The 2021 UNITER Award – Best Romanian Play of the Year

One cold November morning in 2016, I stumbled upon some black-and-white photo negatives at Oser, the flea market in Cluj. Most were vacation photos, taken—as I would later discover—in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia between the 1950s and 1970s, depicting the evolution of an anonymous family over the years. The people in the photographs have become a passion and an artistic subject, but my interest has not been in discovering their identities, but rather in understanding something about the world through the photographs of strangers. Reality can be imagined, deconstructed, and reimagined, layer by layer, endlessly. I gave the people in the images names and invented a possible life for them. Moving past the avalanche of conflicting emotions that arise upon encountering such an archival object—a constant battle between curiosity and ethical distance—the dozens of images give way to endless personal interpretations of the concept of family. “Scenes from the Life of the Stuck Family” is a play on subjectivities, a kaleidoscope of memory, a series of random encounters that take on meaning, and a collection of everyday scenes brought out of anonymity. The play is part of the long-term project “The Stucks,” developed around this found photographic archive. Oana Hodade

Oana Hodade (n. 1985) lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. She is an actress, author, and composer, and works primarily in the performing arts. In her work, she explores fragility, intimacy, personal space, urbanism, and the rituals and routines of everyday life. She is interested in memory, subjectivity, and language, working at the intersection of prose, poetry, and drama.

Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu