Selected work

The Parallel City: An Immersive Trilogy

Producer and project director

The projects were developed by Diogene Cultural Association in collaboration with artists and institutional partners, including the Hungarian State Theatre “Csiky Gergely”, Politehnica University Timișoara, the Merlin Children’s Theatre, and the German State Theatre Timișoara.

The Parallel City is a multi-year immersive urban storytelling project developed in Timișoara through site-specific theatre, local research, and neighbourhood-based cultural production. Between 2021 and 2023, the project unfolded across Iosefin, Fabric, and Elisabetin, transforming the city into a stage for layered encounters between memory, fiction, and public space. The trilogy was directed by Ana Mărgineanu and written by Peca Ștefan.

The Parallel City: Iosefin (2021)

Set across train platforms, courtyards, and riverside spaces, The Parallel City: Iosefin explored parallel lives, hidden histories, and the fragile coexistence of different communities. The production combined multilingual performance with immersive walking routes, inviting audiences to move through the neighbourhood as both witnesses and participants.

Links: Trailer · making of · HU Theatre page

The Parallel City: Fabric (2022)

The Parallel City: Fabric  followed a mystery-driven narrative shaped by urban legends, family tensions, and questions of care, control, and disappearance. Audiences navigated the story through a custom mobile app, choosing paths through an immersive environment that turned the former cultural centre into an interactive narrative space.

Links: Trailer · making of · HU Theatre page

The Parallel City: Party in Elisabetin (2023)

Party in Elisabetin unfolded through five audio-guided routes that converged in a shared celebration staged inside a transformed university hall. Blending performance, dance, puppetry, and time-shifted storytelling, the project created a collective and immersive encounter with the neighbourhood and its imagined futures.

Links: Trailer · making of · HU Theatre page

Screen adaptation (2025)

In 2025, The Parallel City entered a new phase through Orașul Paralel, a film adaptation developed from The Parallel City: Iosefin. Directed by Ana Mărgineanu and written by Peca Ștefan, the film extends the project’s urban storytelling into cinema while remaining rooted in the social realities and local histories of Timișoara (see trailer). 

Why it matteres

Rooted in real places, local histories, and community testimonies, The Parallel City combined documentary research with fictional storytelling across three years of immersive, neighbourhood-based productions. Developed in connection with the wider Timișoara 2023 – European Capital of Culture context, the trilogy became one of the city’s distinctive immersive theatre formats and reached large audiences across multiple editions. In 2025, the project entered a new phase through screen adaptation, extending its urban stories into new formats and wider cultural circulation.

CiviCultura

CiviCultura (2019–ongoing) is the civic-cultural platform through which Diogene extended the collaborative practice of Thespis into public-space performance, civic dialogue, and neighbourhood-based activation. Selected through the Searchlight framework of the Timișoara European Capital of Culture programme, it became an early entry point for Diogene into the wider Timișoara 2023 ecosystem. From this platform, and within the broader Dileme Urbane framework, projects such as The Parallel City, City Talks, and Civic Streams developed as connected ways of working with the city through theatre, research, and public conversation.

Shine Your Light – The City’s Show (2019)

Shine Your Light – The City’s Show (2019) was one of the first public expressions of CiviCultura, bringing together neighbourhood-based performance, live broadcasting, and local participation. Developed across different areas of the city, the project tested a format in which cultural production could activate communities while linking separate urban experiences into a shared narrative frame.

Voice from My Room (2020)

Voice from My Room (2020) marked a pandemic-era transformation of this approach, shifting attention toward intimate, mediated, and home-based forms of expression. Developed under the constraints of isolation, the project kept the civic-cultural impulse of CiviCultura alive while exploring how participation, storytelling, and shared presence could be reimagined in conditions of distance.

CiviCultura also developed the concept of open courtyards, exploring how semi-private urban spaces could become places of cultural encounter, neighbourhood participation, and shared civic imagination. This way of working with lived urban space later informed broader projects such as The Parallel City.