“Sweeping Under the Rug” is a performance piece created by artists Oxana Capatina and Cristian Pasat. The project emerged spontaneously during a visit to the landfill in Văsieni, Oxana’s native village. The two artists often explore such places, drawn to abandoned objects and the stories hidden among discarded things.

During these explorations, the artists recover film photographs, books, sketches, clothes, artworks, objects of cultural value, and everyday items. These are researched, documented, and artistically reinterpreted. Through this practice, they try to understand where an object’s usefulness ends, who decides that it no longer has value, and what is lost when it is abandoned.

The idea for the work appeared one spring day, when the artists noticed many discarded carpets at the landfill. Many were still intact and could have been used, kept, or transformed. Among them were carpets with traditional patterns, connected to the memory of homes and families in the Republic of Moldova.

In the middle of this chaos, Oxana began collecting the carpets and carefully placing them next to one another, as if at home. From approx. 30 carpets, an ordered surface emerged that, for a few moments, seemed like a pause in the surrounding chaos. This gesture became the central action of the performance, while Cristian documented the process, choosing the way this transformation would be seen and preserved.

The title comes from the expression “to sweep the trash under the rug.” In the work, the meaning is reversed: the rug no longer hides the problem, but becomes trash itself and makes the problem visible. The performance draws attention to waste, excessive consumption, and the ease with which we discard things that are still usable, while also speaking about memory, identity, and the fragility of material heritage.
This place of degradation becomes an involuntary archive of the community, where personal objects, traces of everyday life, and fragments of local culture come together what Cristian also calls an open-air museum.
The performance was published online, reshared by the community, featured by press Moldova.org, and later presented at the Artcor Center for Creative Industries.

“Sweeping Under the Rug” is part of a series of five performances related to landfills, ecology, and people’s relationship with abandoned objects. The artists are developing the next parts of the series, continuing to explore these sites and the objects found there.