The exhibition The World of Today and the Safety Zone – an investigation, created on the occasion of the 34th edition of the Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival and displayed in the corridors of the Theatre of Youth consists of Diagrams and mental sketches (plans and notes from various sources: books, magazines, encyclopedias, dictionaries, Internet, Wikipedia, Facebook, ChatGPT…)

‘I try to understand the world in which I live to see how I contribute to its being no worse than it is, if it can’t be better. Today’s world is more and more complicated, complex, and in continuous change, with technology hurrying everything along. Artificial intelligence is profoundly changing society, changing every one of us.

Problems are no longer just local but global: we are affected by global heating, we contribute to climate change, wars – we have one at our border in twenty-first-century Europe that reminds us of the Second World War… – after the Covid 19 pandemic, with its profound effect on the world economy, with billions of people living in extreme poverty, forced migration, slavery, vulnerable persons, social inequalities, ignorance, fake news / disinformation, the rise of populism, extremism, totalitarianism, violence, insecurity… sources of reliable news (?). Complicated. Everything is unstable. Anxiety, fear, depression. We have to adapt, to be flexible, to take care of ourselves, to work together to find solutions for survival, to do what we can where we are, to be responsible. We are in an emergency, mental and emotional resistance, we need critical thinking, creativity, empathy, compassion, continuous education, we need to look after our air, water, food.

Let’s build ourselves safety zones, minimal personal comfort zones, shared platforms.

(Everything is in motion, the Earth orbits the Sun at 30km/sec, the Sun orbits the centre of the Galaxy at 25 km/sec, the Galaxy moves in the Universe at 600 km/sec.)

I have the good fortune of doing what I like. It’s not easy. They always tell you you’re irrelevant or tolerated, although you know what your work is about. Without the stubbornness with which we seek survival strategies, observations, ideas, without our creativity, as humanists, we would sink into dystopia.’  – Lia Perjovschi

Born in Sibiu in 1961, Lia Perjovschi is a visual artist and curator. She lives and works in Sibiu and Bucharest. She is the founder and coordinator of CAA CAA (Contemporary Art Archive and Centre of Art Analysis), an organic project in progress, started in 1985 (and going under different names since then) and KM (Knowledge Museum), an interdisciplinary research project, which has run since 1999. Her activity may be summed up as a journey from her own body (through experiments, performance art) to the universal body of knowledge, a journey that has been presented in over 700 exhibitions, talks, and workshops all over the world.