Projects

Salonul Magic

Salonul Magic is a transdisciplinary series of events that brings together art and music in various locations. Each edition creates a space where different artistic forms such as crafts, painting, and visual art meet live music performances. The events usually include a live concert and an offering of food, creating a warm and immersive experience for visitors.

So far, Salonul Magic has reached its 4th edition, with five new editions planned for the summer of 2026. Salonul Magic is created by Diana Butucariu and Erik Lindeborg, with the shared goal of strengthening the cultural connection between Romania and Sweden through art and music.

The project began in the winter of 2011, following a visit to the small Transylvanian city of Sighișoara. Deeply inspired by the trip, Erik composed ten original pieces within just a few days. Over the course of a year, these compositions were recorded, mixed, printed, and packaged in a colorful pop-up cover created by Diana Butucariu.

The first Salonul Magic event took place in Stockholm, at the intimate Lederman Theater, during a harsh winter storm. Diana’s exhibition, Erik’s music, and traditional Romanian food warmed and delighted the audience late into the night. As Erik wrote in the CD booklet, “I think it will be an amazing year”—and indeed, the collaboration continued.

In the spring of 2013, a second edition, Salonul Magic 2, was born. New artworks and musical compositions were created and presented at one of Stockholm’s most fitting venues, the Jazzistan music club.

Over the years, the Salonul Magic project has moved forward through trust, appreciation, encouragement, and the constant support of friends and family.

For me, Diana Butucariu, this project represents an extraordinary journey—one with many future stops yet to come.

Fluid State

Fluid state is an experimental ongoing art project, focusing on glass as a prime material seen through the eyes of a musician, Erik Lindeborg, an animator, Kaoru Furuko and an artist/curator Diana Butucariu.

The work of the three artists emphasises characteristics of glass such as materiality, audibility and fluidity with the use of generative sound design, stop-motion animation and object making. The exhibition offers a rich and vivid audio-visual experience which aims to realise the mythical fluid state of the glass.

The exhibition explores illusions of movement in cold glass; a resemblance to the primordial state of the material, a substance continually deforming and flowing, a state that the glass retains in its molecular structure as it cools. Glass is made from sand and other materials, including silica, soda ash and limestone, that are melted together at very high temperature. We consider glass a solid but on an atomic level it looks more like a liquid, its atoms all jumbled up, like in a FLUID STATE.

Through their different backgrounds and experiences, with various work processes but with similar perspective and impressions, the artists deconstruct the glass matter, leaving it sometimes in an invisible stage, immaterial and presented only through its reflection, shadow or incognoscible, unspecific sounds.

Sounding Craft

I have been a musician for as long as I can remember. Many years ago, I met a ceramicist and fell in love with her and with her work. Since then, I am looking for ways to combine music with crafts, so that we can create together. In Sounding Craft, I put into words some of what I have learned and demonstrate a practical way for craftspeople, or anyone else for that matter, to approach a musician’s perspective on creativity.

Sounding Craft was part of Konstfack’s Research Lab. Download the full publication in the making on DiVA, or read an excerpt of my chapter.

Diana Butucariu, Mihai Coltofean, and Lucian Butucariu generously contributed the sounds of their craft to my research, exploring the latent musicality of their tools and techniques.

Raw Materials

Can nature be garbage? In their latest collaborative project, ceramicist Diana Butucariu and musician Erik Lindeborg explore the relationship between nature and society, in the context of a large infrastructure project to bury electricity cables underground to improve the reliability of transmission. As the diggers carve a path through the local landscape, they leave behind a scar of mud cutting through fields and forests, and piles of debris of branches, stones and earth.

Butucariu collects these leftovers, this nature-garbage, and uses them to create sculptures. In a process that mirrors how nesting birds have taken to incorporate human refuse into their architecture, she makes her cocoons out of the natural materials ripped out of context by the diggers. Her sculptures deal with interpreting the codependencies between nature and society in a countryside shaped by the relationship between human activities and the forces of nature.

Lindeborg is a musician and sound artist whose most recent work investigates the evolving relationship between work and music. His artistic process involves recording the sounds of craftspeople at work, and turning the sound of their practices into music pieces. In Raw Materials, he documents the soundscape of intersection between nature and society that exists in the countryside.

Butucariu and Lindeborg have been working together for more than a decade, exploring the often overlooked interplay between handicraft and sound practices. The resulting body of work approaches this interconnectedness as an aspect of ecology and unity of human experience. Their latest work is guided by the shift in perspective that has come from moving from the big city to the countryside.