Eliza Trefas

Eliza Trefas (b. 1998, Romania) works in dance, performance, and visual arts. She explores practices and performances that bridge visible and invisible forms of life through the body. She is interested in how bodies are continuously composed—either by entering socio-cultural traps or by being affectively modulated by the environment and larger world events. In some works, she makes an attempt at fixing ills through poetic perspectives or open states of embodied poetry. She is looking for practices that allow meaning and elaborate forms of healing to emerge—both personally and collectively—moving toward a more subjective and intimate process of engaging with illness or emotional distress, creating a performative distance and entering into a relational understanding between these states and the world.

In works in public space, she overlaps social and artistic conventions to open up a certain complexity and sensibility in how we inhabit landscapes, urban environments, and the world at large. In 2022, together with Florin Flueras, she opened Somn (Sleep), an art space for deep and relaxed departures—for falling asleep to rigid institutional conventions and expectations.

RESIDENCY PROJECT

Eliza Trefas wishes to engage with eating disorders through art, aiming to form an exit practice and address the issue by shifting physical and mental hunger towards aesthetic, poetic, art hunger. She is interested in exploring various historical, cultural, literary, philosophical, and personal perspectives on the relationship between oneself and the body. She wishes to examine how the aims of both eating and starving have changed over time.

From Roman feasts with their vomitoriums to gluttony as a cardinal sin in the Middle Ages, from monks' ascetic endeavors to "holy anorexic" nuns, from spiritual fastings to intermittent fasting, from sainthood to patienthood, from periods of helpless famine to voluntary hunger strikes, from the former skeletal body ideals promoted by media to the more recent "body positivity" movements, and from athletes and models to figures like Princess Diana, Trefas is curious about what eating disorders might reflect today, their various causes, and how they can be understood and addressed through different artistic practices, through a subjective, gut-felt pursuit.

Date of residence: 1. 4 – 30. 6. 2025

EDUCATION

2020    Performact - contemporary dance and performance training programme, Portugal

2018    UNATC Bucharest, Romania

SELECTED EXHIBITION

2024    Suprainfinit Collisions, Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest, Romania

2023    The Territory Is Not the Map, Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest, Romania

CURATORIAL PROJECTS

2024   Invited artist (ongoing series) at Theatres, Malmaison Studios, Somn Bucharest, Otopeni Residency, Dendrologic Park Romanii de Jos, Romania

2022 & 2023  Fictions, my body (with Andreea David), National Dance Centre Bucharest, Romania

FESTIVALS

2024    Sublunar, Teatre/Theatres, Bucharest, Romania

2022    Dansuri de Curte, National Dance Centre, Bucharest, Romania

2021    DO Festival, Gdansk, Poland

2021    RAKETE Tanzquartier, Vienna, Austria

2020    Multiplicidades, Santa Cruz Portugal

2017    eXplore festival, Bucharest, Romania