TOTU MOARE ÎN ROMÂNIA
Georgiana Mirea
Performance/Ritual
This thesis emerges from the need to explore, through artistic practice and theoretical reflection, the experience of forced migration as a fracture that runs through memory, family ties, and the body. The work takes an autoethnographic perspective, weaving together personal narrative, performance, and cultural analysis to investigate how absence, nostalgia, and longing shape diasporic experience. At the center of the research is pomana, a Romanian funerary ritual reimagined as a performative gesture and act of poetic resistance. Transposed from the domestic sphere to a public space, the ritual takes on a new function: not only to commemorate, but to share and make visible the migratory rupture. The concept of dor, a deep emotional state of longing and loss, runs through the entire project as its affective and narrative engine. The performance proposes a symbolic alternative to private mourning, transforming it into a collective space of care and imagined reconnection. In this way, art becomes a tool to redefine belonging, to create ties in absence, and to inhabit the space between what has been lost and what can still be generated.
