5th – 11th January 2026, Bibliotheek Utrecht Neude 11, 3512AE Utrecht, Netherlands
Home. Delivered. extends Radu-Mihai Tanasă’s exploration of migrant identity, labour, and belonging through a deceptively simple premise: a masked delivery worker transports a large stone across Utrecht. What begins as a routine shift becomes an intimate study of irregular migration and the lived realities of precarious work, revealing the emotional, physical, and temporal pressures that shape the everyday experience of workers who operate at the edges of legal and economic visibility.
Following the courier from pick-up to drop-off, Tanasă traces the shifting rhythms of platform labour — its instability, its vulnerability, and its quiet acts of endurance. The masked protagonist embodies the paradox of many irregularised migrants: visible within the city yet structurally obscured by the algorithmic systems that dictate their work. The stone he carries becomes a potent metaphor for the burdens of irregular status, the emotional weight of displacement, and the ongoing negotiation of belonging.
Shot in low resolution on an old Canon camera, the film gestures towards Hito Steyerl’s essay In Defence of the Poor Image, embracing the aesthetics of compression and circulation. This stylistic decision is both conceptual and political, interrupting the polished, surveillance-driven representations that often frame migrant labour. Instead, Tanasă cultivates a reflective, slightly surreal visual language that hovers between documentary and fiction, encouraging viewers to inhabit the worker’s tempo rather than merely observe it.
The courier’s drifting internal monologue offers a rare articulation of the psychological landscape of precarious, platform-based employment. His tentative, humorous, and frustrated thoughts mirror the uncertain routes and unstable rhythms faced by those navigating work without secure status. Tanasă’s ongoing use of masks deepens this complexity, suggesting protection, performance, and the multiplicity of identities required to survive under conditions of legal and economic precarity.
Presented within the I-Claim project, the film enters into dialogue with research by Ilse van Liempt and Minke Hajer at Utrecht University on irregular migrants in the Dutch food delivery sector. Their study reveals how shifting regulations, algorithmic management, and insecure legal status intersect to produce new forms of marginalisation. Rather than illustrating this research, Tanasă’s work offers an affective counterpoint — a portrait attentive to lived experience, humour, fatigue, and the delicate agency exercised in moments between tasks.
By foregrounding the emotional dynamics of irregular migration and precarious work, Home. Delivered. invites viewers to reconsider the infrastructures that sustain everyday convenience, and to acknowledge the human weight carried by those whose contributions remain largely unrecognised.
Radu-Mihai (b.1999 in Iași, Romania) is a visual artist and graduate of the Visual Arts and Post-Contemporary Practice MA programme at MIVC den Bosch, the Netherlands. Through usage of various masks and costumed characters, his practice deals with themes of migrant identity, belonging, masculinity and memory. All of his works draw upon personal experiences and events. His main mediums are video, performance and illustration.
Artwork produced with with support from: Cezara Gurău, Vasilis Kapetaneas, Milo Sharafeddine, Alexa V.
Curated by: Alicja Kaczmarek
Commissioned by Centrala for I-claim Project
Programme of events:
05/01/26, 19:30 – 21:00, Exhibition Opening Reception
Curatorial Text
Home. Delivered. extends Radu-Mihai Tanasă’s exploration of migrant identity, labour, and belonging through a deceptively simple premise: a masked delivery worker transports a large stone across Utrecht. What begins as a routine shift becomes an intimate study of irregular migration and the lived realities of precarious work, revealing the emotional, physical, and temporal pressures that shape the everyday experience of workers who operate at the edges of legal and economic visibility.
Following the courier from pick-up to drop-off, Tanasă traces the shifting rhythms of platform labour — its instability, its vulnerability, and its quiet acts of endurance. The masked protagonist embodies the paradox of many irregularised migrants: visible within the city yet structurally obscured by the algorithmic systems that dictate their work. The stone he carries becomes a potent metaphor for the burdens of irregular status, the emotional weight of displacement, and the ongoing negotiation of belonging.
Shot in low resolution on an old Canon camera, the film gestures towards Hito Steyerl’s essay In Defence of the Poor Image, embracing the aesthetics of compression and circulation. This stylistic decision is both conceptual and political, interrupting the polished, surveillance-driven representations that often frame migrant labour. Instead, Tanasă cultivates a reflective, slightly surreal visual language that hovers between documentary and fiction, encouraging viewers to inhabit the worker’s tempo rather than merely observe it.
The courier’s drifting internal monologue offers a rare articulation of the psychological landscape of precarious, platform-based employment. His tentative, humorous, and frustrated thoughts mirror the uncertain routes and unstable rhythms faced by those navigating work without secure status. Tanasă’s ongoing use of masks deepens this complexity, suggesting protection, performance, and the multiplicity of identities required to survive under conditions of legal and economic precarity.
Presented within the I-Claim project, the film enters into dialogue with research by Ilse van Liempt and Minke Hajer at Utrecht University on irregular migrants in the Dutch food delivery sector. Their study reveals how shifting regulations, algorithmic management, and insecure legal status intersect to produce new forms of marginalisation. Rather than illustrating this research, Tanasă’s work offers an affective counterpoint — a portrait attentive to lived experience, humour, fatigue, and the delicate agency exercised in moments between tasks.
By foregrounding the emotional dynamics of irregular migration and precarious work, Home. Delivered. invites viewers to reconsider the infrastructures that sustain everyday convenience, and to acknowledge the human weight carried by those whose contributions remain largely unrecognised.
Radu-Mihai (b.1999 in Iași, Romania) is a visual artist and graduate of the Visual Arts and Post-Contemporary Practice MA programme at MIVC den Bosch, the Netherlands. Through usage of various masks and costumed characters, his practice deals with themes of migrant identity, belonging, masculinity and memory. All of his works draw upon personal experiences and events. His main mediums are video, performance and illustration.
Artwork produced with Cezara Gurău, Vasilis Kapetaneas, Milo Sharafeddine, Alexa V.
About the Project
I-CLAIM project investigates the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households in Europe from an intersectional perspective. It aims to reveal the spectrum of irregularity in contemporary Europe and cast light on the everyday experiences of migrants with irregular, unstable and/or precarious legal status. I-CLAIM develops the concept of ‘irregularity assemblages’ to capture how migrants’ ‘irregular condition’ is produced by the interplay of immigration and asylum laws, policies and practice, wider labour market and welfare regimes, and political, media and public narratives. The irregular condition is shaped by migrants’ social position and positionality as well as by processes that occur at international, European, regional and local levels.
Centrala is commissioning artists in each of the research territories to create new art pieces responding to the project themes and research funding. We will use a participatory approach building relationships with local migrant and artistic communities. The partner countries and cities include: Berlin, Germany; Utrecht, the Netherlands; Helsinki, Finland; Warsaw, Poland; Naples, Italy; Birmingham, UK and each will host exhibitions presenting commissioned work throughout 2025 and the final group exhibition in Brussels in early 2026.