Little has changed in the space my grandparents called home for over five decades, in a small village by the Danube's muddy shores in Southeast Romania.

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There is no other setting so profoundly rooted in my consciousness. It is a place where I can revert to childhood innocence and curiosity, but also become painfully aware of the passage of time.

 

Time Capsule examines our relationship with memory, possessions, and place, questioning how human connections are constructed through physical objects and how material remnants continue to shape our emotional landscapes long after we are gone.

 

The work began as quiet observation, a way of bearing witness to a life still being lived. After my grandparents passed, I returned with a different kind of need, to rediscover what remained of them, to hold on a little longer to what their hands had touched, chosen, and kept. They were no longer there, but the space remained full of who they were, and who they still are. Objects carefully curated and cherished, set aside in a ritual-like manner, neither discarded nor forgotten, each one a quiet and quick trigger capable of collapsing time and pulling the past back into the present. Plastic flowers in an antique vase, a candy bowl hidden behind the blinds that secretly stored sweets for me as a child, a framed photo of my grandparents before they married, a travel journal covering 14 years, a bookshelf filled to the brim by my late bibliophile grandfather.

 

Inviting viewers into a preserved world, the series explores how objects become silent storytellers of family history, childhood memories, and the passage of time, shaping our identities and, in their quiet persistence, holding space for memory and loss.