Stigma

The work is not intended to be a simple historical message, and that makes it powerful: it has a broader, almost visceral symbolism.

The title is very precise: Stigmat does not speak of a wound that passes, but of one that leaves a mark. The foot does not step on the star as in a gesture of simple victory; rather, it seems that the star is something that imprints your foot, upsets you, makes you uncomfortable, deforms your gait. It is a formidable image for educating consciousness about the past: you can get out of the temporal past, but you cannot completely get out of its traces and patterns.

The location in front of the former communist headquarters makes the work not just a symbol, but a confrontation. On the way out, it forces you to pass by the sign and you realize that the past is not just in the textbook, it is in space, in our daily route.

Therefore, Stigmat is a work about the painful memory left by the communist regimes in Romania and Bessarabia. A metal star, symbolically associated with ideology, appears here broken and collapsed, and above it is a stone foot, with an engraved cross - a sign of suffering that is not forgotten, but imprinted. The title suggests a trace that remains in time, beyond political changes. The placement of the work near the former headquarters of the communists reinforces the message: leaving a place of power becomes a direct encounter with the traces of the past.