Sabina Suru and Andrei Tudose form the current core team of Marginal, a Romanian non-profit cultural organisation that supports and promotes interdisciplinary arts. Their toolkit includes technology, science, humanities, sociological studies – the list is extensive, and not unlike our own interests. In August 2024, we had the pleasure of being their local partner when they came to Oulu with Post-Digital Extensions, a project that emerged from a previous project: Post-Digital Intersections. The idea behind these projects is about bringing young artists, curators and mentors together. Post-Digital Intersections took place during Timișoara’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2023 and provided Marginal with plenty of experience that they were able to share within the context of Oulu 2026.
TaikaBox: To start with, can you describe what Marginal is and does, and tell us about your current project, Post-Digital Extensions?
Andrei Tudose: So… Marginal was basically just myself and Sabina, until a few months ago. We just got together, compared our ideas and our action plan, and building an NGO just came up. We started doing projects and, at a certain point, a couple of months ago, we did this thing that had an amazing response, when we practically just made an open call in Instagram, saying “We cannot do it alone, so anyone who wants to come do it, join us, work in the way we work, get paid – not much, but still, get paid for your work.” And we got quite a few people who came and said they wanted to join in. So, in the beginning it was just us, tossing ideas, and now, we have weekly committee meetings, of which one is happening right now as we speak.
Marginal does three main things, one of them, which Post-Digital Extensions is part of, is creating a framework for young artists or young people who want to explore art, to develop. The name was an irony of the “post” thing, actually, because we have posthumanism, post-everything, post-whatever – everything is “post”. But Post-Digital was all about freedom, freedom to talk with the general public in their own language, freedom to connect with others.
Other things that we do are that we try to support artists working with art and science or technology, and also promote art and science towards the general public, explaining what it is, how it works, and why we need it in our lives. We have a lot of projects in the works.
You’ve been in Oulu for a week, and we are now on our second day of a three-day exhibition, which is a fairly short time for an exhibition, but still. How do you feel this all has gone through? Are you happy with the results?
Andrei: It’s been amazing! The previous five or six days before the exhibition have been super intense, and rewarding seeing how Anca and Alexandra just bloomed – to an extent that nobody expected. The exhibition was also great, with about 800 people on the first day, a lot of them really proactive towards the artists and spending time on the installations, some 30-40 minutes discovering the art. It was a busy night for everyone, which we didn’t expect at all.
Sabina Suru: And also, what was supposed to be their projects initially got completely hijacked! When we arrived with the artists, they had more or less the complete idea, and when we went with John and Tanja to the island of Varjakka, it just completely changed. Everything they saw and experienced, it changed their perspective and made the whole concept of the work, which was localised in Timișoara, kind of uprooted from there and brought here, which changed everything they could mean – because they had to relocalise them and start a cultural dialogue with a new culture and a new history of loss and abandonment, which was very fascinating to see develop.
TaikaBox: Since the original artwork was quite large, wasn’t that the idea originally to redo the works locally once you arrived here?
Andrei: Not exactly, for instance, Alexandra’s work contained half a ton of rocks, so her initial plan was to get half a ton or rocks here and do the same thing! But once we went to Varjakka, it was a really touching experience for both artists, and it just made sense to abandon the initial plan, the initial work that she imagined, and work with what she found here, with the history of the saw mill community in Varjakka.
You mentioned the artists blossoming, sort of. What sort of development have you seen in recent days, and in what ways did they change?
Sabina: I’m going to take them one by one. In Anca’s case, for example, her initial project – we call it running away – somehow, the way she expressed it, was a story of running away from her own story, incorporating other peoples’ stories. And somehow, she figured she would take this, and contextualise not the actual work, but just the way it’s shown, and coming here and going to the island, hearing the stories there and seeing what remains – in a way, her idea of having small objects that embody stories of loss – here, it became entirely something else. And somehow, she found the courage to focus on herself and acknowledge her own story and work with that. We didn’t expect it, but were very happy, because we have encouraged her to be strong and face whatever it is she needs to face, and it was necessary, apparently, for her to come here to be able to do that.
And in Alexandra’s case, in her initial project, she focused on memories of houses that were gone in time. So she would interview people that would talk and describe houses that they had never in fact seen, because it had been their parents or grandparents who had lost the houses, but they remained very present in the families’ emotional heritage. So here, this changed completely, because here you had the sawmill that failed and uprooted not just a family but a whole community. And this changed her perspective on what a loss of an architectural piece can actually mean.
Andrei: And I think that it just gave scale to her work. It’s much bigger, and I think this led her to see the importance of her work, that her work is almost social activism, when we take an active stand with these stories, in Romania it was the acts of communists, or economical, as was the case with the sawmill.
You had six students in total in the artist group, curated by other students, and both groups were mentored by professional mentors. This is quite a novel approach, I think. What are the origins of how you came to this?
Andrei: As a lot of experiments, it came from our own frustrations with what we learned and did not learn in art school, or school in general. We started thinking of an alternative learning environment, where you don’t have teachers and students, but you have people with less experience and people with more experience, and they spend time together and talk. We experimented with different formats, different time lengths, different types of people who’d get in the programs. And last year, I think we did the most vicious take on the issues that we were exploring, and that was that learning to communicate is easier, that learning to communicate to the general public, learning to communicate to a curator, and learning to communicate about your art in general. Discovering the common language.
Sabina: Yeah, because we speak the same language, but we kind of don’t understand each other. You have an artist and a curator sitting at the same table, discussing the same concepts from various perspectives, and every time we talked with the artist and the curator separately, they understood entirely different things from each other. You would talk with the artists about the concept of their work and they would explain one thing, and then you would talk with the curator, and it was a different project – it wasn’t slightly shifted, it was something else completely.
Let’s talk about fitting other fields of expertise around cultural or art work. Art and tech don’t usually talk the same language, nor necessarily do cultural associations and companies – they talk about turnover, we talk about performances, for instance. Or with new artists, there are many practicalities that an emerging artist regardless of the field may not know. How difficult or easy do you feel changing the mentorship program into another field could be?
Andrei: I think, for us, it all comes down to two questions. Once the issue that the program wants to address has been isolated to the core – for instance, not knowing how to fill taxes is the superficial issue, but it’s not the core issue, and you have to go deeper and deeper to understand why, to find the reasons why that is so. It might be because the artist doesn’t talk to others, it might be that it’s not important to the young artist. That would be the first stage, and then you just have to find the right people to help the young artist address that problem. Whether it’s difficult or easy, well…
Sabina: I think it’s both easy and difficult, it’s very much how you go around it. Last year, for example, aside from the mentorship program, we were developing a project that was tackling problems related to new media cultural heritage, which is not preserved – half of it is just disappearing every day. One of the things we did with this project was having conversations with scientists, because one of the problems we isolated was the precarity of this art and technology collaboration, where they spoke different languages and couldn’t find the middle ground. And, for example, in these conversations with scientists from research institutes, the real problem was the expectations and preconceptions. The scientists’ preconception was that the artist has an idea that is based on inspiration, and then go to the studio and do their work, and they have all this liberty to create whatever they want, while the scientists have to respect their specific methodology.
And artists have the impression that scientists work in this very rigid system, that it’s a strict route from A to B. And neither assumption is true. So I started explaining to the scientists the methodology of artistic research – you have a hypothesis, you check what other people have written about it and what they say of the art, and you have a peer review and you interview people to see what they do, and you go on with your theoretical research and then move on to the experimental one, and then you prototype and then do the work. And the scientist was flabbergasted, saying “That’s the same methodology that we use!” OK! And then she started telling of her own methodology, which seemed to be very much trial and error. It seemed the very opposite I had assumed of what she does, and she said that “the methodology is just as you described as an artist, and just like you, in the experimental stage we have a lot of trial and error – mostly error”. They have a lot of failures and have to often fall into conditions that limit what they can do, just like in the arts. So, I feel that if we could include this kind of approach into the mentorship program, to make artists and cultural managers and curators and scientists and technologists to sit down in the same table and realise that they have very similar methodologies, we might be able to bring people to work together in more transdisciplinary manner than we have so far.
I’m starting to wonder if there is a possibility of adding to all these layers of expertises – science is basically doing more to existing things, existing breakthroughs or advances. What if we treat art in the same way, putting something on top of it and adding to the piece?
Andrei: Often artists, not only visual artists but musicians and so forth, have this misconception of having to learn to do everything by themselves, adding layers upon layers upon layers. I think this is one of the most damaging things for themselves. One of the things we are doing is not adding layers of skills upon individuals, but teaching individuals how to collaborate with people who possess layers of skills they need.
Sabina: Yeah, and while doing this, you have a lot of new ideas coming in – people from various fields who have very different perspectives on the same thing, for example. And eventually, you’re kind of boiling these together, melting them in one pot, and then you have entirely new ideas than the ones you initially came in with.
How do you evaluate what works and what doesn’t?
Sabina: I think that lately we’ve been focusing a lot on feedback. The first few sessions were based on what we isolated as needs – the first one was the need for young artists fighting to get paid and be treated as professionals, instead of glorified hobbyists. The second was bringing students from various fields, sometimes from the same university, who didn’t know each other, and bring them work in teams. And then we had critical mass to ask them what they think they need. And their answer was that they would love to work with their peers – as mentors. So, the next edition was for them to organise this for themselves. We had the alumni of the first two editions becoming mentors for their colleagues and their younger colleagues. This was a beautiful addition.
Andrei: The other day, we were talking with Anca about her process and where she’s at, and we spent hours on end talking about it. And then Andreea, who is first time in the process, just gasped: “Damn, you’re patient!” [laughter] I think that the best revelation is just giving it time. If you give enough time and pay enough active attention to what is happening around you, you’ll see the results. This is in the short term, although the patience makes it seem like the long term, but it’s not. In the long term, you’ll get to see around you the impact you create – like, the first mentorees wanted to become mentors, wanted to bring the same feel and opportunity and knowledge to others. In Alexandra’s case, she became more critical and started asking more questions. So, you can see the change around you.
Have you received feedback of your methodology from the government side, or the educational side – has it been noticed elsewhere?
Andrei: No. Well, yeah, on a peer-to-peer level.
Sabina: Yeah, not on the big scale, but we’ve had conversations with some of the dedicated and invested teachers, who have encouraged students to work with us, to notice us.
Andrei: I kind of like it this way – it gives us more independence. It’s not about officials noticing us and giving more money, but then we would have to have a stricter approach.
Sabina: Yeah, and that would require we would have to have a structure that could be easily multiplied. This way, we have the freedom to give the sort of fluidity to just adapt every edition to crazy feedback or ideas from the alumni. And if we’d become a bigger institution, we’d lose that.
After Post-Digital Extension ends, what then? What will you do next?
Andrei: I think we’ll stick with Post-Digital as a concept. What I’d love to do next – because, when we started out a few years ago, we were maybe in over our heads, and we thought that this is an issue we’re experiencing. But the more we did it, the more we connected with other cities in Romania, with different types of artists in different stages and in different geographies, going abroad. And we found out that our issue is really a general issue. We don’t have a magic recipe, but we have the patience to listen and the desire to find others who want to do stuff. So, what I’d love us to do is to extend the project, to expand the network and see where that takes us. We might reach a critical mass where some positive change can happen and change the system overall.
The rest of the Marginal people are meeting right now, discussing which are going to be our future projects. For next year’s funding, we have told them that we two are going to be there guiding you, but the projects are theirs.
Sabina: Because some of them are very young – bright students but not necessarily with a lot of management experience. So, we’re there to have their backs, not exactly mentoring but being there when they need us.
The Marginal team were staying at the World Music School – Air, hosting an exhibition at the Oulu Culture Lab (a culture space hosted by Oulu Urban Culture) during Oulu Arts Night. The artists in residence were Anca Șișu and Alexandra Costea, with documentation by Andreea Sasaran. Mentors who were in Oulu with Andrei and Sabina were Annick Bureaud and Janek Swierkowski.
Andrei Tudose and Sabina Suru were chatting with Pasi Pirttiaho