Maria Romania

Kruse, Calin

Regular price €18,00

“Maria is a 72 year old woman who lives in a small village in the South-West of Romania, right next to the Serbian border. Despite of her age, she keeps an enormous 6-room-house – that she inhabits after the death of her husband all alone – animals and several fruit and vegetable gardens.

Her day begins at 6 in the morning with washing and milking the cow before sending it off to the fields, and ends at midnight cleaning the kitchen. She spends a majority of her day feeding and cooking for the animals – she has some chickens, turkeys, a pig, a dog, three sheeps, some geese and many cats. Besides, the house has two adjoining gardens that Maria cares for.

Maria never traveled. Only once she went to a circus to Bucharest, as she was 17 years old.”

a loving photographic portrait of a remarkable woman’s everyday life in rural Romania, full-page b/w photographs of Maria and her house and village, as well as some colour photographs printed on smaller pages, these pictures, according to the artist, “are not a portrait of Romania” but rather “show a subjective memory of what I [the artist] lost, of what in a few decades is going to be lost for ever”, soft cover, 18 x 13 cm, 64 not numbered pages, signed and numbered/100, 1st ed., (Leipzig) 2012