Interviewed by Rhiannon Rostami

April 2024

Natalia de’Vil’s: Romania on holga

What was your motivation for doing/creating Romania On Holga?

The trip to Romania itself was more like a pilgrimage, and it was an honor because I got to go with my grandparents. It was both ancestral and a reunion. My grandparents haven’t been to Romania in 15 years, and refused to go back without me. I was the first in my family born in the states. My whole life I spoke to my family in Romania on Yahoo messenger, through emails, skype, and all those other internet platforms. I had opportunities to go as a kid, but they were always swatted by the pettiness in my parent’s divorce. My passport was a chess piece in the whole thing. It was also taken and kept ‘hostage’ for five years, and with all my family out of the country it created this ugly, sensitive obstacle. It’s not like they could come here either, because of Romanian government rules. When my grandmother’s sister hugged me at the airport on arrival she started crying, saying she lived every day scared she’d never see me. There’s a subconscious, almost secretive, aspect to this whole trip that I think has been about healing from my parent's divorce, and not just for me. It felt like we (my grandparents and I) had made it just in time. So this was a bigger, more complex deal than I can really depict.

Is having an understanding of your cultural heritage, and/or carrying out traditional values important to you? Why or why not?

It’s everything to me. Romanian culture is unique in a way that I can only really compare to the individuality of Albanian culture. I pray I can keep Romanian tradition alive, even if the truth is there’s definitely parts I’m letting shed off. I also think about how if I don’t it’ll almost certainly wither away because there is no relevance of Romania in American pop culture. I never had another Romanian classmate. The only other people my age that are Romanian, don’t speak Romanian, so that’s fostered having a lot of relationships with elders instead. I have one friend that does, and he’s the son of my family’s church’s previous priest. His dad married my parents, my uncle/aunt, baptized me and my siblings. Sometimes we laugh about being ‘dunked in the same bucket’. When we laugh about it, I don’t think he knows how much fear I have about that laugh disappearing, because there’s no one who’d get the joke. There’s this sense of ‘extinction’ I feel like might quietly, slowly take place. Having those relationships with the elders of the Romanian community is where I think I’ve learned so many of my personal values and standards. Definitely what not to do either. What not to become. But, they’ve been who teaches me to stick to my guns and how to love so intricately, for everything something might be. Romanians make the bones in my spine steel.

What does Romania mean to you?

To me, it represents the largest part of my identity. Understanding Romania’s political history is crucial to understanding my family, and understanding my family is one of my main focuses and long term commitments. Since I was young I never saw my family members for just their titles, I saw them as their ‘whole’ selves. So to have a private, intimate relationship with Romania has been what has taught me about myself and life in general. It gives me context about who I am to my family, so essentially I learn how to participate in the family, and that’s critical to me. It shows me how they need to be cared for. How to show up and get this ‘family’ thing right, despite all the obstacles.

Do you believe the traditions and values found within your culture influence your creative process? If so, how?

It influences my visual lens. It’s shown me what is important in a photograph, and what isn’t. It’s responsible for how I recognize my subjects. I notice every detail in someone’s body language when expressing themselves or in a social setting, but I also notice a lot about the condition of the materialistic things surrounding me. My grandmother has bags and bags of photos, including the journal/scrapbook my grandfather wrote poems to her and my mother in while he was in the navy for Romania’s communist border patrol. The photos he has in the journal are held in place by slits in the paper. Why? No tape. No glue. Why? Ask my grandpa, and he’ll explain all the context. There are context clues in everything that teach you about history, political and interpersonal. So when I see these things, I’m studying the actual thing, and the person that’s engaging with it. People go to a different place, mentally and spiritually, when they’re reminiscing. The things I’ve learned from observing are what’s most valuable to me.

What was the decision making behind using a Holga? Does working with film change anything about your creative process?

I worked with both digital and film, and I made sure to use 120mm film. I feel like 35mm is more about capturing a passing event. 120mm makes you preserve something, it makes you view it as not just a memory. The subject you captured is something valuable when it stands alone. There is this archival, intimate feeling in film that I reserve for the imperfect ‘sacred’. 

The subjects found within Romania On Holga consist of landscapes, architecture, and animals. What was it that drew you to capture those subjects specifically?

Well, first, specifically looking at the animals within this project, on the trip, I found a photo of one of my ancestral grandmothers. There are six mothers between us, and she was with two cattle. All my immediate family and ancestors have been peasants or farmers with livestock. So that's what the animals from these photos represent, but overall, those are the subjects I study the Birth/Life/Death cycle through.

History is also of immense interest to me. About animals specifically, since the beginning of time, animals are everywhere. Symbolically, in grave sites, constellations, in literature, in folklore, shaping politics, you name it. I’ve been trying to find more information about what it might be when you feel like... maybe animals are what you essentially worship. Animals are something that we both domesticate, yet kill and use for sustenance. I mean, we even grind their bones to dust and use it for collagen. There’s this brutality, and there's also this divinity. It’s an ethical conflict that I’m forever investigating. Landscapes, architecture, and animals all have been what spark some major wars and tragedies. All these things are reflections of humanity and our ethos. But in my work, I try to honor them for the life force they are or represent. 

From getting to work alongside you on projects, I’ve observed your keen sense of detail during your process. Is that intentional? Or is it just intuitive to your process?

Both. I think some of it is I’ve just made so much art in my life, I know how to see flaws. I believe in not just training your eye, but breaking it. There’s a psychological aspect I study alongside anything I make. I’ve also seen a lot of work from other people that I don’t like, and when I reflect on why, it’s because they missed a mark. I care about details in editing, and in how something makes someone feel the first nano seconds they see it. Fashion campaigns are textbooks to me. I don’t have to like everything I see – a lot of it is about hate. My standard for art is to defy logic – it’s gotta be so good in at least one way that it gives you some kind of high. Throughout the years I’ve spent so much time figuring out what makes an artist a magician. That’s the standard I measure myself against.

Has this body of work sparked any future projects? If so, could you explain?

Actually, it sparked a dedication. To Palestinians and all indigenous peoples. Indigenous to that geographical location, and everywhere else. I haven’t been too vocal about that part, because I’m still learning how to both comprehend and properly express what I’m learning. It (the trip) was a blessing to experience for so many reasons. It’s so profound to my identity, and when I realized what I just experienced is completely tarnished and erased from history for others, and cost them their lives and entire lineages, I felt physical pain. I never cried like that before. Apart from that, a few days ago, I found out my great grandmother was jewish and saved by marriage from the holocaust, but the rest of her family wasn't. A Romanian jewish person is something I’ve never heard of. So now, there’s this new political feature that I never planned on. I think a project that could stem from this is about how Judaism shows up in my lineage.
   

Do you plan on continuing Romania On Holga? Is there anything you would do differently with the project?

I don’t think there’s anything different that I would do, because it’s creating itself.
What’s been unexpected, is that instead of just a story to tell, it’s become an entity. I have digital photos I didn’t even get to yet because the work is just so profound. I’m trying to make a book, but I’ve also been starting to paint from them. I actually ended up speaking to my father again a few months before the trip. We didn’t speak for 8 years. I didn’t expect to have the relationship I have with him now, and we’re currently planning to visit his side of the family, which has always been a mystery and even taboo. So now, the Romania project is taking a path I didn’t mark on the map. It’s not even a detour, it’s
an entirely new road and stops.
			
		
	
 

What do you want the viewer to learn or come away with after viewing your images?

Respect and unconditionality. 

What kind of questions do you wish for your work to provoke?

I want people to feel themselves in the collective web. I want people to ask themselves if they’re really living honestly. I want people to understand their blood is more powerful and precious than anything, alchemically, beyond the parameters of tangible measurement. Not sure if that’s even readable form my work, but that’s my wish for viewers anyway. Like a prayer more than me asking or expecting viewers to realize any of those things.

What are some setbacks you’ve run into since starting this work?

I can’t spend as much time as I planned to get the rest of this project done on the timeline I originally set. I’ve had a lot more to emotionally process, and I’ve had to sit back and watch as meanings change and new answers come to the surface. It takes a toll on me physically, and I’ve had to recognize, face, and accept that. I’m currently trying new methods of time management though, because there’s no true obstacle. I just need to adapt, take it a step at a time, and have faith that whatever it becomes is on course and its most authentic version. I’m learning to let the entity the project has become live side by side with me and do what it asks of me as well.

How are you different from other artists working similarly or dealing with similar subject matter?

Maybe, I’ll say, I really am working from a divine, spiritual place. Maybe it’s even a little
occult, just like Romanian culture. Because other than that, I’m not. I don’t see myself
as different from those people. I actually want to find them, to know them in this way.
They’re my kin.

					
				
			
		
	
 

What spaces do you see this work existing in?

Most importantly, in the hands of my future family, and on the couch with my grandparents looking at the photos on the tv with an hdmi cable from my laptop.
I also hope it becomes a book people are protective over, or a gift to someone after a heart-to-heart. And yeah, I do hope for a gallery some day.