Mira Marincaș, a 2007 graduate of the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, is a visual artist with a passion for analog photography techniques; she also serves as an associate professor in this field at Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca. Her work in the visual arts was honored in 2025 with the Award for Photographic and Multimedia Art from the Union of Visual Artists of Romania – Cluj-Napoca Branch. Mira’s personality is also evident in the realm of literary creation (the volume “Mea fascia,” poetry, published by Exit, Cluj-Napoca, 2022; the Junimea Publishing House Award, Iași, for poetry – 2003)

In the collection titled “Blue Sky Divers,” the person on whom the viewer’s attention is focused becomes a human silhouette transposed into a spectrum of uncertainty. Should we blur the character’s details or, on the contrary, emphasize their particularities? Photography and subjectivity are interconnected, intertwined, and superimposed in layered fields of light. We are speaking of a network of self-awareness, ambiguity, and fluidity of identity, as well as a surface that offers us fleeting emotions. The visual discourse addresses identity, altered physical form, what remains after death, and contemporary photography.

For Mira Marincaș, photographs constituted a parallel reality. The stories about her grandfather, Hristescu Titus Liviu, which inspired the series “Blue Sky Divers”, stem from her mother’s accounts. An archive of a lost life and existence, of an uncertain history, in which the faces belong to no one. Death is irreversible; the photographs in the “Blue Sky Divers” series feed an absence to become a presence. The artist seeks to materialize the memory of her grandfather, the imaginary thus personified, with the caveat that uncertainty permeates the entire scene. The works create an experimental dynamism. Her grandfather’s passion for skiing is firmly embedded in the artist’s memory, which imagines the physique of an athlete and crafts a humanoid entity, the emphasis falling on the essentialization of form that oscillates between two worlds, creatively distorted and abstracted. The aestheticization of physical reconfiguration unites the two dimensions through color. The image abounds in blue, a snow-white cold, like death, and a splash of color. The visual tension keeps alive the memory of a micro-history, The silhouette of a skier floating between time and space. Everything is uncertain. The image itself becomes an abstract apparition like a colorful spectrum of light.

These photographs are created using analog VHS tape recording, resulting in an image altered by the demagnetization of the recording, which incorporates technical approaches and the realm of glitch art. The alteration of the physical form conceptualizes the feeling of dissolving into the invisible, which leaves its mark on our existential structure, shaping our thinking and perception.

Dr. habil. Livia Drăgoi