Humid Installation (1970)
Ana Lupas
The spirit of land art was also around in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, and in Russia the group Collective Actions was active with spontaneous performances and actions in the countryside near Moscow. Romanian Ana Lupas, whose major retrospective was on display at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the summer of 2024, made work that strongly related to land art. Her 1970 “Humid Installation” involved 100 inhabitants of the village of Mârgău in Transylvania and traversed the hillside with long lines of white laundry. So the “humidity” of the title refers not only to weather or natural water, as with much land art, but to cleaning - a theme she shares with American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Lupas explicitly gave land art a social and rural dimension as well.