Luminara Florescu

I am a British-Romanian, chronically ill and neurodiverse artist, curator, artist mentor and community builder. My art practice is a form of Crip activism which aims to disrupt capitalist and ableist structures. When my body finally refused the hyper-productivity of the art world, I discovered collapse as revolutionary. In periods of enforced rest, I found a different way of making and a radical rejection of the notion that artistic worth comes from constant output. I believe in the power of playful disruption — art can be both gentle and radical. My practice seeks a creative (re)imagining of a care-based society through projects such as Rest As Protest and The Slow Practice Collective, bringing together communities of disabled, chronically ill and neurodiverse artists to explore creativity that exists in the territory of Unbelonging.

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I view the body as an archive that holds our lived experiences — with limits, thresholds and days when it cannot be accessed. From this understanding, I have developed a working practice that follows the rhythm of nature and honours my body's response to each season. Using the idea of "the artist's edit" as a creative process, the work takes living form as a number of digital gardens containing creative constellations of weird archives, Crip libraries and Resistance resources to create a 'Digital Commons'. These slow, body-paced ecosystems are open, organic, and ever-evolving without a focus on outcomes. They are a living repository of notes, data, PDFs and lived experiences, created from chronic illness and within enforced rest - not as administrative labour, but as art-making in its own right. Knowledge is circulated freely, and the archive grows toward anyone who finds themselves Unbelonging.

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My Digital Gardens exist alongside a real one. Housebound for much of the year, I tend an actual garden — one created to support and benefit the wild creatures and plants that share the land I live on. Pushed out of private renting by rising costs, my family and I now live in social housing on one of the new developments built on what was once open grazing land. I am acutely aware of what was lost to make way for us. So I garden in a spirit of restitution — working to return a diverse and layered habitat to the wildlife displaced by development, perhaps offering more than the monoculture of a cattle field ever could. To offer diverse habitats in a rural community that is losing its wild spaces to multiple new housing developments feels both urgent and quietly radical.

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Values Statement -

A Gentle Crip Protest when our world is on fire. 

Concerned over the continuing rise of fascism, hate speech, ecocide and the power of billionaires to control these narratives for the purposes of division and harm, I decided to disentangle myself from 'Big Tech'.  Beginning in 2026, I am embarking on a research journey into grassroots, ethical, sustainable and decentralised alternatives to digital platforms. This is part of my Gentle Protest project. I will be working on Crip Time to allow myself to dive deep into the research and disentangle myself from Big Tech in stages that are manageable and support my health and wellbeing.  I will share my research and resources on my website for those who may wish to participate in this Gentle Protest.

This action links to my values set out in The Contract of Self Care -a downloadable resource to support a best practice model for artists who have a social practice as well as participating members of the public involved in their projects.

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If you would like to work or collaborate with me please reach out via my CONTACT Page or Instagram: @luminara_florescu