Ballad of Import-Export: Harvesting Gas and Grapes

A gas-pipe sculpture, inspired by Moldovan centralized gas pipeline network.

When Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 in Moldova, it left behind an economic, informational, and spiritual vacuum, filed by chaos and corruption, along a vast and corroded centralised network of pipes, originally created to distribute cheap gas, which is not the case anymore. One can observe the inherited and ever-evolving relationship between the state and its citizens, by looking at the material state of the critical infrastructure.
The installation reveals the fragmented informational landscape in Moldova, shaped by the friction between conflicting political and national identities, and the inconsistency of the energetic security, always vulnerable and dependent on volatile power relations, be they political or economic.

Through an archive of anonymous social media poetry-traces, the energy infrastructure is exposed as dismembered, into a haunted psycho-geography inhabited by souls living in a state of continuous anticipation, for futures that never arrived, in between temporalities.

A manually powered, hybrid grape-destemmer machine that does fortune-telling.

In the last twenty years, Moldova has become an important fruit and wine exporter, following its long-established, Soviet-time legacy, as an agrarian nation, and further branding itself in that way.
Historically, in the absence of foreign influence, grape harvesting has always been a collective activity in village communities, rooted in agrarian spirituality, which came to signify bonding through work and hardship. Undocumented, unregulated, unspoken of. Increasing export demands, along with regulations on how, and what to harvest, are transforming this local activity, amplifying its scale towards a singular purpose of production, and capital accumulation.

The grape destemmer machine is inspired by local Moldovan home-crafted, wine-making tools found in rural areas, with blades, conveyor belts adapted to enhance its functionality, towards automated harvesting tractors, and general universalization of technology. The machine acts as a fortune-telling tool, since the grapes are separated from the stem, falling down into two distinct containers, therefore pointing towards contradictory scenarios for the future of grape harvesting, and the craft around it.