Month: November 2025

  Through my initial experimentation with questionnaires and gaining a glimpse into people’s lives, I was able to identify a direction for my work. This direction developed further through my engagement with Matei Bejenaru’s work and his own exploration of illegal immigration and the position of the immigrant as a mere transported individual, without addressing the deeper intricacy of experiencing moving away from one’s own country for a better life.

  What this engagement offered me was the opportunity to think about the intricacies and differences between immigration and being an immigrant. Immigration is a process, while being an immigrant is an identity that continues long after the process itself has ended.

  Visually and conceptually, I struggled to bring together the ideas I was exploring. I found it challenging to connect my intention of engaging both an English and a Romanian audience, as each held very different perspectives on what it means to be a Romanian immigrant. Through discussions, I learned that many people actually perceive being a Romanian immigrant in ways that are closer to Western European experiences, in that form, many perceive that the Romanian immigrant has experienced a linear, direct experience.

  While I acknowledge that as Europeans we benefit from certain privileges, such as the ability to come to this country legally, this does not erase the strong preconceptions that exist about Romanians. These stereotypes can significantly shape how we experience the world and particularly how the world sees us.

  The most important result of this triangulation has been the realisation that I need to acknowledge the difference in audiences. I must decide whether I want my work to resonate with Romanians themselves or to explain the Romanian experience to outsiders. What I initially thought could be achieved within a single project may, in fact, need to be developed as two separate pieces of work.

  Moving forward, I want to recognise that the stories I am gathering are not just quotations or data points. They represent my active listening, editing, and compiling of people’s lived experiences. As a designer and representative of this work, I carry the challenge and responsibility of creating a piece that engages audiences meaningfully and respectfully.

  In the next stage, I aim to incorporate more of my own language and Romanian heritage into the project. I also plan to engage more directly with people through interviews. While the questionnaires were a valuable way to gather general insights, I now want to move toward more personal and in-depth forms of storytelling.

  Ultimately, I see this project as an evolving conversation between identity, perception, and representation. It is not only about presenting Romanian voices but also about questioning how these voices are received, framed, and interpreted in different cultural contexts. By allowing the work to remain open and responsive, I hope to create space for dialogue rather than resolution, and to let the stories shape the form the project eventually takes.

  My work for this year aims to explore a closer more personal understanding of immigrant experience as expressed and represented by fellow Romanian immigrants. The majority of the content for this project comes through the use of a questionnaire which was distributed through Romanian immigrant groups and by word of mouth through family and friends. What my project does not aim to do is to interrogate the people on the way that they immigrated to this country nor on their experience through bureaucracy or the process of moving from a country to another on a purely physical basis. Instead my biggest aim was to humanize and highlight what it feels like to be away from home and while I do not deny that this experience is universal for most immigrants. I wanted to address it from the perspective of a group of people that have a similar beginning to me. 

 The reference chosen is Travel Guide (2005-2007) by Matei Bejenaru. This project is an analytical look at the process of immigration and illegal immigration within the mid 2000’s, presenting both an installation and a booklet that viewers can walk away with. The work covers the process of illegally immigrating from Romania to the UK and is visually represented in the format similar to that of transport for London’s. Bejenaru aims to highlight how many steps the Romanian immigrant has to take before entering the UK and the risks taken on their journey to a better life. This installation was created before Romania became part of the EU, so it was at a point when crossing the border from Romania to Hungary was precarious and risky if not in possession of the correct paperwork.

 This was a time where, due to the fairly recent fall of communism, many Romanians were seeking a better life for themselves outside of the country. The document that Bejenaru provides begins by stating that: “If you want to go to Great Britain or Ireland and you have no chance of getting a Visa from the Bucharest embassies [sic] of these countries, you must carefully size up the chances you take when you decide to cross the border without having the legal papers.” The document itself acts as a step-by-step guide and explains in depth what routes to take, what options you have and what risks you are taking by entering the country. The reference itself represented a time in history where people felt the need to escape the country but were unable to go through the legal channels to do so. This illegal process of immigration has diminished as people are able to enter the country legally, though this does not erase the fact that this is a reality for many Romanians seeking a better life.

  Presently, work about Romanian immigration is scarce and oftentimes does not really delve into the emotional experience itself. It is important to me therefore to explain why the reference in question has been chosen. Many may identify the fact both projects explore immigration and state that the reference and my project are not dissimilar. Due to this misunderstanding of the nature of my work they believe that because both cover immigration they are therefore the same. While I do not deny the similarity in root of both projects, their approaches are different. I aim to make people understand that immigration and an immigrant are different things, even if they are intrinsically related.

  In contrast to my work, Bejenaru’s project is technical, detail oriented and does not use the immigrant’s emotions or experiences as necessarily the main focus of his work. The immigrant is anonymous, it could be you, the reader or a nameless third party; Instead of the main focus of this work being illegal immigration and the process of it, the subject of crossing borders is not necessarily the focus, rather leaving this event behind in lieu of how the identity of immigrant can impact people.

 Unlike Travel Guide, which provides its audience with a structured, almost bureaucratic depiction of migration routes, my project privileges the unstructured, the intimate, and the subjective. The anonymity that defines Bejenaru’s immigrants is replaced here by a multiplicity of voices that resist reduction to data or procedure. Rather than mapping borders, my work maps feelings. Though also not specifically identifying my participants by name, my work seeks to create a  well rounded representation of who they are, what they enjoy and what they want you, the reader, to take away.

  Through visual representations of my inquiry, my project takes a more introspective and emotional approach to the subject of Romanian immigrants’ experiences and their feelings regarding their current life. While Bejenaru’s Travel Guide operates in the realm of documentation and social commentary, my work situates itself in the affective and interpersonal. I am interested in how displacement manifests not only as a geographical or legal transition but as a deeply personal reconfiguration of self. By collecting testimonies through a questionnaire circulated among Romanian immigrants, I aim to construct a collective emotional landscape: one that captures the nuances of longing, adaptation, and nostalgia that accompany life away from home. These answers will aid in moving forward with the physical development of this project, becoming the source and representation of the inquiry I am hoping to address.

 In conclusion, my project seeks to bridge the gap between the historical and emotional dimensions of Romanian immigration, offering a counterpoint to Matei Bejenaru’s Travel Guide by shifting the focus from procedure to personal experience. While his work captures a specific historical moment marked by risk, uncertainty, and the pursuit of opportunity, my project captures what follows: the quieter, ongoing experience of living elsewhere and carrying home within. It is less about the act of crossing a border and more about what happens after, when one begins to inhabit a new language, culture, and rhythm of life. Through the voices gathered in my questionnaire, I hope to present an image of Romanian immigrants not defined by statistics or legality, but by sentiment, memory, and resilience. These narratives reveal the complexity of belonging, how it can stretch across geographies, linger in language, and persist through loss. Ultimately, my work invites reflection on what it means to exist between places, to be both here and there, and to find meaning in that in-between space. In doing so, it extends the conversation that Bejenaru began, transforming it from a story of movement into a meditation on emotion, connection, and identity.

For this portion of the project, I wanted to go a different direction and what I’ve previously done with my unit 2 development. Instead of making all of my work be about me and about my own experiences as a remaining immigrant I instead turned out words and wanted to hear what other peoples experiences had been like. I first created this questionnaire as a way to gather small information about what people miss from home about what they miss from Romania and about themselves to some degree.

The questionnaire was first shared to my friends who answered the first few questions themselves and then it was further sent to other Romanians in our circle of friends and then through Facebook groups. The questionnaire was not an identifying questionnaire it did not ask the people to give their name or their contact instead it only asked them how long ago they came to the UK if they considered UK their home and a series of questions about whether they miss Romania or whether they consider UK as for their home.

What I did for the next few weeks was wait for the replies and then I compiled them in a way that I found to make sense, which was through a table. That way I was actually able to kind of track and realise what these answers are saying about the people and about their own experiences.

I was surprised to see that a lot of people that answered were actually people who came to the UK quite a while ago, almost a decade or around a decade ago, which was surprisingly not the audience that I expected to draw in. I was also surprised to see that most of the answers actually had quite a similar tone. A lot of people were missing Romania as a place of home, they were missing Romania as a place where family is and they were missing items from Romania that they technically could source in the UK but a lot of people argued that they felt differently in the UK (food, beauty products, general items).

It was also quite interesting that the questions that I had at the end regarding Romania, which was when you think about our origin country what comes to mind and how would you describe it from your perspective actually brought about very similar outlooks.

Many people discussed how, when they thought of Romania, they either thought of home or they thought of corruption, which I was very surprised by. While it is true that Romania, as a country, does have quite a bit of governmental corruption and that the citizens are acutely aware of it, it was still surprising to see that people found it to be their knee-jerk reaction or their immediate response when asked about Romania.

Similarly, when people are asked to describe Romania, they once again fall on the description of “corrupt.” They focus on the idea and the fact that Romania, while a beautiful country, is unlivable due to its corruption.

This was actually a question where many people mentioned that they would like to return home, that they would like to once more be repatriated and able to be with their families, but that they’re being held back by the corruption of the country. I thought it was quite interesting that many people have immigrated for, arguably, a better life, and while they don’t necessarily all consider the UK their home, it seems they find themselves to be somewhat stuck here in this way.

Taking these answers, I was actually inspired to create some sort of piece that essentially related to what these people had shared with me. What I wanted to do was represent their responses through a piece of design that captured the essence of their answers while also creating a harmonious, aesthetic work.

Based on these answers, I created a small book called Alta Parte / Other Piece, which is a small compilation of things that people spoke about in their questionnaires. The cover features beautiful places in Romania, and inside are people’s setbacks and hang-ups about coming back home.

The book includes the answers of several people, some mentioned that they cannot return home due to family in the UK or because of corruption, while others expressed disillusionment with the idea of returning to a country that is still arguably broken, even though the revolution that was supposed to fix this happened all the way back in 1989.

The cover includes typography made up of words that were commonly mentioned in the questionnaire, with the largest ones being those that appeared most often. It also makes a clear separation between the words in Romanian and those in English, transitioning from a more traditional, “local” font that one might find back home to a sleeker, more “English” typeface.