Ruxandra Lupu

Profile

Holding a MA and BA in Printmaking from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, I worked for several years in the Cultural and Creative Industries, both as an independent artist developing my personal projects and as a freelance consultant, working on European Project proposals (COSME, Interreg, Creative Europe, Horizon 2020) that span across the fields of arts, heritage, tourism and technology. Previously, I have been awarded a BA in Economy from the University of Economy in Bucharest and worked for 3 years in the field of marketing and communication. My artistic and economic formation enabled me to work independently and build experience in the following areas of activity: independent art/cultural projects (from conceptual ideation to implementation), transnational projects with the focus on CCI/tourism, cultural and artistic research (visual research - film analysis, coding, etc-, design research - co-creation, design thinking, design driven innovation -, creative practice) and innovation management.

Starting October 2016 I am a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, with a practice-based project aimed at opening the meaning of the Sicilian Home Movie Archive through creative practice.

I work both as a visual artist and consultant for cultural and creative industries. Examples of my artistic activity can be found at: www.ruluprojects.com. For my full professional profile please visit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruxandra-lupu-645a542/

Research interests

My practice-led research into the meaning of the Sicilian home movie archive started in October 2016 and was driven by the increasing danger of reducing the archive to silence, as a result of the inability to adapt to the shifts brought by the digital era. The aim of the project is therefore to re-think the Sicilian home movie archive as an archive of the present and not belonging to the past, by applying and re-evaluating theories of Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze and deploying creative practice as a tool for knowledge creation. My core approach to solving this challenge is through a mixed- method exploration of selected archives of Sicilian home movies that remain largely unexplored: Filmoteca Regionale di Palermo, Home Movie Bologna and Youtube. The project frames the specific‘nature’of the home movie by conducting interviews with artists who reuse this type of footage in their own work and uses the findings as guiding lines for setting-up a working method that combines visual analysis and creative manipulation for the exploration of alternatives views of the archive. 

As an artist and digital humanities researcher I am interested in using artistic expression to explore the future as a reservoir of the virtual and not as a tool for understanding the past. My working method borrows approaches from sensory studies, cultural analysis and post-human studies in order to explore a dimension of the world liberated from the mind-body dualism. In other words, my creative vision represents a gesture of re-appropriating nature through art. Methodologically, I combine drawing, printmaking, video art, sound recording and photography with creative writing, to give rise to sensible universes that blur the boundaries between reason and sensation. Printmaking in specific is a recurring method, as it works as a forensic instrument that identifies and at the same time leaves indelible traces of the sensible, giving rise to new material scenarios for the future. 

My main research interests include: creative practice as a research methodology, productive imagination, sensory studies, film theory and psychoanalysis and digital materialism. 

Qualifications

• MA in Fine Arts (Printmaking)
• BA in Fine Arts (Printmaking)

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures