My Sweet Elora
May We Be Glad To Gather Our Bones.
The Shape of Knowing
What once Was

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CV

Developed during artist-in-residence program in Bucharest, Romania.
Courtesy of BUCHARESTAIR. April-August 2026

‘‘May We Be Glad to Gather Our Bones’’ explores the enduring influence of Romania’s former secret police, the Securitate, through a performative reconstruction of historical narratives. The work also draws on the theoretical framework proposed by Katherine Verdery in relation to the Securitate archives: 

“Only by reading these narratives as ‘fiction,’ as ‘detective novels’ from the Cold War, do we get to the true political level of the files: that is their performativity, their creation and recreation of reality.”

Set in late-1980s Bucharest, the work follows an underground theatre group secretly developing a satirical play about the Securitate. As the actors transform themselves into officers and their relatives, rehearsals become increasingly tense. What begins as a playful ordeal slowly descends into a power struggle, as the same mechanisms of control they seek to parody begin to emerge within the group
itself.

The work draws on the visual archive of previous cinematic reenactments, incorporating two films that represent fundamentally different approaches to
historical reconstruction: ‘Reconstituirea’ (1960), a propaganda film made under and by the Securitate, and ‘Reconstituirea’ (1968), directed by Lucian Pintilie.

 By placing these two existing narratives alongside one another, the work examines how history can be constructed, staged, and manipulated through images.
Between these two existing narratives, the work introduces a third an final reenactment, constructed through personal testimonies and fictional reconstruction.

By bringing these layers together through consciously exaggerated playfulness, the project investigates how truth is produced through representation, and how
history can be reimagined through performativity and fabrication.

Ultimately becoming a tool for questioning and resisting the narratives through which that past has been constructed, thus considering the archive as a space where history can be rewritten and reclaimed.