I had found a new subject for a marionette play: together

Artist
Phoebe von Held (concept and scenographic elements)

Exhibition
Impreuna/Together: group exhibition with Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Mada Zaharia, and Dana Andrei, organised by Salonul de proiecte as part of the project „Mobilizing Patterns: transnational female solidarities”

Venue
Salonul de proiecte, Bucarest: 26 June - 3 August 2025

Curated by
Magda Radu, Stefan Sava, Alexandra Croituru, Ana Maria Stefan, and Robert Bajenaru

Puppet making
Lambdog1066

Set construction
Dan Vezentan

Graphic design
Larisa Sitar

Photographs by Lee Miller
Courtesy of the Lee Miller Archive

Exhibition photographs by
Ioana Marinescu and Stefan Sava of Salonul de proiecte

Exhibition funded by
Fondul cultural national, Romania

Additional support by
Goethe Institut, Romania

Lee Miller, Lena Constante and Elena Pătrășcanu, Bucharest 1946 - 1956

This scenographic installation — a play without performance — evokes key moments in the lives, friendship, and artistic production of Lee Miller, Lena Constante, and Elena Pătrășcanu.

The piece springs from a series of photographs taken by Lee Miller in Bucharest in 1946, depicting a group of women artists at work in a marionette-making workshop. The atmosphere conveyed by Miller’s photographs is one of female solidarity, artistic integrity, and creative enjoyment. The studio belonged to Țăndărică Theatre, founded by the communist stage designer Elena Pătrășcanu after the Second World War, with the aim of producing political theatre for children and adults.

 One of Lee Miller’s photographs captures Pătrășcanu’s closest collaborator and friend, the artist Lena Constante, turning a puppet of Adolf Hitler towards the camera — a gesture loaded with symbolic significance. In a context where left-wing artists and intellectuals, united by anti-fascist ideals, operated within networks that transcended national and cultural borders, the image acquires a particular political resonance.

Two years after the meeting between the three women artists, Constante and Pătrășcanu were arrested and subjected to the gravest Stalinist show trial in Romania, followed by twelve-year prison sentences. This brutally interrupted their professional trajectories and led to the irretrievable breakdown of their friendship. In her prison memoir, The Silent Escape (1990), Constante revisits the marionette theatre as both a metaphor for political violence and a tool for resistance and survival.

The installation brings into correspondence these two ontologies of puppet theatre that came to determine Constante’s and Pătrășcanu’s biographies: their high time as founders and puppeteers of the leftist Țăndărică Theatre, and their subsequent experience of becoming puppets themselves in Romania’s most notorious Stalinist show trial.