Hic sunt leones: seeing the things we dodge

Hic sunt – In Scena9’s seventh annual print issue, editor Ioana Pelehatăi reframes “here be lions” as a way to face what has been left unexamined—turning blank edges on maps into an ethics of attention. The issue follows hidden infrastructure and gendered labour, probes

When she reclaims the medieval cartographer’s warning—“hic sunt leones. ” literally “here be lions”—Ioana Pelehatăi isn’t aiming for nostalgia. In her editorial to the seventh annual print issue of Scena9. the Romanian online culture journal. the phrase becomes a method: move toward the blank spaces rather than leave them hidden.

In a world where digital feeds amplify outrage and flatten nuance, looking at what’s been tucked away feels political. What stays in shadow doesn’t merely shape perception; it narrows the limits of ethical imagination. Scena9 organizes its print issue around that tension: what do we choose to conceal. and what might we uncover if we dare to look?.

The magazine makes that commitment in physical form, too. Each annual appearance is weighed by more than 250 pages—illustration. photography. poetry. short fiction and reportage assembled into a single. deliberate object. In a culture of speed and scroll, that deliberateness reads less like retreat and more like resistance.

In the crevices between Piatra Craiului and Iezer-Păpușa, that resistance turns into excavation. Artist-writer Nicoleta Moise and photographer Andrei Becheru descend into the “hidden structures” and invisible histories that ordinary maps forget. Their search targets the remains of the workers’ colony of Richita. a small temporary town of concrete once inhabited by workers employed on the construction of the Pecineagu dam.

The inquiry begins with a single spark: a 1988 article published in the communist-era magazine Femeia (“The woman”). chronicling the lives of betoniste—“concrete women” who carved out a place for themselves on construction sites. Today, the settlement’s last ruins are being slowly swallowed by unrestrained vegetation. Moise writes that “It feels as though we might be the first and the last people ever to have arrived here.”.

Pecineagu is not only utility infrastructure. even if a “trickle from these hidden heights reaches our morning tea and coffee cups in Bucharest.” It is also a monument to aspiration—a link in the chain of some 250 dams built under Ceaușescu’s rule. Moise describes these dams as “mammoth constructions. ” standing “as living proof of industrial progress” and part of an ambitious project of “re-writing the landscape” and “civilising” rural space.

The scale is staggering. The Pecineagu dam can hold up to 63 million cubic metres of water, a volume equivalent to 25 Houses of the People, and it ranks as the third-largest administrative building in the world by volume.

But the issue refuses to let “progress” stand as the final caption. Hidden within and around what remains are beavers and European bison. There are old film sets—Lucian Mardare’s 1980 Zbor Planat was shot here. There are faint echoes of forsaken voices. Moise and Becheru build what the issue calls a reconstructive ethnography of place and infrastructure. where human and nonhuman histories intertwine and where excavating becomes a way to acknowledge the weight of what has long been hidden.

That ethic of attention extends beyond the mountains. In a time of rising populism and far-right influence, cultural institutions are often dragged into memory wars. Oana Filip turns to museums—spaces that are far from neutral and can be enlisted in nation-building strategies of exclusion and weaponisation.

In “A populist’s guide to using museums. ” illustrated by Oana Barbonie. Filip shows how memory gets manipulated and how institutions meant to safeguard it are pulled into struggles for power. Those who exploit museums—“mnemonic warriors. ” a term used by the Croatian political scientist Ljiljana Radonić. one of the experts interviewed—use democratic mechanisms to impose a singular version of historical truth.

Filip traces the consequences: the fragile boundary between memory, authority and the public imagination grows harder to keep. The techniques travel easily across borders, too. The issue recounts a shared script applied from Washington to Warsaw: “Change the directors, cut the funding, rewrite the narrative”.

Romania, the issue argues, is not exempt. It notes the absence of official spaces for the communist past, Roma culture, or LGBTQ+ histories. It highlights no reckoning with Roma slavery or Romania’s role in the Holocaust. Those omissions don’t stay archived; they “reverberate into the present.” Filip warns that “how we fail to confront our less glorious past leaves us divided [and] more vulnerable.”.

There’s a line through all of this—not declared, but felt. The issue keeps returning to what gets left at the map’s edge: histories that don’t fit easily into official narratives, labour erased by time, and communities that are treated as outside the frame.

Photographer Maria Guțu offers a different kind of visibility, one that arrives through ritual rather than ruins. She first traveled to the village of Tețcani in the Republic of Moldova in the last days of 2022. drawn by villagers’ vibrant. uncanny rite of welcoming the new year. She returned in subsequent years and watched as locals—young and old. farmers. teachers. neighbours—dressed as witches. wizards. dragons and other mythic figures.

The streets became a psychedelic stage: dances, performances, music, and processions winding through narrow roads. The costumes were built with inventive materials—plush toys stitched into capes. extravagant floral headdresses. and grotesque masks meant to ward off evil spirits. But beyond the bricolage, something collective rises from everyday life: an effervescence that dissolves distinctions of age, profession or status.

In Tețcani, that shared energy binds together memory, local identity and the histories that keep a community in place. If there is “hic sunt leones” in the issue, it isn’t just a warning about danger. It’s a reminder that what looks uncharted—whether it’s a concrete workers’ colony being reclaimed by vegetation. a museum’s missing chapters. or a village’s mythic procession—only stays invisible because we refuse to make room for it.

Scena9 Ioana Pelehatăi hic sunt leones medieval cartography Romanian culture print issue Romanian online culture journal Pecineagu dam Richita workers’ colony Femeia betoniste Nicoleta Moise Andrei Becheru museums Oana Filip Oana Barbonie Ljiljana Radonić Roma slavery Holocaust Maria Guțu Tețcani Republic of Moldova new year rite witches wizards dragons Lucian Mardare Zbor Planat