Elena Stanciu

Around About Circus • 11th August 2026

Things we need in times of crisis: a throwback to the 2026 UP - Circus & Performing Arts Festival

A review and op-ed on contemporary circus and performing arts, as hosted by UP Festival in Brussels, 2026. Published by Around About Circus.

Around About Circus • 16th May 2025

The Great Dreams of the Grand Danois

Cirkus Grand Danois This article is part of the CIRCUS FROM THE NORTH series in which we engage with this rich and exciting region and its emerging aesthetics within circus creation. What is a circus dream? Is it the promise of freedom and...

Academic writing • 3rd November 2022

Horrors of History and Colonial Imaginaries

The Construction and Representation of Black Embodiment in THEM (2021) This paper departs from an interest in exploring the depiction of Black bodies and experiences of suffering, death, and being terrorized in popular television, applied to a...

PETRIe • 13th November 2020

A Step Towards the New Normal - The Style PR Designer rEvolution Programme

By its nature, fashion has the capacity to draw out the vectors of our future – immense energy goes into creating desire for tomorrow, rather than serving the wishes of today. Fashion is always ahead of its time, generously allowing us to jump on its...

PETRIe • 16th January 2019

The Revenant – Human Nature at the Edge of Darkness —

Iñárritu paints a corner in a larger picture of invasion, depicting the frontier from the perspective of a few men and of how they make sense of their world: the frontier marks the border with the foreign they must conquer, the savage they must...

PETRIe • 16th January 2019

Boycott in One Act —

Ai Weiwei makes the best of what art as an institution has to offer, using the medium to influence social structures and challenge conventions. Through aesthetic engagement, the artist reinforces and expands the power of political dissidence, becoming...

PETRIe • 14th January 2019

Her – Literary Liquidity —

Her (2013) is the American comedy-drama written, directed and produced by Spike Jonze, and it tells the story of Theodore, a soon-to-be divorced ghost letter-writer who purchases, and consequently falls in love with, an Artificial Intelligence...

PETRIe • 26th December 2018

Experiences of the Unreal: Post-Photographic Photography —

Material, virtual, augmented, non-existent – reality forces itself into our visual spectrum with the energy of an unstoppable force. We can’t avoid having reality filtered for us, condensed and summarized, in the name of speed, efficiency, and...

PETRIe • 9th December 2018

A Nice Life: Understanding Luxury —

Chasing a rich, luxurious life comes entwined with very specific attitudes and lifestyles, easily traced in today’s cultural products. Variations of an exacerbated American dream host popular understandings of what it means to “make it,” to “be...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Poverty and the Limit to Freedom —

Poverty plays a strange and central role in a vicious circle of its own: if privilege is what might reduce poverty, it is poverty itself that blocks privilege. Deep inequality arises from lack of access to education and resources, which is what...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

In Tech We Trust: Rituals and Ceremonies in the IT world —

Strong leaders are key figures of any organisation. Regardless of holding actual power, or merely projecting it, the head of a company, a religious organisation, or a country embodies the entity´s vision of itself and of its future. In the history of...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Futures Studies and the Taming of Time —

ES: Is the study of future meant to help make better decision in the present? And if so, do you find in your work instances where people still make terribly wrong decisions, absurdly against scientific data? K Æ. M: The point of futures studies is...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Man is the Measure of Time —

Do we fight time? Do we embrace it? Is time a source of anxiety or a stimulant of joy? Does time have a colour or a shape? Can we ever think about here, without thinking about now? These are questions that we seek to explore in our new digital issue,...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Hot Dudes Reading: The Dark Side of Empowerment —

Hot Dudes Reading is an Instagram community ran for the simple cause of collecting photos of attractive men reading in public places, from anonymous contributors around the world. Over 270 photos have been already uploaded, for a following of nearly...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Hashtag Protest —

Digital platforms feed into the structural fragmentation and individualisation of societies today, paradoxically enhancing connectivity and mirroring the spatiality of protest: the public square is now the platform, and groups of activists are now...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Disembodied Warfare: Death by Drone —

Despite the apparent disembodied condition of this type of warfare, the act of military killing with drones has an inevitable emphasis on the human body, both at the level of action, control, and operation of drones, and at the level of those targeted...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Of Whistleblowers and Men: Snowden and the Boundaries of Genre —

Only two years after the release of critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, director Oliver Stone tells the story of Edward Snowden – patriot, beautiful mind, whistleblower. Somewhat in line with Stone's oeuvre, Snowden ends up as...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Sexual Racism: An Anatomy of Desire —

The question whether sexual racism is actually racism has been the core of research ever since, with sociological and cultural studies often being challenged by the complex notion of desire. Sexual or romantic attraction, desire, or preference are...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

Look Away, Look Away, Look Again! —

See something, say something! In our times of imminent aggression, unpredictable dangers, and morphing violence, this is a social mantra we all recite daily. As our modern society advances in technologies of protective surveillance and pre-emptive...

PETRIe • 26th November 2018

My Device, My Screen, My Love: Desire and Technology —

Despite their translucent appearance, our gadgets are increasingly opaque, they refuse to be penetrated, or taken apart, insinuating an existence without origin. These technologies are a first generation of machines that are not built by bodies to...