Oana Clitan

In my practice I use speculative worldbuilding to explore systems humans create to navigate uncertainty. My narratives come from imagining responses to crises happening in our present world, which is why I am particularly interested in how digital infrastructures shape these systems. The construction of these worlds always starts with research, grounded in historical accounts and archives, which I then reinterpret and reimagine in an alternative future scenario. I explore how people respond, adapt, and reorganize within this new reality, science fiction films and literature being a big inspiration. Having experienced myself a society rebuilding itself during my childhood in post-communist Romania, I became very aware of how cultural narratives are shaped and manipulated. Later, my studies in graphic design made me aware of the mechanisms through which ideology is communicated. I work across audiovisual installation, video and textile, selecting each medium for how its materiality, scale and narrative possibilities can reveal different dimensions of my speculative scenarios. I use advertising materials such as posters and flyers, alongside symbolic technological artifacts and mythic motifs as entry points into these worlds, carrying traces of ideology and social values. In the past years my practice has revolved around a long-term project set in a dystopian Rotterdam. www.oanaclitan.com