Luminara Florescu
I view the body as an archive that holds our lived experiences — with limits, thresholds and days when it cannot be accessed. From this understanding, I have developed a working practice that follows the rhythm of nature and honours my body's response to each season.
Using the idea of "the artist's edit" as a creative process, the work takes living form as a number of digital gardens containing creative constellations of weird archives, Crip libraries, Resistance resources and Maps To Get Lost By to create a 'Digital Commons'. These slow, body-paced ecosystems are open, organic, and ever-evolving without a focus on outcomes. They are a living repository of notes, data, PDFs and lived experiences, created from chronic illness and within enforced rest - not as administrative labour, but as art-making in its own right. Knowledge is circulated freely, and the archive grows toward anyone who finds themselves Unbelonging.
My collaborative and digital working experience is embedded in how I move through the world. I imagined and co-built The Slow Practice Collective as a way of life, to decondition myself from inner ableism, to offer a community and manifesto for chronically ill, disabled, and neurodiverse artists — working almost entirely digitally, across distance, in fragments, in the gaps between crashes.
I developed The Contract of Self Care, a free resource for artists to avoid exploitation and burn out, developed with an a-n Artist Bursary, created, shared, and circulated online as a digital commons in its own right. My Image-Maker residency at The Sociological Review Foundation was a practice in slow, body-paced making — producing film and image work that centred the unseen, the marginalised, the Unbelonging.
Lived Experience
I am a British-Romanian, chronically ill and neurodiverse artist, curator, artist mentor and community builder. My art practice is a form of Crip activism which aims to disrupt capitalist and ableist structures. When my body finally refused the hyper-productivity of the art world, I discovered collapse as revolutionary. In periods of enforced rest, I found a different way of making and a radical rejection of the notion that artistic worth comes from constant output. I believe in the power of playful disruption — art can be both gentle and radical. My practice seeks a creative (re)imagining of a care-based society through projects such as Rest As Protest and The Slow Practice Collective, bringing together communities of disabled, chronically ill and neurodiverse artists to explore creativity that exists in the territory of Unbelonging.
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In 2024 we gave out £500 bursaries to the following Axis Professional Members: Sarah Skinner, Caitlin Griffiths, Michael Takeo Magruder, Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Michelle Baharier, Ricky Romain, Luminara Florescu, Catherine Wynne-Paton, Jera May.
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