Acceptance Speech

from Nicoleta Esinencu

recipent of ITI-Prize 2026

I am standing here tonight for my mother.
Maybe some of you know that my father was a writer. He published more than 50 books. My mother dreamed of writing one. Just one. But she never had time for that.
The time was given to my father.
I am here to take revenge.
Her name was Antosia.
Her name is Antosia.

I will start with expressing my ingratitude — to fulfil everyone's expectations.
I was born in the Soviet Union.
I witnessed the collapse and the economic crisis that followed.
My parents, like many of their friends, lost everything overnight.
They were my age at that moment.
My mother constantly had to invent something new just to feed us.
I lived in a new country.
A country in transition.
Then the poorest country in Europe.
Then the developing country.
We know very well what it means to have no money.
So, we have been working without money.

Today Moldova calls itself a small country with a big heart.
Our governments, our politicians continuously say:
Why are you always asking for money? We are not a bank.

So let me tell you something, Moldova:

You don't have money. But you don't need money to acknowledge
Ileana, who brought the story of the Roma communities from Moldova to
Germany. You don't need money to witness Doina, Lilia, Cătălina, Elena and many
others smashing patriarchy by sharing their own stories.
Instead, you opened a college named after Erdoğan. The man who jails
journalists. Who jails teachers. Who jails artists.
A big heart to celebrate oppression.

You don't have money. But you don't need money to stand with the
Moldovan queer community. To stand with their Pride. With their stories
told and performed in Kyiv, Dresden, Munich, Freiburg, Berlin. Hundreds of
people from those cities ate together the borsch the community cooked
during the performance "Dear Moldova, can we kiss just a little bit?"
Instead, you evacuated queer independent artists from one of our last safe
spaces.
Instead, you demolished overnight the only space that the independent
cultural scene in Moldova was left with.

You don't have money. But you don't need money to acknowledge and
recuperate the untold history: the history of the Holocaust and pogroms in
our region. In our performance Clear History, we did more documentary
work than the school history textbooks.
Instead, you chose to welcome a writer who looked at Gaza and saw a
parking lot. Clean. Empty. Dissolved from its people.
Your called her a controversial writer.
A big heart to celebrate the culture of genocide.

You don't have money. But you don't need money to honour the
hundreds of stories of migrant workers from Moldova. Stories we have
brought from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. From badante in Italy to
construction sites in France, from cleaning shit on cruise ships to picking
Spargel for the German table.
The underpaid jobs. The depression. The pills to just keep one going. The
dead bodies repatriated back to Moldova.
These are our people. We have witnessed, archived, preserved, and
honoured their lives and deaths. You haven’t.
Instead, you were too busy squeezing a Porsche car into the Museum of
Ethnography and Natural History.
No, it was not an exhibition about Porsche's nazi past.
Your big heart to celebrate the culture of sales.
A big heart or big sales?

Dear small bank with a big heart,
I am standing here today, owing my place to these communities.
Who have stood by who have shared their stories, their sorrows, and their
joys.
You weren't there, and you don't feel indebted either.
You are not a bank, but you act like a bank. Gentrifying. Displacing.
Monetising. Extracting. Charging rent. Evicting. Demolishing.

This award belongs
to all the undankbare Ausländerinnen.
And to my sisters in disobedience from teatru-spalatorie:
KIRA, ARTIOM, NORA, DORIANA
Thank you for all the dirty laundry we have washed together.

(26 June 2026)