ADMA 2025-2026

BLOOMING MATRENCES [a ‘maternal’ Șezătoare]

On Maternal Care, Collective Listening & Creating

As a Romanian architect, Montessori educator and mother I started in the fall of 2025 to build, in Brussels, Belgium, through close social interaction, repeated co-designing and making, positioning towards the participants, reaction, and repositioning, a space of encounter, listening and creating with Romanian mothers and children with ages between three and twelve years old, living in Belgium.

My research process, immediately influenced by quotidian, personal narratives and dialogues, (feminine) communitarian collaboratives seeks methods of thinking with and through each other’s experiences and stories. Moreover, I consider that the maternal experience has a strong connection between emotions and the body, is a place that can welcome experiments, feeds from community collaborations, has a performative element and must include an abundance of children’s games. These are all elements that I find relevant within my artistic research.

maternal_conversations 1__collaborative work done with my daughter

The BLOOMING MATRENCES [a ‘maternal’ Șezătoare] artistic research focuses on maternal care, collaborative listening and creating. In the research process I work with the questions: Can we build relationships through collective art? Can a developed program support, encourage and nurture a connection between mothers, negotiate ways of interacting, creating, and working together? How can art and design include a place for discussing about maternity as a participatory practice?

Matrescence is the physical, psychological, and emotional transformation which a woman goes through when becoming a mother. This period, similar to adolescence, it is a complex developmental phase dominated by considerable hormonal shifts, changes in identity and the reshaping of relationships and social roles. Defined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s and further reviewed by psychologists, the concept aims to normalize the identity crisis and possible turbulent emotions that often accompany new motherhood, while placing them as a completely foreseen and natural developmental stage. The title of the research also includes the word Şezătoarea (șezătoare, noun; plural: șezători. Şezătoarea is derived out of the verb a ședea (‘to sit’) which describes an old Romanian custom, defining a gathering of people, especially women, most of the times alongside their children, who came together on winter nights to engage in activities such as crocheting, weaving, storytelling, and singing. This traditional community social gathering blended successfully collective manual work with entertainment, folklore, and socializing. Villagers, often organized by location or age group would meet, through rotation, in a host house and bring portable work: spinning wool, knitting, embroidering etc. This work was mostly done by women. Sometimes, later in the evening, the men and local youth would join in, and the environment would shift - food and drinks were shared, while playing musical instruments, singing folk songs, telling stories, or reciting poetry. Șezătoarea acted like a community glue, a courting ground for the young participants and a living library, through the oral passing down of the heritage from older generations to younger ones.

My mother's socialist type apartment block_collaborative work done with my daughter

During the last year, within the BLOOMING MATRENCES research, I chose to explore the tensions that are born from situating myself as: not a (practicing) architect & not an artist, the individual before motherhood & being a mother, not in Romania & not in Belgium (or from Romania & living in Belgium) and a motherless daughter & the mother of a daughter.

As a first step of my artistic research, during the 2025 fall I made a first open call out of four I envisioned, in order to approach women living in Belgium to discuss the experience of motherhood. Forty-eight women responded and out of them thirty-nine were Romanian mothers living in Belgium. I decided, at that moment, to not follow up on the other three other planned open calls and to focus on this first group of conversations. I spent the following six weeks talking with a variety of women, documenting my process, and starting an archive of interviews, questioners, and contacts. Talking with the Romanian mothers was an intense and emotional experience which inspired a second phase defined by a series of individual and collaborative experiments. The third phase existed of physical encounters, conversations and workshops with Romanian mothers and their children. During the past months within my Adma year, I created, as a tool to activate my research, an artist book and a cardboard modular installation. A collaborative work, done alongside my daughter, Dalia Matilda Dumitrașcu, representing a variation of one of the workshops done with the Romanian children.

maternal_conversations 2__collaborative work done with my daughter