Styro City

Mihai Șovăială is an artist who lives and works in Bucharest and Zurich. Since 2013, his work has focused on urban development structures and their peripheries, questioning the impact of architecture on the context and history of the city. His works are displayed as installations in exhibition contexts or in book format, often published independently. Mihai completed his Meisterschüler studies in 2020 at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany, under the guidance of Joachim Brohm, after graduating from the Photo-Video department at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania, in 2016. His works have been exhibited both locally and internationally in museums and galleries such as: Museum of Recent Art, Bucharest; National Art Museum, Kishinev; Kunstmuseum Magdeburg; a&o Kunsthalle, Leipzig; Circulation(s) Festival, Paris; Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna; BTV Gallery, Innsbruck; Biennial of Contemporary Photography, Iași; Plan-B, Cluj; galeria 2/3, Bucharest; Switch Lab, Bucharest.

Styro City is a study of thermal insulation in Romanian architecture. The sequence of photographs is a reference to the urban transformations that marked most Romanian cities in the last two decades. The process of thermal insulation started as the premise of rehabilitating the housing blocks in the early 2000s. After what was considered at the time a grand success, western European styrofoam suppliers saturated the local market. Thus the material has become the most affordable solution among private owners, as well as residential developers. Through this process the constructions are being uniformized and standardized, bringing all the architecture styles together under the same material. The today appearance of Romanian architecture is the result of a concurrence of time with stray human impulses of successive destruction and rebuilding of adaptation and modification. This project imagines the predefined styrofoam as an architectural object, a hint to the face of contemporary Romanian architecture.