As part of the 2025 edition of the Artists Play with Time project, artist Denis Flueraru held a five-hour workshop dedicated to the discovery of hidden sound. The event brought together young participants from diverse artistic backgrounds who shared an interest in sound performance and experimental art. \n
During the session, participants learned about the principles and potential of contact microphones, exploring how these devices can capture vibrations and sonic textures usually imperceptible to the human ear. Guided by Denis, each participant built their own microphone from scratch, experimenting freely with materials and forms, and testing their creations in real-time.
The workshop encouraged play and curiosity — participants recorded, listened, and interacted with the surrounding environment, uncovering unexpected acoustic details in ordinary objects. The session concluded with a collaborative sound experiment, where individual recordings were brought together into a collective composition using Ableton Live. \n
Each of the seven participants left the workshop with their own handmade contact microphone — a unique, experimental tool to be used in future creative projects. \n
Through this workshop, Denis Flueraru continued his exploration of the intersections between technology, memory, and decay. Using experimental instruments and interactive installations, his practice reveals hidden sonic layers within urban and natural environments. His works have been presented at Ars Electronica (Linz), Fête des Lumières (Lyon), MNAC (Bucharest), Mobius (Bucharest), and the National Museum of Art (Brașov), among others. \n

Ana Catalina Gubandru, Eugen Nelutescu, Louis Kareem Jamal, Mihai Paluga, Ruxandra Lipan

Artistx: Laure Boer, Catalina Gubandru, Lăcrămioara Grozăvescu, Hedieh Khajehzadeh aka I-ID, Thibault Jehanne, Kashual Plastik, Florine Mougel, Onur Sekmen, Sashe Urdovski, Perig Villerbu, Andreea Vlăduț \n
Credits for our contribution Network of ideas: Ingrid Ene, Cyrill Lim, Daria Nedelcu
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Cassette Release: Artists Play with Time 2022 \n
Cristian-Emanuel Opriș, Maatus Pealler, Alex Stingu, Mieresch, Mujko, Dolores Mondo Stash, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, SCREW, Miron Ghiu, ardb, Florence Hammer, Lautremoi, Andrei Raicu & Bogdana Dima, Jotunn \n

The Artists Play with Time project began in 2022 with an installation by Ingrid Ene – an instrument made of old clocks connected through contact microphones. The mechanical ticking could be shaped, combined with the human voice, or integrated with other musical instruments, becoming the starting point for artists from Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Bucharest, and several residency programs to create their own compositions. Their recordings were collected on the online platform www.artistplaywithtime.ro, and during the opening event the cassette collection from the first edition will be presented. \n
For its second edition, the project emphasized its inherently mobile and expansive nature by envisioning an open-ended creative network. Within this framework, the artistic object could travel indefinitely, without a fixed route or any appointed nodes from a centre. Over the past few months, the clock-based sound installation has functioned as a mobile instrument, passed along by a spontaneously formed network of artists. This network expanded through association, as each participant invited another artist to join the project. \n
Ingrid Ene started by sending the installation to Andreea Vlăduț, who then passed it on to Florine Mougel—thus expanding the network. Each artist received the installation by mail, used it to create a sound performance, action, or impulse, and then mailed it to another artist of their choosing to continue the process. \n
During the installation's circulation, two invited artists—Lăcră Grozăvescu (working with textiles, photography, and family archives) and Cătălina Gubandru (who engages with body, text, and objects in participatory configurations) responded to the sound pieces arriving from the network. They developed new or acted upon existing projects inspired by the audio material. In this way, the project remained true to its original impulse: associative connectivity. \n
Rather than encouraging clearly defined projects in response to a single theme for a short-term exhibition, the project fosters real and imaginary, human–nonhuman, social and artistic connections within a long-term framework. Artists use the provided artistic object as a creative tool. In turn, their sound-based responses become triggers that inspire or challenge other existing or emerging art projects. In this way, the works open pathways for experimental dialogue and uncover connections between participants. At the same time, the network gathers fragments of life into an idea, reshapes ordinary objects and sounds into instruments and allows past contributions to settle into imaginative impulses that inspire future actions. \n
During the opening night, visitors will have the opportunity to take part in an interactive performative action, where they can taste drinks created and selected by the artists participating in the 2025 edition. Each drink carries a nostalgic character and is designed to act as a memory trigger, evoking personal recollections or significant moments from the participants’ lives, creating a dialogue between individual experiences and the creative universe of the installation.

”Ingrid Ene's solo show ”Windows of future past” reflects on time and memory, from subjective experiences, to collective nostalgias. After a year of live performances, audio recordings and open-calls as part of the ”Artists Play With Time project”, the artist continues the cross-media dialogue she initiated in visual form, through an installation of photography and video works presented at the Diptych art space in Bucharest. The show also marks the launch of the artistsplaywithtime.ro website, where viewers can explore all of the sound works recorded during the project.\n

Time, especially in such divergent worlds as they exist now - digitally personal, memory-linked to our present, impossibly future-aimed – is acoustically ascetic, stuck to its disyllabic symbolic rhythm. Multiplying the arrow of time in all of its layers, from the individual, to the historical, from the singular thread of nostalgia to a collective experience of our histories, we can imagine how the sound wave-length fluctuates in multiples, reverberating through time as a fluid force that we are connected to.\n

Likewise, Ingrid Ene, in her collectively-minded solo show, departs from a singular memory, that of her grandparent’s house. During her childhood, a wound-up spring clock would fill the silence during quiet nights as adults would care for the elderly, where three generations lived under the same roof and for whom a sound of a ticking clock drew different shapes of time.\n

The works presented in the exhibition invite us to reflect on how the past influences our reactions in the present and future. The images in the photographic and video installation works are part of the artist's personal archive, intuiting how nostalgia connects personal biographies with collective biographies, as theorized by Svetlana Boym in her book, ”The future of nostalgia”. Ingrid Ene renders this approach in a dialogue with the invited artists, through the visual association of photography with sound compositions created throughout the project.\n

The exhibition is otherwise set up as a scenography, a theater outside of the time-space continuum, where images, sounds, retro-screenings are linked with the main source of observation and the beating heart of the art space: the generating installation of clocks and sound-works. The time pieces connected through wired microphones seem to be making up the parts for a larger mechanical durational body – that can be tweaked, adjusted, played at, ideally warping our own sense of the now.\n

From this vantage point, a visual realm opens up, a journey through collectively recognizable outside and inside spaces that seem to be recollected from a vision of our past together. A staircase entrance, a lone neon sign, the details of a car snowed in memories we can no longer properly retrieve separately, but only together.” curatorial text by Cristina Stoenescu\n


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