Before we chose the word, we didn’t know it belonged to mathematics too. There, multiplicity doesn’t mean „many things”.
| It means how many times the same root repeats inside one equation – the same answer arriving more than once, changing the shape of the whole because of it. We liked that even better than the version we had in mind. (This is our eleventh edition. If you follow π far enough – past the ninetieth decimal – you’ll find an 11 sitting quietly in the middle of it. We’re not claiming this means anything. We’re saying we noticed, and that noticing is most of what we do here.) |
| Which is a roundabout way of saying: what follows is more like an equation than a lineup. A lineup is a list of names ordered by how many people recognise them. What we’ve been assembling over the years looks much more like a handful of people who keep arriving at the same idea from incompatible directions, and bend it out of shape in the process. So we won’t spend much time on who they are. We’d rather tell you what each of them does to the idea of MULTIPLICITY. |
| MULTIPLICITY begins with two |
| One person is already many – this is what psychoanalysis has been saying for a hundred years. What it adds is that you can’t come to terms with your own multiplicity alone. It takes two people in a room, each trying to stay themselves while being altered by the other. Orna Guralnik is a psychoanalyst who works exactly on that seam – and who has, improbably, made it watchable. On Couples Therapy, millions of people watch strangers describe their own lives and then listen to a version of that life they don’t recognise. What she keeps insisting, in her writing and her practice, is that no couple sits outside history: race, migration, gender, class and inherited politics are all in the room, sitting on the sofa, whether or not anyone names them. The political is personal. |
| Eyal Rozmarin, also a psychoanalyst, follows the same arrow in the opposite direction: how the collective lives inside the individual. How nation, belonging, and inherited loyalty press on a private psyche that believes itself to be its own author. His question is not „who am I” but „who else is in here.” Together, they arrive at Glissant’s sentence from two sides — ”you are not lost because you are multiple” — one from the couch, one from the collective. For this edition, we will be opening a call for couples to do a live session on stage with Orna and Eyal. Details to follow. If you come, bring the disagreement you’ve been avoiding. You’ll be in good hands. |
| MULTIPLICITY is not the same as a crowd |
| Douglas Rushkoff was with us in 2021, during MIDNIGHT, when we were all online and all multiple in the worst possible way: a face in a grid, next to other faces in a grid. He said something then that we’ve been carrying around since — that the internet, games, VR were always, for him, about challenging where he ends and other people begin. Five years later, that question has largely been answered on our behalf, by companies. He has spent a career refusing both of the available positions: the tech utopian and the tech doomer. Team Human argues that being human is a team sport, and that almost every technology of the last two decades has been quietly designed to make it a solo one. Survival of the Richest went to the source and found billionaires asking, in a room, how to keep their security guards loyal after the collapse — which is the purest expression we know of the singular self: the fantasy that you can be saved alone. We cannot wait to have him in our Auditorium this time, in person, with no grid. |
| MULTIPLICITY has a rhythm |
| Nik Bärtsch is a pianist, a composer, a martial arts aficionado (for connoisseurs, a third dan in aikido!), has written a book about the relationship between mind and body, co-founded a club in Zurich, and explores movement, rhythm, and flow through his concept of „Ritual Groove Music” – built from layered patterns, each one simple, almost stubbornly plain on its own, none of them agreeing on where the bar begins. That disagreement is composed. The martial art is in how he sits at the piano. The meditation is in how the band listens. The club exists because the music needed somewhere to be made every week rather than every tour. Take any one of these away and the others get thinner. So he is coming with all of it. The detail we love the most? The technique underneath his Ritual Groove Music comes out of the tradition of Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti, who played from the centre, with weight rather than force — working with the instrument instead of on it. He found the same principle years later in aikido, where getting nervous in your body makes you both slower and easier to read. So a Romanian way of sitting at a piano travelled to Zurich, went through Zen, funk, minimalism and a martial art, will come back to Bucharest in September as something Lipatti could not have predicted, but would probably have recognised. |
| MULTIPLICITY out of one mouth |
| Trung Bao was born in Vietnam, Chiwawa in Poland, and they met through beatboxing, which is either the least likely shared language available or the most obvious one, depending on how you feel about words. They are internationally decorated champions with something over a hundred million views between them, and what they do is the most literal version of our theme in the entire programme: a single body producing a drum kit, a bassline, a horn section and a voice at once, with no instruments and nowhere to hide. Multiplicity with nothing added. |
| MULTIPLICITY is designed, or it doesn’t happen |
| Some of you have already been inside Bella’s work without knowing her name. As Experience Director and Curator here, she built the encounters around Esther Perel, Daniel Jones and Perry Chen – the rooms, the rituals and the reason a hundred strangers from sixty countries somehow started talking to each other instead of checking their phones. Isabella Nardini calls herself an artist of encounters and she has practised in the streets of Paris, the alleyways of Marrakech, the gardens of Inhotim and the flat grey cloud of Zoom. She has lived in São Paulo, Florence, Venice, New York and Bucharest. She once co-designed a ritual that the Cannes Lions jury adopted, which is proof of something we insist on around here: the invisible structure of a room decides what people are able to say in it. She comes back with new variations on the dating walks she previously did and a new experience built around dreams — not the ones you have at night, the ones you say out loud and then quietly postpone for a decade. Bring one with you if you have it lying around. |
| MULTIPLICITY, tasted |
| Marinela Ardelean put Romanian wine on the international map, and has spent fifteen years working the seam between expertise, strategy and visibility: founder of Wines of Romania and the RO-Wine Festival, author of seven books, international judge, jury president at Mundus Vini. Wine is the argument she doesn’t have to make out loud. A single glass holds a soil, a slope, a year of weather, a family’s decisions and a fermentation nobody fully controls – none of which can be separated out again. It is also, in this country, a live question about identity: whether the local thing has to be modest to be authentic, or whether it can simply be excellent. She is not neutral on that and will make it clear. She has just come back from seven weeks on the road with Jidvei: over 80 locations, all seven wine regions of Romania – a route that was filmed as it went, and will become a series. UNFINISHED is the first place she tells anyone what she found on the road. She is also hosting a workshop, powered by Jidvei. Large group (because we know there are many interested!), glasses on the table — and enough room to argue with her. Details soon. |
| MULTIPLICITY is alive, and it smells! |
| We have talked all year about being multiple. She has been feeding it twice a day! Every loaf she makes is a colony. Sourdough is a negotiation between yeasts and bacteria that no baker fully directs. Flour, water, time, temperature and a few billion organisms with their own agenda – that she will bring to UNFINISHED once again! Lara Schütz trained in Austria, Canada, France and Germany, and became the first Romanian certified bread sommelier and the sixteenth woman in the world to hold the title. She is also a certified beer sommelier, a certified expert in the sensory analysis of bread, a trainer of apprentices, a finalist at the 2025 World Bread Sommelier Championship, and the author of the first Romanian newsletter written by a working baker. |
| MULTIPLICITY has a season |
| Roxana Zaha is an anthropologist by training, but a farmer in practice. She runs a small regenerative vegetable farm in her village in Țara Hațegului, raises her children there, and in her spare time makes content that refuses to pick a subject: anthropology, politics, sustainable gardening, books, gossip with a twist! But the farm is what she’s coming to talk about. Regenerative farming returns soil to health instead of drawing it down — many organisms, many timescales, nothing single to optimise. So what happens if you run that logic on everything else we’ve exhausted: an economy, an institution, a town, a public conversation? Expect the cultural thinker and the farmer to speak at the same time, and expect the practical question underneath it all: how a person actually begins building the life they keep describing? She’s unromantic about what this life costs, which is why we trust her on the rest of it. |
| MULTIPLICITY on the Garden Stage |
| Caval and clarinet. Voice. Electric guitar. Bass. A wall of analogue modular synthesisers. Byzantine and folk and oriental material meeting ambient electronics, improvised live, and somehow both meditative and danceable. Vibrant Ensemble will play in the garden, among trees that were here long before us and are entirely indifferent to our programming — which is, all told, the correct audience for a community like us. |
| MULTIPLICITY needs a fire |
| Fire is never the same object twice, and it only exists for as long as it keeps changing. Avisek Majumdar returns to build a ritual around it. Yoga teacher, Ayurveda practitioner, founder of Conscious Living Romania and a practitioner of a tradition that has never assumed there is one body, one temperament, or one correct way to be well. Ayurveda starts by asking what kind of person is in front of it, and gives a different answer every time. It also treats fire, agni, as the thing inside us that turns whatever we take in into what we are made of. The ritual happens around the fire, together: one flame, several dozen faces lit unevenly, everyone arriving with something different to put in. What each person brings is their own business. The fire does not distinguish or discriminate. Thanks to Mastercard, the fire gets lit. |
| MULTIPLICITY at knee height |
| Children are the only people we don’t yet ask to be one thing (yet!). Give thirty children the same pile of things and you get thirty answers. The whole argument, at knee height. Zăvoi builds the play area in the garden: a landscape of objects and materials that keeps changing across the three days, where nothing is aimed at a result. Raluca Matache co-founded it as a space where childhood can take its own time — guided for those who want it, and long stretches of nothing in particular for those who don’t. Her work moves between design and technology, and the question underneath it has always been how people meet the worlds built around them. |
| MULTIPLICITY is also the people carrying the chairs |
| Something we don’t say loudly enough: UNFINISHED does not happen without its volunteers. Every year a group of people give three days to the work that never makes it into an aftermovie:, moving the chairs, answering thousands of questions about the location, standing at a gate for hours, fixing whatever broke twenty minutes before anyone needed it. In this community, volunteers are really inside it: in the „backstage” with speakers who by then are just people looking for coffee, or for the toilet, or for someone to tell them how much time they have left. Carrying a chair across the garden with someone whose book you have on your shelf. Standing in the ten minutes before a session, which is when people are most themselves and least prepared. And, while being here, you really learn things that no panel can hand you – most important, how much unremarkable care sits underneath anything that looks effortless. Join our squad! |
| Open Call for Installations in Our Garden. Last chance to apply! |
| This is the last stretch. Applications close soon, and everyone who has applied will hear from us shortly. We read every single one, which is why it takes as long as it does. BUT if you’ve been leaving this tab open since June, this is the week. We are looking for visual installations and art projects that can live in our garden across the full three days of the festival. Works may be existing, adapted, or newly conceived for the space. We look forward to seeing what you imagine for it! |
| We’ll see you in the garden, September 25–27, in Bucharest.With gratitude, the UNFINISHED team |