[EXPOSITION] AGIR DANS SON LIEU – SACEL ::: Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucarest

AGIR DANS SON LIEU — SĂCEL

27 February – 16 April

Curated by Julie Crenn

Opening: Friday, 27 February 2026, 6–9 PM

Anca Poterasu Gallery / 26 Popa Soare Street, Bucharest

Anca Poterasu Gallery with the Romanian Association of Contemporary Art (ARAC), presents Agir dans son lieu, a group exhibition opening Friday, 27 February, 6–9 PM. The show brings contemporary art into dialogue with the traditional crafts from Săcel, Maramureș.

The exhibition features artists from the ARAC residency in Săcel (2025)—including Morgane Denzler, Damien Rouxel, Delia Popa, Ioana Cîrlig, Andreea Medar, and Ilie Mihali—alongside invited artists and practitioners whose work engages with local material culture and craft traditions. On view are works created during the residency, as well as new and earlier pieces that explore the fragility of subsistence practices, the interdependence of human, animal, and material life, and the cultural, ethical, and ecological decisions shaping rural landscapes.

Agir dans son lieu is a long-term curatorial project initiated in 2016 by Julie Crenn, combining research, residencies, and exhibitions that explore relationships between artists and peasant environments. The title literally means “acting from one’s own place” articulates a mode of situated practice, attentive to historical, cultural, and ecological contexts, and responsive to the lived experience of the place.

Artists _

Ioana Cirlig – Morgane Denzler – Andreea Medar – Aurelia Mihai – Ilie Mihali – Ilieana Mihali – Delia Popa – Maria Poterasu – Damien Rouxel

Exhibition text _ 

Since 2016, Agir dans son lieu (“Act in our own place”) is a long-term project. A cycle of research, residencies and exhibitions dedicated to the links that exist between artists and peasants. Agir dans son lieu began visibly at Galerie Duchamp in Yvetot, Normandy (2017), then Les ateliers des Arques in the Lot (2018), Transpalette in Bourges (2021), La Galerie du Dourven – La Coopérative in Locquémeau (2024), La Traverse in Alfortville (2025), ARAC in Săcel (Maramureș, România, 2025). Agir dans son lieu proposes a multi-voiced, situated reflection based on peasant worlds.

Throughout the history of Western art, the figures of the peasant and the peasant woman have undergone an essentialization that endures in the collective imagination. In the latter, the representation seems unchanging. Yet, since the 1960s, we no longer speak of a peasant world, but rather of peasant environments in the plural, inhabited by actors who make choices about the way they do their jobs. Political, militant, strategic and economic choices that lead them down two paths: that of exploitation or that of reciprocity. The former sees the living world as a short-term resource designed for maximum yield; the latter, which is as reasoned as it is reasonable, applies a sustainable approach to the living world. The first leads to an agriculture without a farmer, an agriculture out of the soil; the second to a physical, ethical and political reconnection with one’s environment. “Farming without a farmer is not just a problem of the countryside becoming desertified; it’s also a matter of the disappearance of a profession and, with that profession, of the body of knowledge and know-how that founded the fundamental link to the living world that peasants and farmers have held in trust for millennia, on behalf of society as a whole.” So, from farmer to peasant, the professions are not the same, nor is the relationship with time and the land.

Over two weeks in July 2025, a group of artists (Morgane Denzler, Damien Rouxel, Delia Popa, Ioana Cirlig, Andreea Medar and Ilie Mihali) reactivated the project in Sacel (Maramures, Romania) at the invitation of Anca Poterasu (ARAC). A collective time of thought, encounters, plastic experiments, discussions and questioning about the agricultural realities of our place. We are aware of the extreme fragility of these agricultural realities. Practices are based on family subsistence. This blatant fragility contrasts with the intensity of the interdependence between faith, rurality, crafts (ceramics, weaving and embroidery in particular), traditions, animals, the river and the forest. At Sacel, everything in daily life and in its own ecosystem (visible and invisible, human and more-than-human), is connected. Thus, Morgane Denzler continued her reflections on sheep farming, wool and the relationship between shepherd, flock and place. Damien Rouxel sought to merge personal issues with observations made in Maramures about traditions and material realities. Ilie Mihali devoted his time to working with earth and fire to create ceramic works. Ioana Cirlig has immersed herself in the vegetal dimension of Sacel. Delia Popa thought up links between her place (Crețești, Vidra region) and Sacel, two vulnerable villages. Andreea Medar continued her research into a disappearing memory. In Sacel, she became aware of the disappearance of pastoral customs and collaborated with a potter and a singer to revive a gestural and musical memory.

More informations about 2025 Sacel residency : https://crennjulie.com/2025/08/04/residence-agir-dans-son-lieu-arac-sacel-maramures-romania/

The residency inspired us to come together for a group exhibition at the Anca Poterasu Gallery in Bucharest. This is the first time that an Agir dans son lieu exhibition is presented outside France, and we are very happy about it. The works brought together for this exhibition include some of those created in Sacel, as well as new and older pieces. I also chose to invite Ilieana Mihali to present traditional Sacel rugs, Maria Poterasu, who created a textile work depicting a rural scene, and Aurelia Mihai, whose film, City of Bucur, establishes a perfect link between the countryside and the city in Romania. The works are thus imbued with attachments, stories (both personal and collective), and a desire to pass on traditions, gestures, and narratives drawn from culture and agriculture.

Agir dans son lieu is a collective research and conversation project designed to make visible a set of choices that have major repercussions within the living world. To make visible those who act in their place as best they can. The works manifest the ways in which all bodies (human and more-than-human) are heavily affected by a system governed by the law of exploitation. Through their works and actions, the artists also demonstrate the places of resistance, the joyful perspectives in which everyone is engaged in their place.

Julie Crenn

Damien Rouxel _ L’Homme Sauvage, 2025
Avec un masque de Vasile Susca.

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More informations _

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