The exhibition PLECAT brings together installations, photographs, and reportage fragments produced across 12 European countries, in the communities where Romanian emigrants live and work. Elena Stancu and Cosmin Bumbuț travel by motorhome through Europe and document the everyday lives of migrants.
“PLECAT is the most difficult and the longest project I have ever worked on,” says photographer Cosmin Bumbuț. “For the past six years we have worked on it day after day, travelling by motorhome from one community to another, far from friends and family, with the feeling that we ourselves were becoming part of the diaspora we were documenting. We grew estranged, just like the people we write about and photograph. But we felt an enormous responsibility to tell these stories and to recover a history of migration that would otherwise risk remaining unseen.”
PLECAT is the most comprehensive documentary project about the Romanian diaspora. It explores what it means to live between worlds, and the way migration transforms not only individuals but Romanian society as a whole. In a tense political context — in which the diaspora vote has generated deep divisions — this exhibition offers an intimate and nuanced look at the lives of those who have left: a visual chronicle of the most significant social phenomenon in post-communist Romania.
The project was nominated in 2025 for the True Story Award, in 2023 for the European Press Prize, received a Pulitzer Center fellowship in 2021, and has won several Romanian photography and journalism awards. In 2025 it was shown at the Museum of Art in Cluj as part of TIFF; in 2024 at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest and at Literaturhaus Berlin; in 2021 at the Venice Architecture Biennale (Romanian Pavilion); and from March to April 2026 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art/MNAC.
Elena Stancu & Cosmin Bumbuț
Photographer Cosmin Bumbuț and journalist Elena Stancu have spent six and a half years documenting Romanian migrant communities across Europe. They have travelled to 12 countries and published over 130 pieces of reportage about seasonal workers in Germany, doctors and nurses in England, tourism workers in Portugal, farmers in Norway, naval electricians in Denmark, researchers in Sweden, students in the Netherlands, women who clean homes in Spain, and women who care for the elderly in Italy.
The two travel by motorhome and become part of the lives they document. Their project captures the work, the daily rhythms, and the process of integration that Romanian migrants and their transnational families go through.
Cosmin Bumbuț spent 15 years shooting for Romania’s most prominent brands and published in fashion magazines including Elle, Marie Claire, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar. At the age of 40 he turned to documentary photography. In 2012 he co-published with Elena Stancu the album Cuba continuă (Art Publishing), about Cuban life at a moment of transition. In 2013 he published Bumbata (Punctum Publishing), a book about the lives of inmates at Aiud Prison before and after Romania joined the EU. In 2015 he won first prize in the Architecture category of the Sony World Photography Awards for the project Camera Intimă, for which he visited every prison in Romania. His photographs have been exhibited at the Berlin European Month of Photography (2016) and the Brussels Summer of Photography, BOZAR (2012).
In November 2013, journalist Elena Stancu — then deputy editor-in-chief at Marie Claire magazine — and photographer Cosmin Bumbuț moved into a motorhome to be able to work on documentary projects.