Alexandrina Ciubotaru

Design - Spatial Design

The Sour Cherry Kitchen

Alexandrina Ciubotaru is a spatial designer whose practice explores how spaces collect memory, ritual, and human presence. Her process combines theoretical and intuitive research—reading texts, conducting interviews, documenting domestic spaces, and collecting conversations, gestures, and routines—with hands-on making. 

Central to her practice is the kitchen. This meant designing and building a real-scale kitchen for the first time: constructing stations for preserving sour cherries, experimenting with woodworking, and creating handmade ceramic trays, pots, and surfaces shaped specifically around the ritual itself.

 Alexandrina sees the kitchen not merely as a functional space for cooking or eating, but as a living archive shaped by the people who inhabit it. The arrangement of objects, the wear on surfaces, the tools used, and the rituals performed all become traces of cultural background, care, labour, and memory. She is particularly interested in how kitchens quietly narrate the lives unfolding within them.

Her graduation project, The Sour Cherry Kitchen, is an interactive installation rooted in the ritual of preserving sour cherries in their own juice, a process passed down to her by her mother and grandmother in Moldova. Growing up, preservation was not only about food, but about spending time together: hands stained red, repetitive gestures, conversations unfolding around the kitchen space. 

During the exhibition, visitors are invited into a full-scale kitchen where they participate in the preservation process using hand-picked sour cherries. In return, they are asked to share their own “sour cherry story” — a memory connected to the kitchen space. Through this exchange, the installation reimagines the kitchen as a social and emotional space where stories are remembered, produced, and shared collectively.

The graduation show marks only the beginning of The Sour Cherry Kitchen. Like a real kitchen, the installation will continue to evolve through use, conversation and the people who gather within it.

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