presented in Soft Thresholds, resulting from the active collaboration between artists and scientists in the framework of the Otherwise Residency, explore situated responses to the permeable boundaries between human and more-than-human systems, between data and meaning, between knowledge and experience. Each piece navigates a distinct soft threshold, manifesting across different scales and territories of perception: from the acoustics of the urban environment to the logic of the microbial world, and from the botanical resilience of the landscape to the shifts in Earth’s atmosphere.

Ida Hiršenfelder’s Desire to Impress draws on avian bioacoustics to explore the blackbird’s remarkable adaptation to human architecture, where rooftops and walls become critical acoustic infrastructure. Rather than reducing bird song to competition or territory, the project foregrounds play, creativity, and delight in the non-human world. Through a geolocational sound walk and installation, the artist asks: before we interpret what a blackbird sings, how does the bird hear the city itself?

Continuing the inquiry into the microscopic scale of bacterial life, Sabina Suru’s so quaint, so charming expands the exploration to focus on non-human meaning-making. Grounded in research on halophilic bacteria and their capacity for bioremediation, the work reflects on the difficulty of fully grasping the semantic closure of these microorganisms. Through a dual presentation - part scientific compendium, part re-coded affective space - the work confronts the gap between human attempts to decrypt microbial logic and bacterial meaning-making as a self-contained process, irreducible to human categories of perception or knowledge.

Laura Cinti’s Our Salvia expands the narrative to the landscape scale. The work traces botanical research on kurgans - ancient burial mounds scattered across Dobrogea - that have survived as ecological refuges despite centuries of agricultural erasure. By focusing on Salvia nemorosa, a flowering plant thriving on these mounds, Laura Cinti situates cultural memory alongside ecological endurance. The kurgan becomes both archive and habitat, speaking of persistence in the margins, where human history and biodiversity entwine, in an act of fragile and profound endurance

Finally, we turn to the planetary and atmospheric scale in Andreea Săsăran’s Untitled Cloud. Working with thermal imaging data of methane emissions, the work transforms invisible spectral traces into a three-dimensional sculpture, where time becomes volume, and data becomes form, making a material archive of an invisible process - a potent atmospheric reality that escapes our natural senses. It forces a confrontation with the limits of perception and our shared responsibility for the unseen impacts that shape our present and future.

Across these shifts in scale, Soft Thresholds is a starting point in exploring how to survive in this changing planetary reality by accepting the blurring of the lines we once drew ourselves. What remains is the realization that the deepest knowledge often resides in the in-betweens: between the lab and the field, between the eye and the sensor, between the human language and the song of a blackbird. The works emerging from this art–science residency, developed upon active research projects, are an encouragement for all of us to step into this space of friction and flux. As friction arises from the intentional clash of methodologies - where the artistic imperative to question and speculate meets the scientific demand for verifiable data - and the flux is the constant negotiation of meaning that defines the co-creation process within the residency itself. Expanding this approach beyond the Otherwise Residency project, we can all hold fast to the open-ended questions, and imagine alternative ways to traverse the often parallel realities we encounter every day. The exhibition itself is a new threshold: a point from which the artists and scientists involved will continue their individual and collective explorations, carrying the residue of co-creation into the ongoing work of reimagining coexistence in our more-than-human world.

Otherwise Residency is co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund and by the Bucharest City Hall through ARCUB, in the framework of the Bucharest Together 2025 program.
The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The Administration of the National Cultural Fund is not responsible for the content of the project or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.
The content of this material does not necessarily represent the official position of the Bucharest City Hall or ARCUB.