Artists: Alexandra Costea, Anna Dumitriu, Dominika Glogowski
Researchers and policy consultants: Alexandra Ciocan, Théophile Humann-Guilleminot, Cristina Moisescu, Mihai Stoica, Ana Zamfirescu
Research partners: Institute of Biology Bucharest, 2Celsius
Curator: Sabina Suru
Art–science consultant: Andrei Tudose
Art–science mediator: Roxana Nicoară
October 14-30, 2026 - Atelier 35, Bucharest, RO

Essential processes that sustain the ecosystems around us are delicate and silent—plant metabolic stress adaptations manifesting novel forms of liveliness or microbiological rhythms neighbouring deep time. Anthropogenic processes that sustain human society as we know it are similarly inconspicuous—invisible gas plumes drifting from industrial sites, hovering over greenery and spaces inhabited by humans and non-humans alike. Yet the fact that they are difficult to notice does not make them inconsequential. They don’t wait for us to perceive them, as we stumble about, trying to make sense of the world. So, what happens when something has clear, nearly tangible consequences, yet eludes our immediate experience? And what becomes politically or culturally influential as we persist in not noticing?

Silent Pressures brings together three art–science projects emerging from Otherwise Residency 2026, connecting artistic practice with biological research, environmental monitoring, and policy expertise. The collaborations began from a shared problem: how do we approach phenomena that exceed the limitation of our natural perception, and what can different ways of knowing reveal about them? Scientific methods can sometimes observe and measure things long before they are perceived, while artistic practices can explore new relationships between their temporalities, materialities, and cultural entanglements. Together, they open a tense yet fragile mesh of questions about what counts as evidence, how knowledge is formed, and how something can come to matter.

The projects in the exhibition move across different scales and systems of attention. Alexandra Costea’s work, in collaboration with microbiologists Cristina Moisescu and Ana Zamfirescu, approaches microalgae as forms of distributed life, operating subtly across deep ecological time. Their rhythms are not synched with the pace of human existence, even though these organisms help shape landscapes and the cultural identities entangled with them. What does it mean to live alongside processes whose significance exceeds the timescales through which we ordinarily perceive change?

Shifting the focus from deep time to the quick adaptive responses of individual organisms, Anna Dumitriu, in collaboration with biologist Alexandra Ciocan, investigates the cellular stress responses and chemical defenses of edelweiss and smoketree. The project traces connections between contemporary biotechnology and historical remedies, protective rituals, and cultural understandings of medicinal plants. Between accumulated experience and laboratory analysis, different ways of recognising biological signals come into view. What might have been sensed, observed, or passed down as knowledge through traditions, before it could be explained through modern scientific instruments? And what changes when a familiar form of knowledge encounters another way of describing the world?

Dominika Glogowski, alongside policy specialist Mihai Stoica and environmentalist Théophile Humann-Guilleminot, moves from natural biological responses towards external influences of anthropogenic processes’ wider consequences, looking into fugitive methane emissions from the ageing extractive infrastructure in Romania. Here, the difficulty is not only that a phenomenon escapes the senses, but that its physical presence barely translates into personnel safety, public awareness or political response, even as its urgency becomes noticeable. Monitoring can establish what ordinary perception cannot, yet it does not guarantee accountability. What could be prevented when unseen danger is felt somatically? Could instrumented forms of embodiment contribute to infrastructural safety, or even to political and institutional accountability?

What we notice, measure, represent, or ignore shapes the boundaries of our relationships with the other, it influences what we consider real, relevant, or worthy of action. Perception is never neutral. This is not to suggest that everything must become perceptible in order to matter, or that greater awareness will solve what we have failed to address. The world was already at work before we arrived to observe it.

Now, brace yourself and join us for a moment in the company of the unsettling thought that existence, in its varied ways, does not depend on our ability to perceive it, to recognise, understand, or accept it. It cares not for our habits or conformities. It might, on occasion, change its ways, and ours in return, in a formless merry-go-around. How can we perceive, make sense, and decide how to act upon the pressures around and within us, when they stay silent in the face of our established way of reading the world?

Silent Pressures is part of the Otherwise Residency program, Marginal’s core platform for artistic research at the intersection of art, science, and public policy. It provides artists and researchers with the time, resources, and context to explore questions that exceed conventional disciplinary boundaries, allowing art to take an active stance towards contemporary environmental issues.
The second run of the art–science research residency, developed in collaboration with the Institute of Biology Bucharest of the Romanian Academy and 2Celsius, connects artists and specialists in scientific research, pollution monitoring and environmental policy, in three explorations of the ways in which we relate to otherness and the non-human across perceptual strata.

Cultural partners: Atelier 35, Zile și Nopți, French Institute in Romania
Acknowledgements: Clean Air Task Force, Radio Guerrilla

Otherwise Residency 2026 is co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund - AFCN, and implemented with the financial support of the French Embassy in Romania and the French Institute in Romania.
The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN 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.

Still Cover

Artist: Alexandra Costea
Researchers: Cristina Moisescu, Ana Zamfirescu
Institute of Biology Bucharest of the Romanian Academy, Department of Microbiology

Installation: Polaroid emulsion lift, 20 blown glass containers, water from the Dăbuleni area

Natural landscapes transform across timescales that are difficult for us to grasp. Soil, vegetation, and ecosystems follow their own rhythms, and their changes often unfold beyond our direct perception. Yet human intervention can compress these rhythms. In Dăbuleni, a region of sandy soils in southern Romania, tree cutting and the levelling of dunes to make way for agriculture have accelerated the transformation of the land and contributed to the spread of desertification. A landscape shaped through slow accumulation can thus be altered in a remarkably short time, according to the needs and decisions of another rhythm, another system. Meanwhile, microalgae have existed on Earth for millions of years, growing and participating, almost imperceptibly, in the transformation of their environments. The encounter between these different temporalities raises questions about how we define a landscape shaped both by processes unfolding over geological eras and by interventions capable of transforming it in a short time. It also draws attention to the role of biological processes that remain beyond our immediate perception, and opens up questions about how these changes shape human identities amid the unintended consequences of our own activity.

The work explores this temporal fragility through the fragility of matter, focusing on ecosystems in continuous transformation and on the ways human interventions can affect processes that unfold slowly. At this scale, space becomes inseparable from time: what appears almost motionless is, in fact, constantly changing, its evolution taking place through subtle accumulations that are difficult to register over short periods. Microalgae become a point of reference for another way of looking at the landscape, one in which transformation emerges from the tension between acceleration and control, within a framework of long durations, continuity, and interdependence between different forms of life. The project follows this tension while leaving an open question: can a landscape be understood and restored without imposing a new identity upon it?

Precious and Immortal Plants

Artist: Anna Dumitriu
Researcher: Alexandra Ciocan
Institute of Biology Bucharest of the Romanian Academy, Department of Developmental Biology

Precious and Immortal Plants explores the medicinal potential of two plants, smoketree (Cotinus coggygria) and edelweiss (Leontopodium alpinum), through laboratory research into their biological compounds, particularly their potential antimicrobial and antioxidant properties.

Working across sculpture, textiles, 3D printing, and biological materials, the project brings contemporary plant science into dialogue with the histories, myths, and cultural associations surrounding medicinal plants. Laboratory-grown plant callus cultures—masses of undifferentiated plant cells—become both research material and artistic matter. These are combined with references to historical medical practices, protective objects, and traditional beliefs about healing, illness, and immortality. Moving between scientific investigation and cultural memory, the project considers how plants have been understood as sources of protection and healing, and how these understandings change through scientific research. It also explores the complex relationship between human vulnerability, plant resilience, and the search for ways to protect life, through a conceptual assemblage of six elements:

Immortal
Vintage blouse with farmed edelweiss flowers in resin, stained silk ribbons with pink anthocyanins from edelweiss callus culture, TB DNA, digital video projection of the artist’s own blood fighting a TB infection in vitro.
Video in collaboration with Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
Edelweiss has historically been associated with tuberculosis (TB), although there is no evidence that its compounds treat the disease. Laboratory-grown edelweiss cells produce anthocyanins, antioxidant pigments that may also indicate cellular stress. An antique blouse containing TB DNA is tied with ribbons stained with these pigments and overlaid with a mirrored video of the artist’s own blood responding to a TB infection in vitro, bringing together illness, scientific research, cultural memory, and the fragile boundaries between life and death.

Precious Corners
Altered vintage box with hidden compartment, acrylic, silver leaf, freeze-dried edelweiss callus culture.
It is believed that edelweiss flowers grow in inaccessible places such as the Carpathian Mountains, hence the Romanian name floare de colț (corner flower). The altered vintage box has a secret compartment which contains a freeze-dried edelweiss callus culture used in the lab to hunt for the medicinal compounds that may have antimicrobial and antioxidant qualities. The artist has gilded the box in silver leaf to indicate the preciousness of these trophy plants and why they need protecting.

Dum Spero Spiro (While I breath I hope)
3D model printed in PLA (polylactic acid), hand-painted in acrylic, with farmed edelweiss and ribbon stained with edelweiss callus culture extracts.
A meditation on the relationship of TB, edelweiss and the altitude treatment for the disease that was popular in Alpine sanatoria. The sculpture and the display cloche reference vintage models used for the historical teaching of anatomy, and it is threaded with farmed edelweiss and ribbons stained with edelweiss extract. Exhibited alongside edelweiss callus cultures from the Institute of Biology Bucharest.

Veil
3D printed PLA, hand-painted in acrylic with smoketree leaves in resin with drawing, silver wire and silk ribbons stained with smoketree callus culture extracts and dyed with smoketree heartwood (a.k.a. young fustic).
Smoketree is associated with the healing of skin and burns. In folklore, the featherlike appearance of its flowers was thought to ward off malevolent forces by offering a veil of concealment. Here, a 3D printed sculpture of burned skin is intertwined with dried (frozen) smoketree leaves preserved in resin with drawings of some of the bacteria the leaves can treat, and silk ribbons stained with smoketree extracts and dyed with smoketree heartwood. Exhibited alongside smoketree callus cultures from the Institute of Biology Bucharest.

Callus Culture Pomanders
Two 3D printed silver pomanders, silver chains, freeze dried smoketree, respectively edelweiss callus cultures.
Pomanders are perforated globular containers which can be filled with plant materials, spices, herbs, or perfumes and worn around the neck as protection against infection in times of pestilence. The two silver 3D-printed pomanders exhibited incorporate, on their surfaces, models of plant specimens, documented at the Institute of Biology’s Herbarium. Each pomander contains freeze-dried plant callus cultures grown in the lab from edelweiss, respectively smoketree. Plant callus cultures are unorganised, dividing masses of undifferentiated plant cells made from a piece of sterilised plant tissue on a nutrient-rich growth medium.

Eagle Triptych
Silk stained with sterilised bacteria—Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella enterica—using chromogenic agar patterned with antimicrobial plant compounds and extracts from edelweiss and smoketree callus cultures, embroidery, and rinsed in oak gall ink, resin, smoketree flowers, pressed smoketree callus culture and farmed edelweiss.
Three textile artworks made with silk pieces that have been laid on chromogenic agar (a growth media made from seaweed, containing special diagnostic dyes) and then grown with four kinds of pathogenic bacteria—Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella enterica—which have been challenged with plant compounds and extracts from edelweiss and smoketree. On some silk squares, the blues (Staphylococcus aureus), greens (Listeria monocytogenes), pinks (Escherichia coli) and purples (Salmonella enterica) show what are called zones of inhibition, patches where the bacteria did not grow, meaning the extracts and compounds tested here, on small discs, may be effective at killing these bacteria. There is a strange result however where the bacteria grew on the antimicrobial discs but not around them. This may be an effect of the concentrations of compounds and extracts called the Eagle effect (medical and microbiological occurrence where bacteria or fungi exposed to higher concentrations of an antibiotic show paradoxically reduced killing and better survival than at lower, optimal doses). The materials were sterilised by autoclaving prior to exhibition.

The Methane Whisperer: Being with the Hazard

Artist: Dominika Glogowski
Researchers and public policy consultants: Mihai Stoica (2Celsius), Théophile Humann-Guilleminot (Clean Air Task Force)

Six photographs, 60×40 cm, print ultra giclee on Alucobond; vest with methane sensing device, helmet, bone-conducting headphones; sound.

Methane is one of the strongest short-term drivers of climate change, and largely invisible to those living and working near it. The work proposes another way of encountering this industrial hazard: a wearable instrument that transforms the gas's presence into a live, directional soundscape, making changes in the surrounding atmosphere audible and tangible on the body.

The vest carries two methane-specific sensors, alongside sensors registering volatile organic compounds (VOC), temperature, humidity, and the wearer's heartbeat. As methane levels change, tones grow louder and pulse faster on the corresponding side of the body. A low frequency, transmitted through bone conduction, vibrates against the skull, while the heartbeat becomes part of the soundscape. The instrument does not offer a numerical readout but an embodied form of sensing, placing the wearer in a continuous relation with the air around them.

Extending the artist's practice of Deep Speech Listening, the work approaches listening as an attentive encounter with systems that resist straightforward interpretation. Rather than translating methane into a singular message, it allows the gas to shape the sound as it is detected. The atmosphere becomes a material participant: something that acts upon the body while remaining largely beyond ordinary perception.
Developed with oil-field workers in mind, the prototype addresses those whose labour unfolds alongside fugitive emissions, often without the means to sense them directly. It also raises questions about the distance between detecting a hazard and responding to it: measurement can establish a presence, but does close to nothing in terms of recognition or accountability.

Presented within the exhibition in dialogue with images taken during field research in petrol polluted areas in Southern Romania, the work asks what changes when the air we inhabit begins to speak—not through a warning or an explanation, but through a shifting relation between body, technology, and environment.

More information on the sound design component:
https://artecoindustry.com/methane-whisperer-sound/