Away – Cosmin Bumbuț (photographer) and Elena Stancu (journalist)

Guided tour of the exhibition: April 19, 6:00 p.m., National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC)
Project Presentation: April 20, 5:00 p.m., Reading Room, right wing, 1st floor, Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest.
Moderation and organization: Associate Professor Dr. Mihai Ometiță.

Photographer Cosmin Bumbuț and journalist Elena Stancu have been documenting Romanian migrant communities across Europe for six and a half years. So far, they have traveled to 12 countries and published over 130 reports on seasonal workers in Germany, doctors and nurses in England, tourism workers in Portugal, farmers in Norway, ship electricians in Denmark, researchers in Sweden, students in the Netherlands, women working as cleaners in Spain, and those caring for the elderly in Italy.
The two travel in a campervan and become part of the lives of the people they are documenting, and their project captures the work, daily life, and integration process experienced by Romanian migrants and their transnational families.
Their project was nominated for the True Story Award in 2025 and the European Press Prize in 2023; it received a fellowship from the Pulitzer Center in 2021 and several Romanian awards for photography and journalism. In 2024, it was exhibited at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest and at Literaturhaus Berlin, and in 2021 at the Venice Architecture Biennale, in the Romanian pavilion.
Cosmin Bumbuț spent 15 years photographing for Romania’s leading brands. At the age of 40, he began working in documentary photography. In 2012, he published, together with Elena Stancu, the photo book Cuba continues (Art Publishing House), about the lives of Cubans during a time of transition. In 2013, he published Bumbata (Punctum Publishing), a photo book about the lives of inmates at Aiud Penitentiary before and after Romania’s accession to the EU. In 2015, he won first prize in the Architecture category of the Sony World Photography Awards with the project Private Room, for which he visited every prison in Romania. His photographs have been exhibited at the Berlin European Month of Photography (2016) and at the Brussels Summer of Photography, BOZAR (2012).
In November 2013, journalist Elena Stancu—then deputy editor-in-chief of Marie Claire magazine—and photographer Cosmin Bumbuț moved into a campervan so they could work on documentary projects.
They have published reports on extreme poverty, domestic violence, marginalized Roma communities, life in prisons, the medication crisis, school dropouts, and migration. They have produced two documentary films: The Last Boiler (2016), about a Roma family from southern Romania who emigrate to France, and Residents (2018), about Romania’s first center for female inmates with mental illnesses. In 2017, they published a collection of reports Home, on the road (Humanitas).
In January 2019, they began work on “Plecat,” the most extensive documentary project on the migration of Romanians to Europe. The project offers an insider’s view of the lives of Romanians in the diaspora: the processes of integration into new societies, the fragile balance between homesickness and the need to belong, the lives of transnational families, and how migration transforms identity, values, and the relationship with Romania. It is an in-depth journalistic endeavor that sheds light on the emotional and social reality of a generation that is simultaneously changing both Romania and Europe.