magnum apus

Vlad Hodrea

— sound installation
Thursday, 24 Sept 19:00 — Sunday, 4 Oct / MX

magnum apus is a sound essay on the dusk of Romanian folk magic.
I spent three weeks in Timișoara documenting charms, ornithomancy (reading the world through birds) and other practices. What do we still think of as "knowledge" today, and what do we shoo away as "noise"?

Apus means footless. From the Greek ἀ-, prefix meaning "without," and πούς/poús, "foot." Two very different birds carry this name.
One is the common swift (Apus apus). Their feet are so small that they seem to have none, and they really do live almost entirely in flight, months at a time. They eat, drink, even sleep on the wing, coming down to land only to nest.

The other is the bird of paradise, up in the southern sky as a constellation. The first ones to reach Europe arrived with no feet; the hunters had cut them off, keeping only the beautiful, sad plumage. So people decided the bird simply had no feet. That it never touched the ground, that it lived its whole life in the air and came down only for its eternal rest. They weren't lying. They just never saw the bird.

The piece listens for exactly this: ”same names, opposite roads”, knowledge that survives only in flight, mouth to mouth, on trust, one that vanishes the moment you try to hold it. A documentary fairy-tale from Timișoara, carried by field voices, birds and the tales told about them, held together by the question that haunted me during my visit and ever since I came back home: what do we do with everything we've forgotten how to believe in?

Vlad Hodrea is an artist and cultural communicator based in Bucharest, at times, journalist and DJ. They work with field recordings, voice and sound in spaces, write personal essays, and explore forgotten or speculative archives. Music, in its many forms, is a safe zone; proof that what feels distant or unsettling may return later with unexpected intimacy.

This work was developed during the Critical Waves sound art residency hosted by Orizont Sonor, as part of a Franco-German cultural cooperation project supported by the Franco-German Cultural Fund and organised by the Institut français de Roumanie and the Goethe-Institut, in collaboration with the SIMULTAN Festival in Timișoara.