Accelerator Today

Andrei is a gallerist and a cultural manager, president of Asociația Culturală Eastwards Prospectus. He did Business Administration studies in Romania and France. With a M.A. degree in cultural management at INSEEC Paris and following his international experience in the field, he opened a gallery in Bucharest, in 2014. Ana-Ilinca is a communication strategist, with expertise in multinationals, where she has been a department head for 14 years, and in PR conducted for institutions such Word Bank or EU-related. In Accelerator, she was a cultural mediator and ensured a consistent external positioning of the programme, developing relevant content to enable a substantiated debate on contemporary art.
Accelerator Today podcast doesn't end with this episode and the Accelerator project. Mentorship and Production for Emerging Artists. It will continue and as a vibrant part of the work of Asociația Culturală Eastwards Prospectus and Gaep Gallery. We wll come back soon!

Georgia Țidorescu is a young curator based in Bucharest. Since 2018, she has been working in exhibition production for various institutions and organizations. Currently, Georgia is in an experimental phase of discovering her curatorial practice. Within Accelerator. Mentoring and Production Programme, she is Technical Coordinator, handling the production and technical matters of the project, with a significant contribution in coordinating and implementing its public art stage.

"It seems to me that one of the things that I have seen the most so far, in my of activity, is a public who wants to understand, but somehow it passes by a people reluctant to explain some things, which then become elitist and contemporary art ends up being in a bubble. "

“They say history is written by winners. Probably a good deal of history is somehow filtered, tainted or affected by how winners interpreted the outcome. And art gives you the opportunity to learn to look at things from a different angle. It challenges you to see things in a different way.”

Albert Davidoglu has been CEO of Macromex since November 2019. He joined Macromex’s management team in 2012, in the role of Business Development Director, and took over as Chief Operating Officer (COO) in 2017. Macromex is the undisputed leader in the food industry in the frozen and chilled segment in Romania, owner of the brands Edenia, La Strada, Corso, Food & Glory and Azuris. This year, the company celebrates 30 years since it has ben founded.

The guest of this edition of the podcast is Raluca Șoaita, co-founder of Gaep Gallery and founder of Tesseract Architecture, the only architecture studio specialized in the medical field in Romania.

I think what I want is already happening. We see that art got much closer to the human dimension, the community, the social dimension. We see that art that is made by large teams, large communities. We saw that at Documenta this year. We see that art gets closer to architecture and that architecture gets closer to art. Architecture focuses much more on what the user and has reduced scale. The emotional element is being brought up more and more. From my point of view, this is a totally new way forward and it is very interesting to see how it develops.

"When you walk into that place - be an art gallery, a museum - walk in, leave everything in behind, without any prejudice, without any preconceptions and let yourself be surprised. That’s all. You have to see what you feel when you see that work of art. And whether it will give you a taste, a feeling, a thrill, that's what art and access to art is all about."

The guest of this episode of the Accelerator Today podcast is Răzvan Copoiu, CEO of Signify Romania and 10 other countries in the South-East Europe region (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Republic of Moldova, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia and Kosovo) since August 2020.

Răzvan has extensive expertise in B2B sales management of electrical and renewable energy equipment, industrial automation as well as software, IoT and Cloud solutions, as a result of over 20 years of experience and international exposure, in the energy and industrial sectors, both in the private and public sectors, in Romania and other European countries.

Ruxandra Miuți are studii de licență în inginerie, un MBA și specializări în marketing, monitorizarea strategiilor de specializare inteligentă și economie circulară.

S-a implicat ca expert sau consultant în proiecte din domenii diverse, de la tehnologii digitale la industrii creative și culturale, având o contribuție în adoptarea inovării în conceptele proiectelor culturale. În proiectul ACCELERATOR, a realizat studiul UNVEILING PERSPECTIVES: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES OF CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART, o cercetare a practicilor artistice în artele vizuale europene.

În prezent, Ruxandra este Innovation Manager la Green Digital Innovation Hub.

This episode is a cozy interaction with Marius Perșinaru, business men, C-level manager and entrepreneur and a der fried of Gaep Gallery and of Asociatia Culturală Eastwards Prospectus.

Apart from being Executive Director of The French Trade, Industry and Agriculture Chamber from Romania (CCIFER), Adriana Record is a key stakeholder, a true supporter, with a deep interest in the contemporary art arena.

In a dialogue with Andrei Breahnă, co-founder of Gaep Gallery , she reveals her insights, from the point of view of audiences, with regards to the role of contemporary art in Romania, how to connect with contemporary art and many other super-interesting topics.

I was born in ‘the place where nothing happened’ and have been in a love-hate relationship with Bucharest for the past twelve years. Walking alongside the quotidian, holding on details and trying to deal with (the perception of) space, I probably still think as a painter hidden under the vast, succinct and long ‘interdisciplinary’ term.

After engineering, graphic arts and product design studies, Lucia Ghegu (born in 1990) earned a research scholarship at Accademia di Romania in Rome (2018-2020) during which she developed an artistic project on the impact of post-communist migration on the Romanians living in Italy. In her recent works that include both large-scale drawings, light installations and objects on the border between sculpture and product design, she is interested in architectural space, mobility understood as fluidity, migration, community, identity, constant tension between expectations and reality, but also the poetics and aesthetics of the image. Lucia frequently chooses drawing as a solution against the hyper-technological trend, a quick and spontaneous note that mediates the transition from idea to object and documents the process.

Personal history often marks the starting point in her research, which develops in anthropological, social or architectural directions. Lucia Ghegu seeks the intersection points between personal and universal histories, aiming through to ask questions, to push towards direct experiences and not to offer answers or categorical situations. 

Details on: www.accelerator-mentorat.ro

Maria Mandea (born in 1991) is an artist working with the medium of play. She graduated from the Product Design department at UAUIM Bucharest in 2017 and is currently enrolled in the Doctoral School at UNArte Bucharest, where she researches play design in a social context.

With a background in product and stage design, her recent work explores participative situations in which she invites visitors to become performers and co-creators of the artwork. 

She developed “Micul Haos” in 2013, a toy design project based on an original concept on the border between toys and participatory art objects. In 2021, she co-founded Știrbei47, an open studio and space for emergent and participatory art in Bucharest.

Maria takes part in Accelerator. Mentoring and Production for Emerging Artists programme.

We are inviting you to a brave conversation between one of the artists who are part of Accelerator program - Roberta Curcă - and Andrei Breahnă, gallerist, cultural manager and project manager of Accelerator.

From sources of inspiration to education - from current challenges to dear projects, every conversation with Roberta makes you wonder what you can do more to push yourself to become better at what you do as an artist or as professional in any other field.

(...) "The small drawing – it is small because it's inspired from the sample books area, from the samples I found at the flea markets at TEROM, the synthetic fabric factory in Iasi, because it inspired me a lot as this factory no longer exists. There was still this object, which I found. I also found very interesting this relationship with time, i.e. how you have something that should give you a sample of something, but that something actually no longer exists. And I started to ruminate on this idea. I really want to take it further, from drawing into the object area." - Roberta Curc[

From Philosophy and literature studies – to art. From photography to sculpture. In the conversation with Delia, we understand what makes sense to her as an artist and what she wants to offer to the audience, by the means of her practice.

“My photography is object-oriented. I haven’t been interested in portrait or landscape and my objects are generally ordinary and cold at the first sight. They are bricks, blocks of metal, or deserted houses. But they are objects that very often hide vulnerability and fragility, which become symbols.

I often photograph such objects then I connected them in books (my series of photographs are compiled in books). So, it was natural for me to start get to the object itself, the sculpture which is presented at Gaep, Back To Where It All began exhibition.

It was a paradox. I was expecting to be uncomfortable, but the moment I got from drawing to the actual object, I realized how much joy there actually is in physically working with your hands.

We are inviting your to listen to a vivid dialogue between Þorlákur Einarsson, director i8 Gallery from Reykjavik, Accelerator International Partner, and Andrei Breahna, president of Asociația Culturală Eastwards Prospectus, and co-founder of Gaep Gallery in Bucharest about the Icelandinc visual arts in the larger national cultural context, about how i8 gallery's program focuses on a mix of national and international artists thus promoting local artists on the international arena. Last but not least, the guest of Accelerator Today podcast explains the key factors to be taken into account by emerging artists to make it in the artistic world and develop a smooth and vigorous transition to the established artist status.

We kick off our podcast via a vivid dialogue between Andrei Breahnă, Accelerator project manager, and Ana Ilinca Macri, Accelerator cultural mediator. This is an invitation to enter our world. How and, most of all, why Accelerator was brought to life – you will find out in our first episode.

We will also share our success and plans for 2023.