Hidden Guardians

Revealing the forest’s unseen life, its quiet protectors, and what they stand against — through photography, storytelling, and painting.

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What this Overlap is about

Hidden Guardians reveals Bucharest's Băneasa Forest as a place of layered life, quiet care, and growing pressure.

Centred around the Bǎneasa Highly Sensitive Tree — a long-time resident oak — this Overlap brings together Romanian photographers, Bucharest voices, and painters from around the world to explore guardianship as something already happening — often unseen, fragile, needed.

The Overlap unfolds in three phases, each building on the last, creating a shared cultural record of what is held, who protects it, and what threatens its future.

How it Works

Hidden Guardians unfolds as a three-stage process, each with its own competition:

Photography
Romanian photographers document Băneasa Forest through three shared themes.
Voices
Bucharest residents respond to selected images with short spoken reflections in answer to the question "What does this image evoke in you?"
Painting
Artists around the world respond to both the photographic images and voice layers, and create painted interpretations based on those.

All finalist photographs, voice content and painting submissions are posted to the Hidden Guardians Overlap membership space.

Creative Commponents

Hidden Guardians invites participation from multiple communities, each contributing in a different way to a shared cultural record of Băneasa Forest.

Romanian photographers are invited to spend time in the forest, working within three guiding questions:

What is being guarded?
Who are the guardians?
What is the threat they guard against?

Bucharest residents are invited to share short spoken reflections in response to selected images. Contributions may be personal, fragmentary, or reflective — moments of memory, concern, care, or attachment. Voices are curated with care and shared with permission (either with credits or anonymously).

Painters around the world are invited to respond to winning pairings of photographs and voice. Each painting becomes a translation across place, medium, and perspective — extending the forest’s story beyond Romania while remaining rooted in lived experience.

Participation unfolds in phases, allowing each group to engage with clarity and purpose. Contributors are not asked to represent the forest as a whole, but to respond honestly from where they stand.

Open Calls

Hidden Guardians will shortly be open to Romanian photographers.

Photographers are invited to work in Băneasa Forest and submit works in response to three guiding theme questions:

What is being guarded?
Who are the guardians?
What is the threat they guard against?

Further calls — including spoken contributions from Bucharest residents and painted responses from artists worldwide — will be announced in later phases.

Details on how to submit material will be posted here soon!

Timeline

Phase I — Photography competition

Photographers are invited to reveal the hidden forest: soil systems, roots, surrounding biodiversity in all its forms, micro-life, textures, and unseen rhythms that sustain Băneasa Forest as a living system.

This phase focuses on attention rather than spectacle.