Notes from the field
I am, by habit, practice, and temperament, an artist rooted in the lab, the darkroom to be more exact, with its safelights, variable chemistry, timed lighting, and all sorts of potential image accommodating materials. That is not to say that my comfort zone lies in control. But I do find comfort in the compactness of the lab, where variables are somewhat isolated, errors are cataloged (and happily employed later), and time is measurable.
So when I found myself standing in the courtyard of the Institute of Biology Bucharest (IBIOL), convincing credentialed field researchers, artists, and unsuspecting participants to wander through urban bush with envelopes of cyanotyped prompt cards for site specific speculative research, I was surprised by the absence of the familiar impostor feeling. There is an obvious strangeness and out-of-placeness in taking a lab-bound, material-rooted artist and throwing her into the chaotic, unmanageable reality of Bucharest’s urban green spaces—and then asking actual scientists to join her in an unreliable biodiversity survey.
Collaborating with field researchers on my Concrete & Canopy project, in the framework of The Urban Green Blueprint, was an exercise in mutual, polite bewilderment. Scientists are trained to strip away ambiguity. They create clear taxonomies, verifiable counts, and replicable methodologies. I showed up with a speculative research toolkit—part performative game, part tactile field notebook—asking them to measure the softness of moss with their thumbs, calculate the heat difference between tree shade and sunlit asphalt, or answer questions like: Who planted the ivy climbing up and down by the greenhouse? Reply in exactly three and a half words.
Yet, beneath the initial disciplinary friction lay a shared realization: both art and science begin with a disciplined form of attention. The difference is that science as we know it (we, outsiders) often feels compelled to sanitize its context, while artistic research—specifically speculative, feral research—wallows in the messy, contradictory, and unanswerable aspects of that context. Science gives us the taxonomy of an Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven); artistic research asks whether that invasive, stubborn weed patch actually serves as a vital anti-human shelter for sparrows, and whether it counts as green space, as the city administration would rather pretend it doesn't exist.

The Bureaucracy of Concrete vs. The Feral Reality of Grădini de Bloc
To understand why an unreliable survey is necessary in Bucharest, one must first appreciate the absolute absurdity of how urban nature is measured and regulated in Romania. If you dive into the research literature—such as Bogdan-Nicolae Păcurar’s 2017 study on Romanian green space policy—you quickly enter a Kafkaesque landscape of bureaucratic statistical gymnastics.
Under Romania’s Law 24/2007 (and the European-driven mandates tied to EU accession), local authorities were obligated to provide a minimum threshold of green space per inhabitant, specifically 20 square meters by 2010, and 26 square meters by 2013. Sounds noble, right? Except for one glorious, systemic flaw: Romanian law measures green space strictly against population size, entirely ignoring the physical, spatial expansion of the city itself.
Between 1993 and 2015, the total population across Romanian county capitals remained essentially flat (a tiny 0.02% decrease). Yet, over that exact same period, the built-up surface area of these cities expanded by a staggering 41%. Cities sprawled outward across hectares—more concrete, more asphalt, more infrastructure—for fewer people. Because the statistical formula relies on population rather than actual land area, official green space metrics offer a distorted, fictional image of ecological health. Worse still, under Law 33/1994 and Law 255/2010, the state’s power of eminent domain (compulsory purchase) can be invoked to build highways, roads, and utilities, but never to acquire private land for urban forests or public parks. Even worse, provisions in Law 24/2007 allow existing green zones to be re-zoned and paved over for public utility infrastructure.
And here is the punchline: official statistics completely exclude the small, vernacular grădini de bloc—the ubiquitous pocket gardens nestled between apartment buildings, parking spots, and pedestrian paths. Yet, as current urban research reveals, these informal, unmapped patches account for 21% to 28% of Bucharest’s entire vegetation surface. Over a quarter of the city’s living green canopy exists in a statistical void. An in this no-man-or-plant-or-bird land, I joined researchers Roxana Nicoară and Adelina Scorobete, and ornithologists Andreea and Mihaela Ciobotă, in their field research expeditions in Bucharest’s many grădini de bloc, monitoring plant and bird biodiversity, and their wellbeing and contextual interdependencies in these very diverse ecosystems. I would wake up unnaturally early in the morning and walk uneasily, orbiting them, measuring trees (looked strangely like embraces, among the best parts of the work, really!), listening to birds and counting disturbances (you know, cars and such), and I would walk back to the studio, left with many questions. First: why is there so little-to-none research done in these half vernacular, half feral green spaces?
One afternoon, after returning from one such urban expedition with Roxana, I finally had a breakthrough, by coming across Axinte et al. (2025), where grădinile de bloc are framed as post-socialist informal practices—sites of quiet sustainability, which rang familiar to Anna Tsing’s latent commons. These spaces aren't designed by high-concept landscape architects. They are built and tended by residents (often retirees) who erect DIY fences, haul discarded bathtubs for rainwater, and cultivate handsome, ornamental blooms in tacit conflict with local municipalities. Local authorities periodically show up to prune branches, seal swift nests with expanding polyurethane wall foam, or cut down unauthorized plantings.
These gardens exist in a delicate, contradictory state: they are fenced off to keep humans out, which accidentally creates miniature, low-interference sanctuaries where stray cats, blackbirds, mosses, and insects thrive away from human tread. They are latent commons—unnoticed, undeveloped, elusive, and bubbling with unrealized multi-species possibilities.

Bendy Temporalities, Variable Feralities
When designing the visual and physical toolkit for Concrete & Canopy, returning to my roots in alternative photography—specifically the cyanotype process—felt like a mult, but I couldn't quite grasp the why, at first. I excused myself by saying that a direct chromatic connection never hurt anyone and working with an environmentally honest and safe process should always be the way to go. It became obvious, as I advanced through the production of testing cards, that this rather intuitive choice had more to it.
In a world governed by digital immediacy, instantaneous photography, and speedy busy urban life, cyanotype is inherently time-bending. It is a slow, photochemical showdown between iron salts, paper fibers, water, and light. You cannot rush a UV exposure; you are entirely subject to cloud cover, atmospheric conditions, and seasonal specificities. It demands that the practitioner step out of human clock-time and align with nature bound rhythms. Which is not always possible and there are work arounds, as cyanotype needs a UV light, there’s no obligation for it to be a natural one. LED UV is just as good—only it slows down the exposure by 5 times or more. What was a 4 minute exposure out in the September sun, was now 20+ minutes. This became an essential element later on—and not because the production of the toolkits took longer in artificial conditions, but rather because the cards needed a particular observational slowing down temporality, and this started from the production of the toolkits themselves, and continued in the field. Basically, the project uses the aesthetic and temporal philosophy of alternative photography (as we call her now) as a tool to slow down human perception. The cards act as tactical publishing artifacts of sorts, dragging the participant out of their daily autopilot and forcing them to adopt a radically different temporality.
This is where speculative design meets feral ecologies, and morphs naturally into feral design. Speculative design creates scenarios to provoke debate and uncover hidden issues. Feral design takes this further: as explored in projects like Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas or games like Rock, Paper, Pigeon (RoPPi), ferality refers to non-human entities and ecosystems that emerge, adapt, and flourish within human-made infrastructures, often in direct defiance of human control. I wanted to test this in a more situated way, in the field, by means of more than my own observations and biases. So I prepared under a similar methodology to both of the above mentioned projects and went for a somewhat gamified approach to visual cues and guided research. When a participant would step into the researched ares, they would receive eight cyanotype cards, and would be asked to engage in this slower temporality of observation, as the observational cues on the cards asked for a speculative, multi-species attention:
Touch the shade of a tree for 15s, then sunlit asphalt for 15s. Record surface heat difference.
Crouch down close to the ground. Listen to low sounds. Name at least 3 that aren’t human.
Find a place that looks like it should contain life. What is missing? Record 2 conflicting thoughts.
Estimate the exact moment this tree became a habitat. Record the date and time.

The Unreliable Survey in Action and the Accumulation of Partial Truths
On August 26, 2026, when we launched the first public field session in the garden of the Institute for Biology, the installation came alive as a performative, collective experiment. When handing out the envelopes, my instruction to the participants was explicit and unapologetic: This is an unreliable biodiversity survey. You are fully allowed—encouraged, even—to misidentify, speculate, imagine, and invent. Misidentification and uncertainty are not scientific failures here; they are primary research materials. How a human imagines or remembers a green space is just as ecologically relevant to urban culture as a rigid tree count.
The protocol unfolded through four curated modules of attention:
Observation: Measuring audible, tactile, and thermal realities (e.g. moss softness, shade heat, sparrow counts).
Vulnerability: Looking for damage, loss, and erasure (e.g. foamed-in bird nests, clogged tree cavities, missing native flora, mass pruning gaps).
Bioacoustics: Listening to the urban soundscape (e.g. AC unit hums vs. bird calls, echoes off prefab concrete block walls, natural sounds than feel off).
Interrelationality: Mapping multi-species entanglements (e.g. ivy linking species, cat-sparrow truces, non-human residents who would notice your disappearance).
Upon returning from their 30-minute field wanderings, participants were asked to distribute their field research cards across four distinct boxes corresponding to the four attention modules. They had to decide for themselves where their responses belonged, based on their own personal reasoning. The resulting accumulation was not a pristine research. It was an unstable, multi-layered collective archive, part field notes, part speculative mapping, and part tactical publishing-ish object.

Embracing the Uncontainable
What does this synthesis of lab-rooted artistic practice, field research, alternative photography misuse, and speculative design ultimately accomplish? I can only hope it assists in exposing the chasm between how cities are planned and how life actually happens. Bureaucrats see green space as a formulaic metric of square meters per capita—a convenience to be shuffled around on zoning maps to justify concrete expansion. Field biologists see it as a complex, quantifiable web of species interactions. But the residents who live alongside Bucharest’s grădini de bloc—human and non-human alike—might experience it as a chaotic, intimate, emotional, feral territory, awaiting care and gentleness for mutual thriving.
I can only hope that, by bringing alternative photography's slow, light-sensitive philosophy out of the darkroom and into a vernacular space, Concrete & Canopy turns research into an act of temporal resistance. It gives both the artist, the researcher and the civil participant permission to step off the clock, to embrace the simple act of listening to something else than human speech and urban noise, or of watching something that isn’t visibly moving, as a legitimate form of inquiry. I can also hope that, by going through that process, one might acknowledge that the most vital ecological relationships in our city are often the ones happening silently, quietly, beneath our shoes, in the shadow of a feral tree who escape over pruning, thanks to at least one resident who took the time to notice them and stand up for them.