Unfinished Institute
A four-day experience where ideas, art, and people from all disciplines meet and evolve together. Each edition builds on the last, creating a living archive of interdisciplinary thought and creative exchange.
Since 2016, Unfinished Festival has brought together thinkers, makers, and dreamers from across the globe to Bucharest for an immersive exploration of what happens when boundaries between disciplines dissolve.
This project, spearheaded by the EIDOS Foundation in Bucharest, gave carte blanche to five renowned international photographers from Magnum Photos—Bieke Depoorter, Thomas Dworzak, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth, and Newsha Tavakolia—to deliver their vision of Romania today. Our mission and challenge in bringing to life this overdue photographic MRI of Romania was to balance and contextualize the Magnum photographers’ perception of the country as outsiders. We wanted to, through this book and exhibition, visually bridge Romania’s past with its path forward, and connect the country’s self-image to how it is—or may be—perceived outside, whether now or in the future.
Magnum’s five parachute-style angles were therefore paralleled to the more local perspective of a Romanian photographer, Cristian Movilă, and six authors: anthropologist Alec Bălășescu, poet Andrei Codrescu, psychiatrist Gabriel Diaconu, writer Gideon Jacobs, historian Elena Tănase, and actor Adrian Văncică. This constellation of voices was furthermore orchestrated by Florian Ebner, Head of the Department of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and designed by Sascha Lobe of Pentagram in London.
This project, spearheaded by the EIDOS Foundation in Bucharest, gave carte blanche to five renowned international photographers from Magnum Photos—
Bieke Depoorter, Thomas Dworzak, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth, and Newsha Tavakolia—to deliver their vision of Romania today. Our mission and challenge in bringing to life this overdue photographic MRI of Romania was to balance and contextualize the Magnum photographers’ perception of the country as outsiders. We wanted to, through this book and exhibition, visually bridge Romania’s past with its path forward, and connect the country’s
self-image to how it is—or may be—perceived outside, whether now or in the future.
Magnum’s five parachute-style angles were therefore paralleled to the more local perspective of a Romanian photographer, Cristian Movilă, and six authors: anthropologist Alec Bălășescu, poet Andrei Codrescu, psychiatrist Gabriel Diaconu, writer Gideon Jacobs, historian Elena Tănase, and actor Adrian Văncică. This constellation of voices was furthermore orchestrated by Florian Ebner, Head of the Department of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and designed by Sascha Lobe of Pentagram in London.
