We live in a world constantly shaped by the voracity with which the political and/or economic boundaries are set and tested, and the individual thresholds restyled at one’s pleasure. We base our common ground on agreed regulations, perfected laws, and conventional guidelines. We are concerned with edges and vicinities but most of the times our interests reflect the simple impulse to evict any oddity existing close to us, any incongruity which might contrast with the general expectations of life or might impede with what society urges us to do. The online space has become nowadays the preferred medium in the dissemination of the basic norms and standardized perspectives regarding the human condition, a free-to-take education, open for all, pleasing our eyes and minds with hopes of an effortless success and the mirage of an uncomplicated happiness. In the virtual reality anyone can play, adjust their own terms and normalise their relationships. Scrolling up and down the social sites and the various online platforms outlines the inner principle of this new agora, respectively that to remain virtually alive means to play the proactive card. One has to feed in real time the social networks in order not to be forgotten. Subjects, themes, memos, motivational discourses, petitions, creative writings are flowing non-stop. People unleash their spirits and behind the monitor act in good will. What happens in the backyard of our everyday life — that life that we actually live, at home where we sleep, we take our medications, go shopping, and pay our bills? One could say that it looks disconnected from the other self that posts every day something to the world. Are we as proactive in reality as we are online? Can we address the world in another way, allowing other (physical) zones of individual and collective negotiation to emerge, other forms of expressing our voices and building dialogues between us?

Let’s turn the lens towards the public space. It changed profoundly. The public space we knew in the 1990s, then in 2000s is not the same. It became even more regularised, privatised, and monopolized by commercials. Sometimes, it looks like an addendum of the online space. Still, the question that we can pose, after more than thirty-five years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, is how to tap the bottom of reality we all share today? How to capture the authentic feeling that drags people and influence their destinies? We can certainly ask ourselves if the civic centre might be still the ideal place for art to project scenarios, to collect feedbacks and engage in conversations with various communities? There is certainly a new dynamic. Things that concerned once art in the public sphere are effectively reconfigured as the mindset of people changed as well. And the centre of the city is not the right place to search for the fundamental concerns breathing in the society’s body, as there the terrain seems to be cleaned by any dirt. But the spaces of transit, the leftover territories and the margins of the city expose involuntarily the pitfalls of our enchanted and reformed reality. When we commute everyday by train, bus or metro, we sense the current social and economic emergences and the political slippages which contrast with the glossy picture kept safe by our computer screens. It has become evident that art’s presence in the public space is not the kind of one-time trial. On the contrary, it is a long and enduring process of adaptation, listening and establishing trust with individuals, communities, or institutions. Art has the potentiality to give back to society what the charming stories and posts shared online don’t: the possibility to doubt, to refuse idealisation and show the fragility of our lives, the cracks behind the shinny floors, the bitter taste of economic inequality. The task of art in not to decorate the vitrine of public sphere, but to slowly peel its layers until it reaches its core.

Alina Șerban is art historian, cofounder of the Institute of the Present, Bucharest and founder of the publishing programme P+4 Publications. Her research explores the history of the exhibitions and the non-linear historiographies of post-war Eastern European art and their specific theoretical and social contexts of manifestations. She has a particular focus on oral histories and artistic archives. She was grant recipient of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture & Theory (2022). Her recent projects include: the exhibition Matei Bejenaru: Songs for a Better Future (Moderna Galerija, MSUM) and Karton Tandem, a magazine dedicated to accidental encounters, free associations and experimentation in photography and literary writing (2025).