I have believed in polyphony from early on: in the power of modelling one’s identity and voice, letting oneself be influenced by a multitude of experiences from different periods and different cultural and geographical spaces. Borders are something deeply ingrained in a country that remained frozen in time behind the Iron Curtain. Even after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, three decades ago, borders have continued to dominate institutional and mental structures, to the point where they are sedimented in the collective imaginary of Romanian people. No matter how far away from Romania I would move, I carry its history. At the same time, I am lucky to have experienced the collapse of Romania’s physical borders to the West at an early age. 
Residences and fellowships abroad come as small havens in which I can disconnect from the real world and dig passionately into the literary life and the subjects of new books in the making. This time I focus on such subjects as Gruppe 47, the Vienna Group and the writers of the Austrian avant-garde and neo-avantgarde.   
  
Creative input  
I have had positive experiences during my residences. So far the existing boundaries I perceive have to do with the adjustment to new realities that come with their own form of uprootedness, especially when the contact with a new literary community is in play and it takes the form of a translocation beyond one’s own comfort zone. For me, such experiences are useful for writing and trigger some important writing mechanisms. Creativity is not a static mode, it certainly relies on interactions with people and spaces whose environment gets imprinted into my system. Overcoming boundaries is part of this overcoming of thresholds between who I was and who I may become in the new cultural space, as well as related to how I adjust my writing to the new realities, how I let myself be shaped by the new culture. 
  
Changing times and places  
In Graz I have overcome several temporal boundaries. When I left Bucharest for Graz, I brought with me an anthology of Austrian poetry from the 1970s, translated by the poets Petre Stoica and Maria Banuș and published by Minerva Publishing house. This volume contains the only Romanian translation, as far as I know, of a text by Gerhard Rühm, one of the co-founders of the Vienna Group, who also collected and published the texts of the group. I had never imagined that I could be part of one of his readings, have a chat with him and get his autograph. It was a form of going back into history and a form of living history in the present. 
On the other hand, a concern I had was related to maternity and the shifts it triggered. I have brought a toddler with me, who was one year and a half when I arrived in Graz. I had heard about how you can become absorbed by multiple roles once a child arrives, so I had already determined early to make the impossible possible, push myself to write, research and finalise the book in progress. In it I envision a world which takes its reader through the creation of new environments, preserving and also transforming the linguistic and natural ecosystems. 
I have managed to have a good writing rhythm in Graz so far, and for a few months now I have been reading mainly Austrian literature. I embrace the opportunities presented by this fellowship and the city of Graz and I feel that this work is advancing in the right direction. I am very grateful to Alexandru Bulucz, who has already translated some excerpts from this new project into German. 

Unlimited ideas
In my manuscript in progress, the human is no longer at the center. The central configuration is taken up by spaces, territories, directions and paths that are being created as characters evolve. It is territories that create the personality of the one who navigates and discovers them. Uprootedness, scatteredness, and reconstruction are the pieces on this map of assemblages. Humans are reflections of spaces, their needs are created by the landscapes they go through, by hollow spaces and crowded spaces, by wilderness or primitiveness, by civilisation or the memories spaces carry in succession.
Researchers, as I imagine them, because I do not interact with many, must have an arduous and hard task, especially when they study a writer’s work. This type of research always seemed to me a very sensitive but also rigorous task, a task of great responsibility. To manage to access (even if only approximately) someone’s psyche, to know the mechanisms that condition writers, to pursue their cultural and social ties is a huge responsibility. I do not think researchers have boundaries: they work with multiple layered worlds they need to unpack one by one to reach their depths.
What I see through the lens of a writer and journalist can be much less clear and more superficial than what a researcher sees. I admire writers who have been able to dabble into fields beyond literature, be it Oswald Wiener in his ➡ Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (1969), Daniel Kehlmann with his ➡ Die Vermessung der Welt (2005) or Benjamín Labatut in his ➡ Un Verdor Terrible (2020) to mention just a few. Yet, researchers as well as writers need to navigate wisely the distinctions between truth and fiction, between fictionalisation and reality, between their constructed hypotheses and the reality of a writer/the subject matter. In a world of increased fictionalisation and false truths, such task emerges as a shared responsibility of both writers and researchers.