TAKING OFF (2014)

Coordinator: Cristian Nae

Collaborators:

Camera and cut: Andrei Cozlac

Costume design: Daniela-Cristina Manole

10-28 February 2014

Istituto Romeno di Cultura e Ricerca Umanistica di Venezia

This exhibition was inspired by Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, 1986), itself rooted in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). The theory explores how human beings cope with the existential anxiety provoked by the awareness of mortality. It proposes that we overcome this fear through the construction of cultural worldviews—systems of shared beliefs that provide meaning, order, and the promise of symbolic or literal immortality. By identifying with these belief systems and maintaining self-esteem through socially valued roles, individuals are able to mitigate the terror of their own impermanence.

Becker argued that culture’s psychological function is not to reveal truth, but to obscure the unbearable possibility of annihilation. This idea became the conceptual core of the project, an installation composed of old, painted vintage objects arranged within a cabinet of curiosities. These found objects, once cherished and now obsolete, evoked both decay and remembrance—symbols of our continuous attempt to resist disappearance through material traces.

The exhibition also included a series of drawings, a sound installation and a video centered on the notion of symbolic immortality. In the video, pages are ripped from a notebook filled with poems and sketches, an act oscillating between destruction and preservation. Each torn page, filmed in close detail, transforms into a metaphor for the fragile persistence of memory and creative expression. Together, the objects, drawings, and video formed a poetic reflection on mortality, legacy, and the human need to find permanence within transience.