“A Country Called Dacia” is my latest project, started in 2018, which will become a book by April 2026. I have visually followed the way Romanian national founding myths are being reshaped, as the borders between history, truth, propaganda, and nationalism constantly intersect.
🪓 Presales are open and deliveries will start at the end of March.
PRE-SALES FOR A NEW BOOK
Order you copy until March 15 and get:
A small signed print (13x18 cm, archival quality)
Discounted price
Your name mentioned in the project
The book, of course:)
29 Euros /Romania, shipping included, 42 euros /EU, shipping included
Some of the photographs were exhibited in 2025 as part of a group exhibition at the House of European History in Brussels, alongside works by another 27 photographers from 14 European countries. The exhibition was titled “Presence of the Past. A European Album.”
A history museum chose contemporary photography as a means to present and question Europeans’ complex relationship with their past, outside the classical and institutional frameworks such as schools, museums, or official ceremonies. The exhibition brought together documentary projects from across Europe, thus offering a complex and nuanced panorama of the ways in which we connect to, search for, interrogate, or rewrite the past—each in a deeply personal manner.
The curator of this exhibition, Simina Bădică, succeeded in identifying, with scientific evidence, a state experienced by most of the subjects, and one that was not unfamiliar to me either:
The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman recently proposed the concept of “retrotopia,” defining it as the imagining of an ideal society (a utopia) projected not into the future, but into the past. “Faithful to the utopian spirit, retrotopia draws its vitality from the desire to rectify the failures of the present human condition—this time by resuscitating the failed and forgotten possibilities of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, authentic or presumed, now serve as reference points in charting the map toward a better world.” [i] (Bauman, Retrotopia, 2017).
Could historical reenactments be yet another form of what Bauman describes as “our retrotopian love affair with the past”?
Format: 155 × 235 mm (portrait)
Number of pages: 208
Photography: Petrut Calinescu
Design: Radu Manelici & Cristina Raicu
Texts: preface by Simina Bădică, curator of “Presence of the Past. A European Album”, House of European History, Brussels, plus an introduction by Petruț Călinescu (photographer, author)
Language: Bilingual edition RO–EN, edited by Ioana Călinescu
Paper: Munken Lynx 130 gsm
Binding: Otabind, softcover with dust jacket
Print run: 600 copies, offset printed in Hungary by Progresszív Nyomda
ISBN 978-973-0-43063-9