Transylvania Jewelry Festival 2025

A little bit of time travel

In 2025, Naturalesa was selected for the first edition of the Transylvania Jewelry Festival, an international contemporary jewelry event held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The festival, themed “For the Love of Jewelry,” brought together 78 artists from 24 countries, with more than 320 contemporary jewelry pieces presented across galleries, cultural institutions and alternative spaces throughout the city.

For Naturalesa, the exhibition was significant for another reason: it brought my work back to the city where I had spent years building a career in architecture and interior design, this time, as a jewelry designer.

From architecture to jewelry

Before Naturalesa, Cluj was the place where I ran my interior design studio.

My days were filled with architecture, materials, furniture, permits, construction sites and clients. I designed spaces for people to live, work and gather in.

Returning with jewelry felt strangely familiar and completely different at the same time.

The scale had changed. Instead of designing spaces, I was creating objects small enough to hold in your hand, but I was still interested in the same things: materials, nature, structure, detail and the relationship between an object and the person who experiences it.

Piedra

For the festival, I presented pieces from Piedra, a collection inspired by natural stones and the marks created by time.

The collection began with my fascination for hag stones: stones naturally pierced through by water over long periods of time. What interested me was the way something that could look like damage could become precisely what makes the stone special.

That became a metaphor I kept returning to.

We often think of our marks, imperfections and difficult experiences as things we should hide. But perhaps a mark isn't always damage. Perhaps it is evidence of what has shaped us.

In Piedra, I work with natural stones while preserving their individual shapes and imperfections rather than trying to make them uniform.

The collection became an exploration of imperfection, resilience and the beauty of what has been shaped by time.

Coming home

Two galleries in Cluj beautifully prepared exhibitions featuring my work, and I had the chance to see the Piedra pieces in a city I knew so well, but through completely different eyes.

There was something almost surreal about walking the same streets where I had once been an architect, now returning as a jewelry designer.

We went to wine tastings, walked through familiar places and visited exhibitions. For a little while, it felt almost like travelling backwards in time.

Except I wasn't the same person who had left. The city was familiar. The work was different. And so was I.

This time, I got to experience the whole thing without rushing back to the kids, without trying to fit the trip around everyone else's schedule.

Just two days in a city that had been such a big part of my life, seeing how far the new chapter had already taken me.

A little bit of time travel, indeed.