Round 1. Winning Project.
One day, her house was empty
Tracing memory through light, surveillance and inherited silence
What happens when a house keeps the memory of what was never fully spoken?
In One day, her house was empty., artist Letiția Popa looks back towards the history of surveillance in former Communist Romania and explores how political and systemic oppression continue to leave traces in the present. The project begins from intimate questions: how does inherited violence alter our idea of home? How does intergenerational trauma shape the way we love, remember and speak? And what remains inside a family after years of silence?
The work is deeply influenced by the stories of the artist’s father and grandparents, but also by more recent political tensions, including the cancellation of the Romanian presidential elections in December 2024. Between family history and collective instability, the installation becomes a space where personal memory and political memory meet.
At the heart of the project is a layered visual and spatial experience. The installation is built from five plexiglass walls, each approximately two meters high, connected through thin metal supports. These transparent panels create angular structures that resemble both architectural fragments and unstable memory surfaces. A lace cloth is placed between the structures, becoming both a projection surface and a symbolic filter.
This detail is central to the work. The lace does not simply receive the image; it transforms it. As projected light passes through the floral embroidery, the image becomes fragmented, softened and almost spectral. The result is a subtle holographic effect, where the projected material appears to float between object, screen and atmosphere.
The moving-image component combines archival footage preserved by Eye Film Museum with personal footage recorded in both The Netherlands and Moldova. Actresses Cătălina Romaneț and Ela Ionescu appear in the visual material, adding a performative layer to a project that moves between documentary fragments, fictional elements and emotional reconstruction.
Technology plays an important role, but not as spectacle. The technical setup includes an Optoma ZK507 4K projector and a Panphonics Audio Element Actief sound shower system. Together, these tools create a visual, spatial and sonic environment that is intimate and unstable. The audience does not simply watch the work from one fixed position. Instead, they are invited to move around it, to shift perspective and to experience the images through transparency, reflection, distance and sound.
The final installation feels ghostly and fragile. Images do not remain fixed. They pass through material, lace, space and memory. The viewer is placed inside a structure that feels like the remains of a former home, or perhaps the emotional architecture of a memory that can no longer be fully reconstructed.
The collaborative and production process behind the work also shaped its final form. Working with actresses, an assistant producer and different types of visual material required logistical coordination, travel planning and careful organisation. At the same time, the process opened space for experimentation. Letiția describes learning to let go of fixed expectations and become more open to feedback, uncertainty and transformation.
Through One day, her house was empty., Letiția Popa creates a work about inheritance, silence and the invisible structures that remain inside families, homes and histories. The installation does not offer a clear answer. Instead, it asks the viewer to search for traces, to move through fragments and to reflect on how the past continues to shape the rooms we live in today.
In the context of TECA, the project reflects the power of technology as a sensitive artistic tool. Projection, sound, archival footage and sculptural installation come together not to clarify memory, but to make its fragility visible.
Letiția Popa
Letitia Popa is a Romanian filmmaker, visual artist and researcher based between Bucharest and Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Art critique by Marina Krsmanovic Savic, visual artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina
The artwork “One day her house was empty” by Mrs. Letitia Popa can be considered a complex discourse of memory, emotion and history. It transforms the exhibition space into an immersive experience, where the spectator is transported into a new world of image, sound and light. By combining archival materials, found footage and personal narrative and projecting them onto a transparent plexiglass surface, it allows light to fragment itself, creating an illusion of reality, as if the viewer is walking through embodied memories. The lace curtains function as a bridge between fact and intimate memories. To a certain degree they create an illusion of a large window in the exhibition space, through which the spectator watches history unfold. In this way, the viewer is no longer a mere onlooker, but a witness to what happened and how it felt. The sounds incorporated into the final artwork experience deepen the emotional level of the observer’s presence, leading the viewer into a completely new experience of empathy.
Placing the artwork into a dark room, where light from the projector travels without barriers and onto transparent materials, creates an atmosphere where the artwork is not only an image but a fragment of history and memory. It reminds us that history is not only a series of factographical information, but a lived, witnessed, emotional and physical experience.
Two collaborative projects. Two different ways of looking at memory, evidence and technology.
Through TECA, artists from Romania, Serbia and the wider region explore how digital tools can support contemporary artistic processes — not only by creating new images, but by opening new ways of questioning what we see, what we remember and what we inherit.
From projection and sound installations to digitally altered photo-video works, these projects show how technology can become a space for artistic research, cultural exchange and emotional storytelling.