A Common Thread Between Transmutation and Migration: Exploring Simina Marin’s Cross-Disciplinary Practice
by Jiani Wang
A subtle commonality can be discerned across architect and artist Simina Marin’s multimedia practice: her interest in transforming one material or element into another, and her passion for reinterpreting the objective world through a subjective lens, shaped by her personal observations and interpretations as a creative and diasporic individual.
Born and raised in Romania, Marin later moved to the United Kingdom and then to the United States to pursue academic and professional training in architecture. She has worked internationally, including in the UK, the US, and Switzerland. After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 202, she began working at the intersection between architecture design, art, and curation. Some of her prominent working and creative experiences include participating the inaugural art residency at the Kirkland Gallery in Cambridge and serving as a co-curator of Beta Architecture Biennial in Timisoara, Romania in 2024.
During her residency at the Kirkland Gallery, Marin created an installation titled Housework and exhibited it in the gallery space. An assortment of floppy fabric objects and materials occupied the space: several wooden slats were tucked inside a stove or leaned against the wall, while others, soft, and sewn together, lay in the middle of the room. A screen placed on the floor replayed a close-up of the fabric slats being ironed by the artist.
The idea for this work grew out of Marin’s curiosity about and reflection on domestic labour, which is often overlooked compared with labour performed in public and professional settings. By re-materializing the wooden slats as soft fabric objects, Marin sought to explore a series of dichotomies central to discussions of labour: the natural and the man-made, and the public and the domestic, through the material contrast between softness and hardness.
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This interest in the translation and transmutation of elements is also central to her Paratexts series, in which Marin uses the graphic forms of letters to render the view outside her window. This experimentation may remind one of the various strands of concrete poetry in the art and literary worlds. The alphabetic symbols function as pixels, carrying semantic meaning while their colors and arrangement correspond to those in the view observed by the artist.
Across both series, Marin explores how materials can be imbued with new meanings, and whether new common ground can be found between objects and elements with different physical qualities, perhaps on the premise that discrepancies inevitably arise during translation and transmutation. In her project land (reciprocity and other methods of defining the) fill, it seems that Marin intends to bring these discrepancies to the fore as the focal point of the work. It is a series of paper-cuts in which the seemingly intended subjects are cut-out, leaving blank spaces, with the remaining margins become the work itself. The relationship between centre and periphery is thus turned upside down, with supporting roles becoming the leading characters. In a conversation with the artist, Marin explained that her intention in creating this series was to study, reinterpret, and highlight the margins—a seemingly metaphorical gesture that questions the power relations taken for granted in many aspects of society, including material circulation, construction, and the use of resources.
Drawing from her own migrating experience as a migrant artist, Marin’s practice also traverses different disciplines, scales, mediums, and spaces. What threads them together is a continuous exploration of the relationship and interconnections between form and content, the signified and the signifier. In continually exploring how these elements inform and transform one another, Marin challenges pre-existing norms and established trajectories in daily life, design processes, and industrial production, navigating these fields by making sense of her own world through the diverse means and materials available to her.
Fía Benitez has presented recent exhibitions, readings, and panels at CSUN Art Galleries, Bozo Mag, Printed Matter, Ehrlich Steinberg, Heavy Manners Library, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, The Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles, The Reef, Tin Flats, and Other Places Art Fair. Their work has received support from Center for Cultural Innovation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, California Arts Council, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As an editor, Fía has contributed to The Vassar Review, Sublevel Magazine, East of Borneo, and Studio Magazine at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Their words and pictures are published by 4N Magazine, The Big One, Baest Journal, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and The Kitchen Blog. Fía holds degrees from Vassar College and CalArts. Visit her portfolio at fiabenitez.com.