Landscape Mode

A popular film location, Romania has witnessed a surge in ‘set-jetting’—travel influenced by movies and TV shows, even surpassing social media in holiday inspiration. Following the success of Tim Burton’s Netflix series ‘Wednesday’, tourism boomed. Despite being set in Vermont, the series was filmed across Romanian locations deemed suitable. It has also served as a proxy for Paris, Moscow, and more. Sometimes the reasons are financial, but other times the Romanian film locations provide more predictable weather and have minimal modern infrastructure to remove in post-production. Romania’s folklore has also become globally popularised, with local legends like werewolves, vampires, giants, and ogres seen across mainstream entertainment and inspiring numerous IP franchises.

‘Landscape Mode’ is a panorama to take your own photo among the amalgamated visual culture of outsourced landscapes, appropriated characters, and amplified clichés. It scoured film location databases for films, series, ads, and games that use Romania’s locations as proxies. Based on these proxies and appropriated folkloric characters, figures and landscapes were sourced from online 3D scan repositories and text-to-3D AI tools. Welcome to ‘Landscape Mode’, a place where everything looks eerily familiar, a ghost of binges past, a faint memory of childhood fairy tales, a composite of content.