For several years, Andreea Peterfi has been photographing 'accidental sculptures': abandoned objects that she encounters during her residencies in Europe and Asia, when she takes long walks to discover the cities she visits. She has built up a photo collection of this, “as an archive of human presence, traces and activity, related to the urban environment, to (sculptural) materials, and to behavior in daily life.” In the places she visits, her camera helps her to acclimatize and to investigate the identity of the places. For her latest research, she wanted to travel to a village in Transylvania where the minority of the Szekler people live and where part of her family comes from. Carvings and carved gates are part of the Szekler culture, who would like to seek them out, to delve into their symbolism and history. Through theory such as that of De Certeau and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, she wanted to interpret and reinterpret this history, gain insights into her own background, and come up with new work.

Peterfi studied photography in Bucharest and graphic design in Ghent and Amsterdam. She was involved with Kaus Australis and shows her work in exhibitions and installations. She combines her documentary street photography in an installation form with sculpture, in other words sculptural reinterpretations of those accidental street sculptures. Photography and sculpture also come together in this latest personally motivated project plan. The R&D committee thought it was an exciting proposal from someone with a sense of aesthetics, the combination of intuition and documentation makes it a personal research that is of common value.

At the end of the summer of 2021, Peterfi went to Transylvania to search for and photograph the Szekler gates and to organize them by village and province. She visited Szekler museums and craftsmen to talk about their craft, woodcarving symbolism, past and present. She made drawings of the gates and symbols and started sketching new symbols herself to have them executed as wood carvings. “This research is important for the development of my work, both as a photographer, because of the quality of the photo documentary, and for my background as a graphic designer, because of the language of communication through symbols and the remodeling or addition of new symbols to an already existing vocabulary." In addition to a publication, she wanted to include the results in an exhibition.