ESC Volunteer in Genoa, Italy: Miruna Condrea

I arrived in Genoa thinking I was coming to volunteer. What I did not know was that I was also entering a long conversation with myself. Almost one year later, that conversation took shape as an exhibition.

Living and working in a residential center for unaccompanied minors slowly changed the way I understand time, care, and creation. My days were structured around the life of the center itself: shared spaces, daily routines, preparing meals, maintaining order, and being present with the boys inside the day center. The work happened there, in enclosed spaces, in repetition, in small gestures that rarely look meaningful from the outside, but slowly build trust and rhythm.

Outside of that rhythm, Genoa became my place to breathe. In my free time, I walked alone by the sea, through neighborhoods and train stations, letting the city hold me when the days felt heavy. These walks were well-deserved pauses. The beauty of the city, the light, the water, and the distance they offered helped me return to myself and to the work with more clarity.

As an artist, I lived with a constant tension between what I imagined and what was possible. Creativity in this context required patience and humility. Many ideas remained ideas. Others transformed into something smaller, quieter, and more personal. Drawing became my way of observing without interfering, of processing without explaining. Art stopped being something I shared immediately and became something I carried, slowly, privately, until it was ready.

The boys carried complex realities shaped by migration, faith, rules, frustration, and resilience. I chose not to translate their stories directly into images. Instead, I focused on what stayed with me after each day: fragments of faces, emotional pressure, silence, repetition. Through drawing and linocut, I worked with memory rather than documentation, allowing time and distance to filter what mattered.

This experience unfolded within the framework of TUIN ESC volunteering project, carried out between September 2024 and August 2025 in Genoa, Italy. I was part of a European Solidarity Corps placement in a residential center for unaccompanied foreign minors, coordinated through a partnership between SUPER TINERI from Romania and P.E.C.O. coordinating organization in Italy, and co-funded by European Union. The project offered structure, space, and freedom at the same time, leaving much of the experience to be shaped by daily realities and personal responsibility. I learned through tasks, through navigating uncertainty and learning how to stand on my own.

The exhibition that emerged at the end of this period is not a summary of the project, but a pause within it. The works do not explain what happened. They hold what could not be said at the time. They carry the weight of routine, of adaptation, of emotional presence in a system that moves slowly and asks patience.

I leave this experience with fewer illusions and more honesty. With a deeper understanding of integration, of care, and of my own limits. This project taught me that art does not need ideal conditions. It needs time, attention, and the courage to stay with what is uncomfortable. The exhibition is my way of acknowledging that what we live through changes us, even when the change happens quietly, one day at a time.