When I want to breath fresh air, I open the window 2014.

What do you do when you want to get fresh air? You open the window. You welcome NATURE inside. You emerge into NATURE, just by leaning on the border of the window or balcony. The way that we relate to the outside, from inside our concrete boxes is visible through this very simple and basic gesture: opening the window.

We manage to transform our buildings into something that is suitable for living using minimum space but maximum comfort.

The project tries to grasp the way the apartment inhabitants relate to the outside, how they exit their concrete boxes to breathe “fresh air”. They open the windows to find yet another concrete building and in its back yet another one. Few people have the time or opportunity to go outside of the city, to visit the “real NATURE”. Most spend their time watching it on screens or walking through artificial reproduction of NATURE called ”parks”, that are altered with better roads, toilets, benches, shops, playgrounds etc.

The fresh air that comes from the open window is the maximum a lot of people will receive for months, now that the way we relate to our jobs or responsibilities has changed. The fact that we don't need to leave our apartments, thanks to the developments in technology - we work from home; we can order our groceries and pay our utilities directly from our phones– translates into a life perfectly spent indoors.

The work is a compilation of multiple videos of my friends on their windows, taking a breath of fresh air, in a cigar or coffee break or simply admiring the scenery, mixed with videos of their view. The fact that the concrete is visible as a front wall when they go ”outside” blurs the line between inside and outside. There is no such thing as OUTSIDE anymore.

In the context of the recent pandemic, 6 years later, the video is even more relevant as now we are asked to stay indoors 100% of the time and try to manage our day to day lives in the prisons of our homes.

Gabriela Mateescu is an artist who lives and works in Bucharest with performance, video-performance, installation and drawing, being inspired by personal experiences and the constant exchange of ideas that takes place in small groups of people.This interest led to the creation of the mutual creative support group, Nucleu 0000 in 2014 in order to facilitate access to culture for artists who after graduation are caught between creative and subsistence work.

Under the umbrella of the group, she developed, in addition to various exhibition programs in Bucharest and Timisoara, a project to promote Romanian digital artists on the online platform spam-index.com and recently the initiative Where is she?, a complex educational program that includes courses, conferences, workshop and exhibition, which problematizes the lack of women artists in the history of arts in textbooks and specialized universities.

Between 2014 and 2015, Gabriela coordinated the Center of Visual Arts - Multimedia in Bucharest, where she extended for a year the Nucleu 0000 pop-up type exhibitions, focusing on young artists of her generation, offering them a space for experimentation.