Alexandra Vacaroiu

Mami, where is your daddy?

Alexandra Vacaroiu is a Romanian-born artist and artist-educator based in Hastings, UK. Working across photography, text, cyanotype, and moving image, her practice explores themes of memory, identity, and familial relationships. Through both personal and found imagery, she constructs visual narratives that navigate loss, care, grief and the shifting nature of personal histories. Vacaroiu holds a BA in Photography & Film and an MA in Fashion Photography from the London College of Fashion, as well as a PGCE in Art and Design from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including The Photographers’ Gallery, the V&A, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the British Council and has been featured in publications such as Dazed & Confused, Vice, and The Times. “Mami, where is your daddy” was made following the death of my father, who died two weeks after the birth of my first child. He had been waiting to become a grandfather, but never met my son, nor the daughter who was born after. I wanted them to know one another so deeply, that I began to construct, through photography, a space in which they might meet. Using archival photographs of my father alongside images of my children, I bring together two timelines that never physically intersected. The work emerged during a period marked by both grief and new life. Becoming a mother while losing my father created a dissonant emotional landscape, where joy and sorrow existed simultaneously, often in conflict. This was further complicated by postnatal depression, which blurred and intensified these opposing states. The series does not resolve this tension, but remains within it, holding together presence and absence, beginning and ending, in a space where both can coexist. Through the act if making, I create the encounter that reality denied them, allowing these two generations to coexist,if only within the photographic image.