[en] In September 2025, I spent half a month searching Brussels for caraway seeds (Carum carvi in latin, chimen in Romanian). I moved through supermarkets, specialty grocers, and "world foodˮ aisles, repeatedly encountering confusion with cumin, an entirely different spice. A shopkeeper eventually offered to order caraway for me-the shop logic of contemporary abundance: if something is missing, the market can procure it on demand. « Just come back in two days ». The gesture signals for me a sharp contrast between the food crises of my childhood and my present, Brussels life. Caraway is the key ingredient in "supă de chimenˮ, a clear caraway soup my mother cooked throughout my childhood in 1980s Cluj-Napoca. The soup was nutritionally modest yet emotionally dense: it appeared when little else was available, when wage factory work and exhaustion left no time for my momʼs elaborate cooking, and when a thin, hot liquid would still stand in for maternal care. Very often I remember my mom making this soup when she left for afternoon factory shifts. As if to say: « I leave you in the care of this soup ». Today, the difficulty of sourcing caraway in Brussels does not register as a crisis; instead, it reveals a temporal rift between the austerity of Romanian socialism and the relative abundance of Western European capitalism. That rift becomes the productive impossibility at the heart of my reenactment practice.
