This room is articulated by photographic archival images. It invites the viewer to enter imaginatively into the historicity of the present and traces a genealogy of care through Bucharest’s evolving urban courtyards, foregrounding the transformation of domestic life under the socialist regime. Before the widespread demolitions of the 1970s, homes and gardens formed and articulated a deeply rooted urban fabric—spaces of continuity, community, and care. These were systematically erased to make way for socialist apartment blocks, creating new, often desolate, yet inhabited domestic landscapes. Historical photographs—taken just prior to demolition and sourced from personal family archives in 2020 by the exhibition’s curators—offer rare glimpses into these lost domestic worlds.

In dialogue with this personal archival material are photographs by artist Ion Grigorescu from the 1980s, capturing life in the liminal spaces between newly built blocks. Taken during the early years of socialist urban reconstruction, his images mark a transitional moment: from loss and rupture toward quiet adaptation, improvisation, and the re-emergence of care. One enters the present through the past, here both as an act of critique and contemplation. Through the lens of Ion Grigorescu, whose images possess a critical-archival quality, the first room opens onto the present, documenting the contemporary intimacies of domesticity as intergenerational acts of care.