Ecaterina Stefanescu

Romanian-born Ecaterina Stefanescu is an architectural designer and artist based in the UK, where she currently teaches architecture at the University of Central Lancashire. Her collaborative practice Estudio ESSE, co-founded in 2015, creates highly contextual site installations and bespoke design work. In her artistic projects, Ecaterina uses the act of making as a tool for exploration and investigation, producing models, collages and drawings that deal with place and material cultures of people.

About the project

“Rooms“ is an artistic and research project through which Stefanescu will attempt to explore the lives of migrants by creating intimate portraits of their interior spaces and possessions through a series of large-scale models and paper collages. She is interested in the liminal identity of immigrants and how this is expressed through their material culture. Focusing on immigrants from Eastern Europe, the project is about the transient domestic places they inhabit, the objects they surround themselves with during their migratory experience, and how the systemic network of home and amenity acts upon the host city of Berlin. These will be investigated through 3 thematic fields at 3 scales: the City, the Interior and the Object, which will be researched through interviews, site surveys and drawing sessions with participants, and represented through drawings, collages and dioramic models.