NOW/NO

Artists: Mălina Ionescu, Andreea Medar

The first in the series of land art interventions NOW / NO by Mălina Ionescu and Andreea Medar is located in the Unesco Hațeg Geopark. It is at the same time a response to the place itself, the landscape understood as synonymous with its geological, historical and cultural strata, and a continuation of a common project developed by the two artists since 2017. Now / No revisits a reinterpretation of communication and writing in a double way game of transforming the alphabet – the graphic sign is invested with a symbolic function, and the letter becomes a visual element. The signs on Codin Hill can be read as direct quotations from the history of the land, a wave to the marine creatures which swam in the Tethys Sea until 15 millionyears ago and continue to shape the identity of the places their fossils are being unearthed from. The three signs spell, in an alphabet created for this occasion, the word NOW – the present, the continuous time always between past and future, and in progress regardless of its place in the timeline. A series of a accidents and impossibilities misspelled the word, and the third letter is almost illegible. The resulting negation, unintended at first, wrote itself and added an activist dimension to the message that in phase 2 of the project will be spelled with planted trees.