“Love, Loss, and the Spaces Between” is a photographic project by artist Ioana Cristina Casapu, capturing the fleeting yet intimate connections we form with temporary living spaces. Created between 2015 and 2019, this collection features timed self-portraits taken by the artist with her phone in various short-term living spaces across European cities. The project explores how memory, the passage of time, and the impressions we leave behind anchor us to the history of a place, despite the transient nature of our stay.
“In 2015 I began secretly shooting nude pictures of myself in other people’s apartments. It felt like making love in people’s homes without them knowing.
I took these self-portraits throughout four and a half years, in various homes where I’d spent a few hours, a few days, a few months. None of the houses belong to me – there have been flats of my friends, sublet apartments I rented for myself, the homes of lovers or those of strangers. This series speaks of the momentary intimate connection we build with temporary living spaces. The world is unstable in all its aspects, yet our personal history is written in the walls that accommodate our very human experiences, even for short periods of time. Most of the homes where I shot these portraits are over 120 years old (sometimes 400), they have hosted the lives of at least six generations, and have survived the Second World War. These photographs remind me of every place where I loved, danced, slept, ate, thought, wrote and wept – in short, of every place where I have felt home in this world.
The last image (14) was taken in November 2019, in Berlin Schöneberg. It represents a farewell to an important chapter in my life which ended as I left that house. It bears the symbolic value of the light spaces which fill our lives once we have crossed on the other side of an experience that changes who we are fundamentally. I have the certainty I will (most probably) never revisit these homes again. Yet, I have had a difficult time departing from some of them, and the memories enclosed in those spaces have sometimes lingered for more than it was necessary. The project closes with a carte blanche: in making these images finally available to the public, I make my life available for new visions.” – Ioana Cristina Casapu
BIO
Ioana Cristina Casapu is a Romanian-born, Berlin-based author of novels, essays, and poems, with her work featured in over 30 anthologies and magazines in English, German, and Romanian. A journalist and artist, she uses her craft to explore independent ideas on feminism, migration, sexual politics, and loneliness. In 2024, she founded “Girl, Show Me That Body (of Work),” a series of literary and performance events organized by Lettrétage in Berlin. This initiative aims to showcase the work of women writers and artists with a migrant background, fostering a bridge between communication and experience, and encouraging not just the consumption of art, but also its active shaping and rethinking.
