Ci6esMethodologies|BucharestExhibi6on / Workshop / Talks - Casa Scarlat Ghica & UNAgaleria, October - November, 2010

Galeria NouăEditura UNARTE

Editors: Ger Duijzings, Simona Dumitriu, Aurora Király

Contributors: Gruia Bădescu, Irina Botea, Călin Dan, Mădălina Diaconu, Simona Dumitriu, Aurora Király, Margareta Kern, Iwona Kurz, Anthony Luvera, Vera Marin, Mircea Nicolae, Ioana

Tudora and Mihai Culescu and the workshop par>cipants: Marina Albu, Cris>an Bălan, Bogdan Bordeianu, Daniel Djamo, Mihai Moţcanu Dumitrescu, Andra Mi>a Dumitru, Ioana

Gheorghiu, Marius Huza, Andra Jurgiu, Marius Mitran, Mihnea Nicolae Simiraş, Sebas>an Stan, Ionuţ Piţurescu, Ştefan Sava, Viorela Strat, Zelmira Szabo, Mihaela Ţânţaş, Miruna Ţîrcă,

Emilia Ţugui.

Photos: Călin Dan, Ger Duijzings, Simona Dumitriu, Anthony Luvera, Margareta Kern, Iosif Király, Mircea Nicolae, subREAL, Gabi Stamate, and from the workshop par>cipants: Marina

Albu, Bogdan Bordeianu, Ioana Gheorghiu / Andra Jurgiu, Andrei Radu, Ştefan Sava.

Transla6ons: Carmen Dobre and the original English versions from a part of the contributors.

Text edi6ng: Ger Duijzings

Proof-reading: Ger Duijzings, Simona Dumitriu

Graphic design: Aurora Király, Iosif Király

h?p://ci>esmethodologies.wordpress.com

Contact: ci>esmethodologies@yahoo.com

© the authors, the ar>sts

On the cover: Mircea Nicolae - Glass globes / 25 demolished houses, detail, photo Simona Dumitriu

Table of Contents

Ger Duijzings

Aurora Kiraly

Simona Dumitriu

Vera Marin

Ştefan Sava & Mihnea Nicolae Simiraş

Marius Huza & Miruna Ţîrcă

Ionuţ Piţurescu, Zelmira Szabo, Cris6an

Bălan, and Mihai Moţcanu Dumitrescu

Marina Albu

Daniel Djamo, Mihaela Ţânţaş, and Emilia

Ţugui

Ioana Gheorghiu and Andra Jurgiu

Bogdan Bordeianu

Viorela Strat, Andrei Radu, and Marius Mitran

Gruia Bădescu

Irina Botea

Mădălina Diaconu

Călin Dan

Margareta Kern and Anthony Luvera

in conversa6on

Iwona Kurz

Mircea Nicolae

Ioana Tudora and Mihai Culescu

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a RomânieiCi6esMethodologies Bucharest / ed.: Ger Duijzings, Simona Dumitriu,

Aurora Király ; contributors: Gruia Bădescu, Irina Botea, Călin Dan, ...;transla>ons: Carmen Dobre, Irina Botea, Călin Dan, ... ; text edi>ngand proof-reading: Ger Duijzings ; graphic design: Aurora Király,Iosif Király. - Bucureş> : Editura UNARTE, 2011ISBN 978-606-8296-22-7

I. Duijzings, Ger (ed.)II. Dumitriu, Simona (ed.)III. Király, Aurora (il., ed.)IV. Bădescu, GruiaV. Marin, VeraVI. Dobre, Carmen (trad.)VII. Botea, Irina (trad.)VIII. Dan, Călin (trad.)IX. Király, Iosif (il.)

71(498 Buc.)

Introduc6on

The Ci6esMethodologies experience

The Ci6esMethodologies workshop

Why organise or par6cipate in a workshop called Ci6esMethodologies?

InnerCITY: Văcăreş6 Lake

Invisible borders

Space dialogue |excerpts

Acvilele Albe

Beyond the façade: a shop window exercise

Three meters from the railway track

Trips

Urban layers: marking mobile monuments in the public domain

The good, the bad, and the ugly: shaping a methodology for

the evalua6on of public spaces in Romania

Elena the ladybug and re-enactment

Sensory cartography: urban smellscapes

Emo6onal architecture: the beginnings

A rocky boat: reflec6ons on research, process, and representa6on

Mobile Warsaw: media in the city and the city as a medium

Bucharest: the city as raw material and role model

Looking down on or looking up to Bucharest public spaces.

Militari – Drumul Taberei in-between vernacular design and urban policies

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Organized by: Project realized with the support of:

was to draw the attention away from the polishedand processed end products of their work, eventhough they remain a crucial point of reference,and to focus on process and practice, i.e. on howthese outcomes are achieved through forms ofexperimentation, error and trial.

One of the aims of CitiesMethodologies has beento push the methodological boundaries in urbanresearch. This is why we have been keen onincluding the work of artists (some of whom havecome from UCL but most from outside university)who tend to explore cities in more improvised,playful, and idiosyncratic manners. Their work isoften experimental, with the emphasis put on justdoing something out of the ordinary, applying acertain procedure or protocol, without knowingwhat the actual outcome will be. The work ofAnthony Luvera, a photographer who participatedin the first edition of CitiesMethodologies (2009)and also presented his work at CitiesMethodologies| Bucharest, is a perfect example in this respect.For a number of years, he has been working inLondon and Belfast, building up an archive ofthousands of photos made by homeless people (andthose with experience of it) including assisted self-portraits. The decision he took was to organiseweekly workshops, providing participants withdisposable cameras which they would bring backthe following week to be developed. He started thisparticipatory photography project without a

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest, an exhibitionwith workshops and talks showcasing new andinnovative methods in urban research, was heldbetween 28 October and 5 November 2010, inCasa Scarlat-Ghica, a for Bucharest typical old andneglected villa in the courtyard of the NationalUniversity of the Arts of Bucharest (UNA). It wasorganized in collaboration with the Galeria Nouăand the Association for Urban Transition (ATU).The concept was developed by Ger Duijzings(UCL School of Slavonic and East EuropeanStudies) and John Aiken (UCL Slade School ofFine Arts), who in May 2009 organised the firstedition of CitiesMethodologies at UniversityCollege London (UCL) with curatorial assistancefrom Rastko Novaković. While CitiesMethodologieswent into its third edition at UCL, attracting workfrom across the globe, CitiesMethodologies |Bucharest was the first edition organized abroad,outside UCL.Asecond one is planned in Warsaw 2012.

The key idea of CitiesMethodologies is toshowcase the processes through which scholarsand artists in their research and explorations of theurban environment approach cities and gatheruseful data and material, instead of displaying —asis normally the case— the polished end products oftheir work. The emphasis is on innovativemethodologies, particularly drawing on the workof (visual) artists, whose approaches are oftenidiosyncratic, intuitive, and improvised. From ourperspective this is where the inspiration forinnovation may come from. The exhibition isthought of as a walk-through exhibition, emulatingthe specific urban form of the street, which as apublic and complex setting, provides opportunitiesfor unpredictable encounters and synergies. Thekey to methodological exchange and cross-fertilization, which is crucially part ofCitiesMethodologies, is talks and workshops,where artists, film makers, anthropologists,sociologists, architects and urban planners, presentand discuss their work, where issues are raised, andquestions are asked.

The initial idea for CitiesMethodologies emergedin 2008, when Ger Duijzings received a modest

amount of funding from the UCL Arts andHumanities Faculty to develop the Cities researchtheme.1 He teamed up with John Aiken, theDirector of the UCL Slade School of Fine Arts, indiscussion with whom the event took shape. Oneof the tasks was to create an inventory of workdone at university, and to invite collaborators fromall corners of UCL with an interest in urbanstudies. It became clear that it was not possible tobring all strands of research together under oneoverarching theme, and so the idea grew to focuson methods and methodologies, an aspect allresearch shares. Scholars and artists gather dataand visual sources through systematic encounterswith the city, and they (implicitly or explicitly)employ a set of methodological tools, i.e. practicaland often conventional steps to gather data orimages. The questions that we put at the centre ofCitiesMethodologies were: how do researchers andartists approach and tackle the city as a separateentity of research and exploration; through whichspectacles and prisms do they look at urbanrealities; what do they do, how do they work,where do they look for the data that they need;what mistakes do they make, how do they maketheir hands dirty in terms of the practical choicesthey make in the process of data gathering and thecollection of visual sources; and, finally, how dothey, at the end of this research trajectory, processthe data and materials they gather into formats thatcommunicate their ideas and findings. The idea

Introduc6on

by Ger Duijzings

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1 Additional support and funding was received from the UCL SladeSchool of Fine Art, UCL School of Slavonic and East EuropeanStudies, UCL Grand Challenges, UCL Urban Laboratory, and thePolish Cultural Institute.

where the researcher defines the topic, formulates akey research question and a hypothesis, and thendecides how he or she will go about gathering dataand materials, i.e. what methods will be used toanswer the question. This often becomes an overlymechanical process, justified by the need to obtain‘reliable’ and ‘representative’ data.Anthropological research is far more improvisedand open-ended in this respect, and closer to theexperimentation that is characteristic for the arts.This has been one of the premises ofCitiesMethodologies: it may be productive andinnovative to just ‘do’ and ‘absorb’, like the‘hanging out’ in the case of anthropologicalfieldwork, and ask the salient questions about thematerial afterwards. It is in the process of doingthat one may develop new approaches, topics, andraise interesting new questions. In this approachthe methods come, if you like, first and thequestions second.

One of the ideas that have emerged fromCitiesMethodologies | Bucharest is that each cityprovides a specific physical, socio-political, andhistorical context, which partly defines anddetermines particular issues and problems,including the methodological ones. In one citycertain approaches may be more appropriate and

suitable than in another. In Bucharest, the themesthat imposed themselves were those of the brutalsocialist and post-socialist ruptures and urbantransformations (which are for instance explored inMircea Nicolae’s work), of urban segregation (inthe work of Irina Botea), of abandoned urban space(the workshop projects), and the role of artists inengaging with these issues (in subREAL’s orMarina Albu’s work). One of the methodologicalissues that were at the centre ofCitiesMethodologies | Bucharest is the intenselyfragmented nature and factionalism of localacademia and architectural and urban planningcircles. The existence of informal groups andcliques, between and within the differentprofessions and disciplines, prevents genuinecommunication and collaboration. This was themain rationale to organise an interdisciplinaryworkshop prior to the exhibition, with participationof young professionals and research students. Thetask of small interdisciplinary teams was toidentify a controversial urban development projector complex space in Bucharest and put to workvarious urban research tools and practices,reflecting on process and method, and gathering acombination of visual and non-visual data. Theaim was to build bridges of communication anddevelop a platform of debate and interaction,

preconceived idea of what the outcome of wouldbe and how the archive could be put to use. Itcrystallised into an exploration of the insideexperiences of homelessness, the everydaypreoccupations and abstract and philosophicalconcepts developed by those who are homeless,and of their understanding and perception of thecity. Luvera facilitated the creation of individualportfolios for each of the participants, which wereincluded in the archive of images.

The work of Luvera shows that the arts andhumanities can bring a proper understanding of thesubjective experience of living in cities, byzooming in on categories of people inhabitingurban spaces, offering an intimate view of theirproblems and mindsets. As our cities and everydaylives in these cities are changing rapidly ourmethods to capture those experiences will have tochange as well, which is at the core ofCitiesMethodologies: to argue for reflection onmethod in the context of an object that isconstantly in flux. Given the complex problemsfaced by contemporary cities, innovative, flexible,and multi- and inter-disciplinary researchmethodologies and formats are urgently required. Afine example is Margareta Kern’s work withfemale guest workers from the former Yugoslaviain Berlin, who arrived in Germany in the 1970s.Her work or rather her work-in-progress, whichwas showcased in different formats at the firstedition of CitiesMethodologies as well as inBucharest, provides an intimate insight into theexperiences of female migrant workers in a West-European city, but moreover provides a probingreflection on method and presentation of intimateand fragmented lives, through the presentation offamily snapshots and personal memorabilia, andthe artist’s writing of fiction.

An important objective of CitiesMethodologies isindeed to creatively juxtapose different methodsused by artists and scholars to uncover theexperiences of the city, from oral history, literature,photography, and (documentary and experimental)film-making, such as the London-in-Motion filmson East Europeans in London, to for instance theportrayal of contemporary Romanian cities throughelectronic music by Cosmin Nicolae, or thesmellscapes explored by Mădălina Diaconu in herwork on Vienna. In that sense CitiesMethodologiesmakes an important contribution to what is a majorchallenge of urban research: to tap into the diverse,newly evolving and multi-facetted urbanexperiences of those who inhabit our cities.

The aim of many contemporary artists is not onlyto represent urban realities but to insert their workinto the public life and public spaces of cities.Some installations, practices, and performances aredeliberate interventions in order to provoke apublic response, like the work of Polish artistJoanna Rajkowska (participant in the firstCitiesMethodologies in London). Outcomes are notpredictable, as became abundantly clear fromRajkowska’s presentation about her Palm Treeproject in Warsaw and the ways in which it becamean urban symbol contested and appropriated by avariety of groups, politicians and activists. In away her project is an example of an experimentaland open-ended process which forms a reversal ofwhat is the usual practice in academic research,

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crossing the usual disciplinary boundaries andexploring ways of working in mixed teams. Thiswas an addition to CitiesMethodologies which hadnot been part of the London event.

It is our intention to ‘export’ and adopt theCitiesMethodologies format to other local contexts.The next edition of CitiesMethodologies outsideUCL is envisaged to take place in Warsaw (2012),organised by a local organising committee andfunded locally. The outcome will be different,matching the specific issues and ambience of thatcity, but with input from London and Bucharest.Part of the flexible and open concept ofCitiesMethodologies is indeed for the mostsuccessful projects of each edition to be ‘ping-ponged’ around between the different cities whereCitiesMethodologies is taking place. In Bucharest aselection of exhibits from the previous Londoneditions were showcased and at the last Londonedition projects from CitiesMethodologies |Bucharest were exhibited. We welcome initiativesto carry out future editions elsewhere, and iftruthful to the original concept, we will do our bestto provide support and assistance.

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest exhibition.28 October- 5 November 2010. Curators: AuroraKirály and Simona Dumitriu. Location: CasaScarlat-Ghica and UNAgaleria.Artists: Wesley Aelbrecht, Irina Botea, MargaretaKern, London-in-Motion (LiM), Anthony Luvera,Cosmin Nicolae, Mircea Nicolae, RastkoNovaković & Ger Duijzings, Ro_Archive, PeterSant, Alexandru Solomon, subREAL, FüsunTüretken, Eva Weber, and participants of theCitiesMethodologies Bucharest Workshop.

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest talks.29-30 October 2010. Moderator: Ger Duijzings.Location: UNA Galeria.Participants: Gruia Bădescu, Cătălin Berescu,Liviu Chelcea, Phil Collins, Călin Dan, MădălinaDiaconu, Simona Dumitriu & Raluca Ionescu,Celia Ghyka, Margareta Kern, Iwona Kurz,Anthony Luvera, Vera Marin, Norbert Petrovici,Ştefan Tiron, Varinia Taboada, Ioana Tudora.

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest workshop.9-23 October 2010. Coordinator: Vera Marin.Architects: Cristian Bălan, Marius Mitran, MihaiMoţcanu Dumitrescu, Mihnea Nicolae Simiraş,Sebastian Stan, Emilia Ţugui.Artists: Marina Albu, Bogdan Bordeianu, DanielDjamo, Ioana Gheorghiu, Andra Jurgiu, AndreiRadu, Ştefan Sava, Zelmira Szabo.Anthropologists and sociologists: Andra MitiaDumitru, Marius Huza, Ionuţ Piţurescu, ViorelaStrat, Mihaela Ţânţaş, Miruna Ţîrcă.

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Casa Scarlat-Ghica

background, but during the development of theproject we became familiar with so many differentapproaches that our own understanding becamemore complex and nuanced.

The list of participants was an adventure in itself,as the four of us were keen to invite all those weconsidered to be able to fill in a piece of thisproject's puzzle. During the development of theproject, partly due to time and financialconstraints, we had to settle on a reasonablenumber of participants. Yet all participantsperfectly matched the project concept. Thecuratorial work as well as the practical preparationand organization of the project I shared withSimona Dumitriu. This process progressed

At a time when, due to the general lack of fundingand infrastructure caused by the financial crisis,Romanian artists withdraw in fictional projects andinstitutions, I was in the extremely fortunateposition to be able to develop, together withcolleagues, a truly interdisciplinary project whichhas the potential to be repeated in other formats inthe future. Such an endeavor seemed to be veryuseful to me in the Romanian context for a numberof reasons. In the first place, there is the city itself,which requires to be observed and analyzed fromperspectives as various as possible. Secondly, thereis the necessity of creating a platform forspecialists from different fields and the need toshare methods in an interdisciplinary manner.

Thirdly, there is the need and wish to involvestudents who take an interest in the process ofurban space analysis and research.

The concept for CitiesMethodologies developed byGer Duijzings and John Aiken in 2009 in Londonis very interesting and versatile and can be adaptedto different contexts. Working with the Bucharestproject team (consisting of Ger Duijzings, SimonaDumitriu, Vera Marin and myself) offered one ofthe most pleasant and motivating professionalexperiences over the past few years. One of theaims of the project is to promote interdisciplinarityand create new synergies, and in a way our teamclearly succeeded in this. Each of us initiallycontributed with knowledge specific to his or her

The Ci6esMethodologiesexperience

by Aurora Király

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Exhibition view

smoothly and naturally, as we compiled the finallist of participants and projects and their set-up andpresentation in the exhibition space.

One of the crucial aspects of this exhibition wasthe venue we selected for the event. The NationalUniversity of Arts in Bucharest gave us access to abuilding located on its premises close to its mainbuilding, a nineteenth century structure known asCasa Scarlat-Ghica or Casa Robescu. Having anintricate history, this is a neo-classical building wasconstructed in the second half of the nineteenthcentury and has the status of historical monument.The magistrate Alexandru Scarlat Ghica (1837-1918) lived here up until 1901. A.F. Robescu,professor of mathematics at the Matei BasarabHigh School bought the house at the beginning ofthe twentieth century and donated it shortlythereafter to the Ministry of Religious Affairs andPublic Education. Until 1948, the building housedthe Vocational School for Girls No.1, then itaccommodated for some time the Fine Arts HighSchool N. Tonitza, and finally it was home to anumber of artist studios subsequent to anagreement with the Union of Fine Artists. In 2008,the National University of Arts arranged anarchitectural competition for the extension andfunctional remodeling of the university, and in2009 the contract with the Union of Fine Artistswas terminated in view of cleaning and preparingthe space for the implementation of the selectedarchitectural solution. The shortage of fundsdelayed the commencement of the constructionwork and in view of this the management of theuniversity invited students and professors todevelop temporary projects in this space.

Considering that the spaces dedicated tocontemporary art and medium size cultural projectsare relatively few in Bucharest and that only someof these target non-commercial projects, theScarlat-Ghica house seemed perfect from severalpoints of view. On the one hand we felt attracted tothe complicated and anfractuous history of thebuilding and the utter deterioration of it — as ametaphor standing for the state of other similarbuildings in Bucharest and for the center of the cityfractured by many changes and architectural styles— evincing the state of the entire city at a smallerscale. Last but not least we were delighted by thelarge space it made available forCitiesMethodologies in compartments that

perfectly suited the purpose of our project. Thedivision of rooms helped to break down thepresentation into separate artistic projects,installations, projections and so on.

Along the lines of the CitiesMethodologiesconcept, the exhibition functioned as a platform forpresenting methods and approaches used by artistsin their explorations of the city but also forpresenting and examining the work that had beendone (or was still in progress) by the differentinterdisciplinary teams consisting of artists,architects and social scientists that were created inthe framework of CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest.

The exhibition did not take the traditional route ofconstructing a project from the start, but it ratherfunctioned as a collaborative project mixing andarranging the pieces of a partially assembledpuzzle. The concept had already been outlined andthe emphasis was on process and used methods andless on final works and projects. In addition, wehad the possibility of inviting some of the artistswho took part in the previous editions of

CitiesMethodologies in London.

That being said, the exhibitionCitiesMethodologies | Bucharest was a goodopportunity to bring together artists concerned withthis subject and the social, cultural and politicalissues that shape the urban context. The exhibitedworks, completed as photographs, video/soundinstallations, videos or documentary films, offeredmany relevant examples as to how artists record,reflect and question the city, and urban life andhabitation in general.

In retrospect, one of the aspects that I found mostrewarding was that the entire project functioned inan organic and unified manner. We succeeded tobring this across in the exhibition as well: theexhibition space clearly felt like an old andunsanitized house, where work was in progress,and one would enter its different rooms andgradually learn different stories. The tour of theexhibition started with the ground floor whichhoused the works of Irina Botea, Mircea Nicolaeand Cosmin Nicolae.

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Mircea Nicolae - Glass globes / 25 demolished houses, installation, 2010

Iosif Király - Ro_Archive - Bucharest, 2008

Irina Botea’s videos, such as Elena the ladybugand Re-enactment, reflect her interest in interactingwith the individuals she filmed, giving intimateaccess to a series of stories depicting inequalityand abuse, realities which in terms of harshnessand toughness contrast with those of our ownsocial and professional milieus.

Mircea Nicolae’s installation entitled Glass globes/ 25 demolished buildings reflects upon the tearingdown of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuryhouses from the city center and their replacementwith blocks of flats and office high-rises. The artisttransformed a number of glass globes found in aderelict glass factory into self-sufficient objects,making an obvious reference to those decorativeChristmas snow globes which showcaseenchanting winter landscapes on which snow fallsquietly once the globe is turned upside down andshaken. Mircea Nicolae replaced the traditionalsnow globe landscape with pieces of bricks whichhe collected from torn-down houses and which hesculptured into houses, in a form similar tochildren's simplified drawings. On a nearby wallphotographs of the actual demolished buildingswere exhibited. The installation was completed

with a banner he took from one of the buildingsunder construction and a map which marked thelocation of the torn-down houses.

Cosmin Nicolae’s contribution consisted of asound installation which greatly added to theunderlying beat of the entire project. The soundequipment was installed in a room which was toodeteriorated to receive video installations and fromwhere a constant sound mirroring Bucharest's skidrows traveled (the sound pieces had evoking titlessuch as Tower block or Beton brut).

At the first floor, the film The solitary life ofcranes by Eva Weber (a German filmmaker basedin London) provoked in visitors a more detachedmeditation on the rhythms and agitation of the city.Her film has the poetic quality of presenting andexamining habitual situations from a new andunusual perspective, resulting in stories whichcross all kinds of boundaries. It displays the life ofthe city as seen through the eyes of crane driverswho work at great heights and who, by the verynature of their occupation, watch the city from adistance and with detachment.

Margareta Kern’s installation entitled Guestfocused on the mass migration of laborers from theformer Yugoslavia to West Germany. The workfeatures especially women who moved to Berlin inthe 1960s as guest workers and who still live andwork there. The visitors were able to see slidesfrom the personal archives of these women and atthe same time had access to personal and officialdocuments. One of the intentions underlyingMargareta Kern's project was to transform thesewomen's “stories into histories and conversely toturn histories into personal stories”. Theinstallation was constructed as an intimate workroom where visitors would become ‘guest workers’and browse through materials and documents, thusgaining access to the information.

Anthony Luvera’s projects are similarly interestingin terms of approach, development process as wellas results. During 2006-2008 he developed theResidency project, working with homelessindividuals from Belfast and putting specialemphasis on the ethical aspects of photographingvulnerable people and investigating the fine line ofdivision between artistic control and subjectempowerment. Similar issues were addressed in

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Viorela Strat / Andrei Radu / Marius MitranUrban layers: marking mobile monuments in the public domain, 2010

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photographed subjects relating to architecture,industry, agriculture, education, social programs,sports, and entertainment. The resulting databasecan be grouped according to the aforementionedfields or can be composed and recomposed inrelation to the format of presentation (book,exhibition, lecture etc.) and the theme of the event.At the same time the images have different artisticqualities and styles representative for everyparticipant to the project.

From the artistic duo subREAL (Iosif Király andCălin Dan) we exhibited images from the projectentitled Interviewing the cities. The project startedin 1999 with a double purpose: on the one hand toanalyze, on several levels, artistic developments invarious cities, and, on the other, to articulate therelationship of the artists’ duo with people andplaces. The project consists of three series ofstaged photographs: first, portraits produced incollaboration with members of the local artisticcommunities; second, interviews with publicmonuments; and third, city overviews realized intrompe l'oeil, outlining the artificial nature of urbanplanning and its intimate relationship with thetourism industry and the mass-media. The

and features young artists and art critics such as:Bogdan Bordeianu, Michele Bressan, SimonaDumitriu, Bogdan Gîrbovan, Raluca Ionescu,Andrei Mateescu, Cosmin Moldovan, RalucaNestor, Cristiana Radu, and Larisa Sitar.

The idea behind the project Ro_Archive has beento produce an ongoing artistic documentation ofthe present. Since 1990, Romania has gone througha rough transition period involving major political,social and cultural changes. These transformationshave affected all spheres of life. The effects ofthese dramatic turns can be easily seen on the‘face’ of the city, in buildings under construction(not always with due authorization), in the newpublic monuments, in the inventiveness of urbaninhabitants who adapt their living spaces in orderto suit family needs (ground floor apartments beingrented to small businesses or adapted toaccommodate small family-owned boutiques ormini-markets).

Following the model of Farm SecurityAdministration, New topographics or La missionphotographique de la DATAR, the Ro_Archiveteam has traveled to many parts of the country and

the video exhibited at CitiesMethodologies entitledPrologue to Isha. This work reflects the artist'sconcern with the exchange between photographerand subject, through documenting the preparationsfor an interview with Isha, a woman suffering fromschizophrenia.

In addition to presenting their works in theexhibition, Anthony Luvera and Margareta Kernattended the opening in Bucharest and deliveredlectures. Their artistic projects, public talks as wellas their collaboration with us in the context ofCitiesMethodologies, provided an opportunity tobecome more familiar with the interactive workmethods of these two artists who address socialissues in their visual art projects.

For CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest, Ro_Archivepresented a sample extracted from their 10,000photographs database, showing the changingtrajectories of their approach during the three yearsof the project's development, moving from aposition of subjectivity to the recovery of the indexvalue of the image. Initiated under the umbrella ofthe National University of Arts, Ro_Archive iscoordinated by the architect and artist Iosif Király

subREAL - Interviewing the cities - Framing Bucharest, 2002

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exhibition brought together a selection of blackand white photographs varying in size andextracted from the sections entitled Framing andListening to sculpture and made between 2000 and2004 in Stockholm, Montreal, Zürich, Bucharest,Amsterdam, and Helsinki.

Among the participants to the exhibition worthmentioning are also: Wesley Aelbrecht with avideo essay critically examining the ethnographicfilm-making practices of Pedro Costa who hasbeen documenting housing transition in a slumarea of Lisbon; Füsün Turetken with panoramicphotographs featuring street elevations; and PeterSant with the film Chinatown, day for night, aboutthe urban night-time.

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest included, inaddition to artistic installations, a projection roomscreening films which document the attempt ofartists, filmmakers and sociologists to analyze thecity: a selection of films from the project London-in-Motion (made by the students from UCL andparticipants from outside the university, on EastEuropeans living in London); AlexandruSolomon's films A dog’s life (on stray dogs) andApocalypse on wheels (on traffic in Bucharest); orthe experimental performance film made by RastkoNovaković and Ger Duijzings, entitledLebensraum / living space. The film shows GerDuijzings walking on the streets of London,reading passages from the diary he kept in 1992,when he was conducting anthropological fieldworkin war-torn Yugoslavia. The collaboration betweenRastko Novaković and Ger Duijzings furtherevolved with a series of more recent artworksunder the title The geopolitical everyday.

Last but not least, an important nucleus of theexhibition consisted of projects which resultedfrom the CitiesMethodologies | Bucharestworkshop. Even if the emphasis of the workshopwas on process, on the analysis and investigationof methods and on the benefits of working inmultidisciplinary teams, the majority of teamssucceeded in producing a visual or materialpresentation of their work. The inclusion of theseprojects in the exhibition was important to theparticipants because it provided an opportunity torelate their work to that of others and reconsidertheir projects from a broader perspective.

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In May 2011, I had the chance to present aselection of the Bucharest exhibition at the lastedition of CitiesMethodologies in London,receiving feedback from both visitors andorganizers. It was not until then that I was able totake the necessary (geographical, temporal andpersonal) distance to become fully aware of thequalities of the project developed in Bucharest.The work with students, the contributions ofartists, guests speakers and other participants at allstages of the project (workshop, exhibition anddebates), and last but not least the team'sengagement and involvement in developing andcarrying out this project, all these joint effortscreated a powerful, dense and important event forboth the artistic and academic community.

Exhibition views:Ro_Archive, Marina Albu - Acvilele Albe, Eva Weber - The solitary life of cranes, Margareta Kern - Guest

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CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest kicked off with aninterdisciplinary workshop that took place at theNational University of Arts in Bucharest (the UNAGallery) between 9 and 23 October 2010. Itresulted in seven interdisciplinary projects thatwere showcased at the main exhibition. Theprimary objective in each of these projects was toidentify, apply and test a combination of methodsin order to explore and analyze particular parts ofBucharest. Instead of formulatingrecommendations for how to solve concreteproblems and issues, the scope of each project wasto discover new and interdisciplinary ways ofapproaching the city by engaging with researchpractices of others. In other words, instead oflooking at the city as such, we focused instead onthe methods through which to approach existingurban realities, comparing them, outlining thedifferences and trying to foster dialogue. Aware ofpeople's inclination to defend one's discipline evenin the context of an interdisciplinary project, theparticipants – artists, architects, geographers,sociologists and anthropologists – collaborated onexplorative case-studies, which they translated intoa joint project, using visual and other material, andhighlighting the specific contributions of each field tothe ‘common cause’of understanding urban realities.

In order to bring coherence and direction to theworkshop, some key themes and focal points weredefined:• Urban voids and abandoned spaces• Flux and dynamics of the city, in relation to urbanvoids and abandoned spaces• Methods of site-specific observation andintervention• Non-visual data (soundscapes, odor or smellmaps, etc.)

During the first meeting, several interdisciplinaryteams were formed, with the intention to distributepractitioners from the three main fields in an equaland balanced manner. Yet it proved impossible tomake all teams work in perfect triangulation(which would have meant the inclusion of an artist,an architect or urban planner, and a sociologist oranthropologist). Some teams were dominated by

representatives from one particular discipline,while others were not even ‘complete’ as one of thethree fields was missing. In the case of MarinaAlbu’s proposal, architects and anthropologistswere invited to take part in an already existingproject. Personal affinities, shared interests in onesubject or another, the occurrence of realcollaboration or the lack thereof resulted,understandably, in a number of deviations from theideal workshop format.

The interdisciplinary teams had the task ofidentifying and exploring a site in Bucharest thatmatched the criteria and main themes of theworkshop. After selecting the site, the participantsspent some time there, getting acquainted with thesurroundings as well as the other team members,discussing approaches put forward by allparticipants in relation to the chosen site andselecting a combination of (hybrid) methods with aview of proposing and producing, by the end of theworkshop, a shared project to be included in theexhibition. The emphasis was on data gatheringand the structuring of the project, as well as on themethods and ways in which information wascollected, selected and used during theinterpretation process.

The workshop included guest lectures by VintilăMihăilescu, Florin Tudor, Space Syntax, MirceaNicolae, Celia Ghyka, Ioana Tudora, LiviuChelcea, etc. On the day following the opening ofthe exhibition, British video artist Phil Collins wasinvited to discuss the results with the workshopparticipants and students of the National Universityof Arts. During the artist talk and the informalmaster class that followed, Collins screenedsamples of his work, including from his mostrecent film Marxism Today (a film on formerteachers of Marxism-Leninism in what was oncethe GDR). This was followed by a lively debate.Apart from the obvious relevance of these mattersfor Romanian society, bringing to the surface ourown shared obsessions with these issues, theconversation with Collins provided numerous veryuseful insights into the artist’s methods ofproduction and collaboration.

The CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest workshopwas a genuine experiment in what could be calledapplied interdisciplinarity. Its limits and potentialswere intensely discussed, to the extent that therewas also a sense of crisis or awareness of theinsurmountable problems that this kind of dialogueposes. It became clear that the road to a morediagonal and interdisciplinary use ofmethodologies as proposed by Kristeva is full ofobstacles, problems and tensions. However, it didlead to moments of concrete dialogue in the fieldor site research (in the form of simple andspontaneous conversations on waste groundlocations or interviews in the middle of the city)resulting in new ideas that were useful to all, andtriggering forms of reflection on methods whichwe tend to apply rather mechanically or intuitively.One of the real benefits of the workshop was theinclusion of artists. In the social sciences, the artsare usually ignored when exploring thepossibilities and potentials of interdisciplinarity,even though many artists have perfectlyappropriated the methods of examination andresearch developed and put forth in other fields,some in a mimetic manner and others because theyhave an inclination to research.

The workshop resulted in seven projects, whichwere all exhibited at CitiesMethodologies,reflecting different takes on interdisciplinarycollaboration. The artist Marina Albu invited anumber of friends, i.e. two architects and ananthropologist, to take part in her project AcvileleAlbe. They formulated the existence of a fictionalgroup of anarchists who lived in Bucharestbetween 1945 and 1948 on the abandoned andderelict premises of a former hospital. “I chose thisbuilding on account of the myths I heard”, MarinaAlbu wrote when explaining the selection of theruined building from Dr. Iacob Felix Street 88.Considering that this site has been associated withstories told in the neighborhood, Albu intended toexamine historicizing mechanisms. Consisting offilms and interviews with the pseudo descendantsof the artists as well as black and whitephotographs and fictional documents of actionsthat happened on the premises of the hospital, herproject is about creating a new myth — the mythof a group of protesting artists who disappearedonce communism set in – and making it into a‘fact’ documented and noted on Wikipedia. Even ifthe project shows that in the viral internet era,rumors are not difficult to start, it flags up a realand profound issue: Romanian art needs myths,heroes and predecessors. In the context of the crisisof modern and contemporary art in Romania, analternative art group such as Acvilele Albe isindeed possible and imaginable. A similar

The Ci6esMethodologies workshop

by Simona Dumitriu

“Interdisciplinarity is always a site where expressions of resistance are latent. Manyacademics are locked within the specificity of their field: that is a fact… the firstobstacle is often linked to individual competence, coupled with a tendency to jealouslyprotect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their ownprerogatives, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teachtheir students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology” (Julia Kristeva,”Institutional interdisciplinarity in theory and practice: an interview”. In Alex Colesand Alexia Defert, (eds.). The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity. London: Backless Books,1998, pp.3-21, here pp. 5-6).

occurrence is that of discovering andmythologizing now almost forgotten artists and thepossibility that they may indeed contribute to areformulation of still unwritten or projectedhistories.

Two teams selected the area of the (never fullyrealized) Văcăreşti lake as location for theirprojects. Video artist Ştefan Sava and architectMihnea Nicolae Simiraş approached it from theposition of the random explorer. The explorerventures into a space with its own rules which arepartially out of sync with urban realities andpartially intersect with it. The Văcăreşti lake (alake that does not exist and which consists of dikeswithout water) appears as the paradoxical ruin ofthe technical incapacity of the communist regime,now taken over by nature and vegetation, scatteredwith improvised living spaces and crossed byinquisitive explorers. “The explorer realizes that hehas entered the remnants of a historical accidentleft by communism which is now governed by aset of rules which are strange for the urbanindividual. Somehow the laws that usually governthe urban environment do not apply here: natureburies and covers the marks of the accident andcontinues to evolve by itself, through its own will”.In their project, Sava and Simiraş tackle the issueof measuring this enclosed space, of examining therelations it forms with the outside, and of studyingits urban surroundings which are peripheral to it. Inthe resulting project, consisting of a film, andaccompanied by photographs and a drawing madeby the architect and the artist, the Văcăreşti lakefeatures as a place with its own flora and fauna.One almost expects to come across creatures suchas those in the book Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna byphotographer Joan Fontcuberta (1988).

The investigations of the group made up of BogdanBordeianu, Andra Dumitru and Sebastian Stanproceeded backwards, documenting precisely thisborder through the ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ points fromthe Văcăreşti area — through a new shopping mall,a newly built, large and only partially inhabitedcompound of luxury apartment blocks, a militarybase — in the context of the map of this site andthe transformations it has undergone in time. Inthis case, the study of the border turned into aninvestigation of protection and public securityissues when the team members were stopped andheld after they had unknowingly traversed theterrain of a military base. The digital photographstaken by Bordeianu (although they did capturesites that were not signaled as prohibited for imagetaking) were deleted by patrolling soldiers. Twentyphotographs were finally recovered from thememory card by means of special software. Theywere exhibited as projections, producing a simplebut disconcerting effect: twenty rather banalimages of the surroundings, seeking to documentthe city and having nothing dangerous inthemselves, become evidence for an equally simplequestion: What needs to be ‘protected’ and‘secured’ in the public space, and why, and whodecides about the anxieties, dangers and problemsof security in today’s city?

The project of the team made up of IonuţPiţurescu, Zelmira Szabo, Cristian Bălan andMihai Moţcanu Dumitrescu focused on abandonedspaces in the Piaţa Matache area. The result of

their collaboration was an installation in whichhouse numbers of abandoned and derelict houseswere nostalgically and slightly ironically‘preserved’ in jars, in the absence of real sitepreservation. The team members’ complexconversation in the context of this threatenedspace, conveying both the workshop themes andrelated notions of interdisciplinarity, was perhapsmore important than the exhibited object itself. Intheir Space dialogue, this particular urban site isdefined through a mix of two types ofabandonment, which are both linked to marketmechanisms. “Lately, people have been organisingand assessing space here by de-contextualizing it.A market-like situation has evolved, and people areonly interested in ‘merchandise’ while walkingaround, picking convenient items, and paying noattention to context or circumstances. This hasbeen happening for the last twenty years now”.Carried out a few months before the demolishingworks started for the new Buzeşti-Berzei-UranusBoulevard, erasing important parts of the PiaţaMatache area, their project can be seen as beingrelevant to the entire city, linking in with currentpolitical debates about axes, journeys and traffic.

One team focused on Ferentari, one of theneighborhoods of Bucharest which suffer mostfrom violence, racism and poverty. Two members,Miruna Ţîrcă and Marius Huza, are coordinators ofKomunitas, which is an association that carries outcommunity projects in the neighborhood. Theyboth have experience working with the poorestmembers of the community. The other twomembers of the team were young artists, IoanaGheorghiu and Andra Jurgiu (who is also a studentin architecture), who visited this ill-famed part ofBucharest for the first time. Although at somepoint during their research the two halves of thegroup went their own way, each producing theirown project, they shared common ground in termsof dealing with issues of social stigmatization anddeprivation. Yet two very different positionsemerged: Miruna Ţîrcă and Marius Huza produceda large scale simple print, an enlarged image ofFerentari with a thin red line drawn in the middleof it, dividing the street and the city in two halves:the upper and the lower half, with no means ofcommunication between the two. But where Ţîrcăand Huza saw separation, Ioana Gheorghiu andAndra Jurgiu saw similarities and shared strategiesof adaptation by the inhabitants of Ferentari. Inthese almost ‘rural’ parts of Bucharest peoplecreate small flower and vegetable gardens on whatcould be described as patches of public space.These improvised gardens show the two faces ofFerentari, on the one hand it presents itself as analmost idyllic rustic environment displayingresourcefulness. On the other hand, it alsodemonstrates the fragility of these ‘rural’ spaces inthe city, some of which are located only a fewmeters away from the rail tracks that pass throughthe area, illustrating the gap between the ‘twohalves’ of society.

Beyond the façade: a shop window exercise is theoutcome of the joint project by Daniel Djamo,Mihaela Ţânţaş and Emilia Ţugui. The projectstarted with an examination of the Victory ofSocialism Avenue, which links Union Square withCeauşescu’s House of the People (now House ofParliament). The objects of study were the empty

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Ştefan Sava / Mihnea Nicolae Simiraş - Crossing the border, C-print, 2010

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and abandoned shop windows of decommissionedstores found in this part of the so-called CivicCenter. The team observed the relationshipbetween the centrality of the Victory of SocialismAvenue in the symbolic geography of the cityduring the 1980s, and its current failure as acommercial area and a public space. The survivingstores are arranged according to strangesymmetrical principles: if there is a café (or a bank,a mini-mall, or a travel agency) on one side of thestreet, there will be one similarly positioned on theopposite side. In their exhibit, Djamo, Ţânţaş andŢugui also linked the abandonment and emptyspaces of the Civic Center, previously the coresymbol of the Romanian socialist city, to thecomplete emptiness that defined shops (such as theAlimentara, Gostat and ABC stores) in Romaniabefore 1989. Like in a children’s game, the threeauthors reconstruct, out of photo fragments, three-dimensional montages of commercial spaces,suggesting an ideal outlook for these stores thatwere meant to be the symbolic showcases of theVictory of Socialism Avenue.

University Square is another important site inBucharest. It represents one of the most importanturban intersections, presently undergoing majorrestructuring. As part of these changes, four statueson the square (of Mihai the Brave, GheorgheLazăr, Spiru Haret and Ion Heliade Rădulescu),located in front of the University, were temporarilyremoved and transported to Izvor Park, in front ofthe House of Parliament. Marius Mitran, AndreiRadu and Viorela Strat designed an urban itinerarymarked by stencils distributed between UniversitySquare and the site where the four statues weremoved. Street interviews detail the public’s attitudetowards the temporary transformation of twoimportant landmarks in the urban landscape,questioning the meanings of the terms statue andmonument and exploring Robert Musil’s classicalargument about the invisibility of monuments andmemorials.

Taken together, the interdisciplinary projectsdeveloped during the workshop provide interestingcase-studies in which different approaches to urbanspace — including forms of social activism,methodological study, theoretical construction ofinterdisciplinary discourse and the poetics ofminimal gesture — intersect. The following textswritten by participants to the workshop provideadditional information and nuances about theindividual projects. They demonstrate the attentionpaid to collaboration and the evaluation of itslimits in the exploration of a common interest inthe urban environment.

Exhibition views - the workshop projects

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In my career, the main challenge has always beento bring people together – people of variousdisciplinary backgrounds and with differentexperiences but all with an interest in urban lifeand the urban environment. This was whattriggered my interest when I first heard aboutCitiesMethodologies (the event that took place inLondon in 2009) when it was briefly mentionedby Ger Duijzings in a presentation he gave at NewEurope College in November 2009. Previously, asan urban planner and activist for a better urbanismin Romania, I had the chance to work withsociologists on various projects articulating ideasfor a desired future, and the experiences werefrustrating and interesting at the same time.Frustrating because we were somehow turningaround in circles: I was expecting answers fromexperts whose role it is to understand people andtheir social environment in order then for me topropose interventions in space, while thesociologists were expecting answers from me interms of what to ask people about space. Wenormally managed to overcome these initialdifficulties. The way out was somehow ourcommon preoccupation with solving problems, andfinding solutions to improve both the space andliving conditions of people. But what if there areno ambitions in solving problems? No projectionsfor a better future for a place like Bucharest? Andwhat if, besides planners interested in space, andsociologists interested in people, we include a thirdcategory of persons whose main activity it is toexplore urban contexts through their ownsubjective responses, feelings and ideas about aplace and its people? Yes, you guessed, that thirdcategory would be my description of artists.

The initial idea was to propose a day long exercisein which interdisciplinary teams bringing togetherrepresentatives of all three categories (planners andarchitects, sociologists and anthropologists, andartists) would experiment by working together. Wewould start exploring a given controversial placeor location (such as the area around the newBasarab bridge), spent a few hours in the field inteams of three, asking participants to document thesite, each with their own specific instruments athand, and then to talk in their team about these

approaches and compare and confront tools andspecific disciplinary perspectives. In the evening,the teams were meant to give a presentation notonly on their understanding of that site, but also onteam dynamics and the use of applied methods inreading a place.

The principles remained the same, but thetimescale of project expanded considerably notonly because of my ambitions, but also because Ireceived many good advice on how to properlyorganize an experiment like this, where it is indeedimportant to ensure that there is enough time tocreate common ground for communication withinthe different interdisciplinary teams. The exercisewas after all designed to compare and confrontmethods and various approaches within each of theteams, by exploring a site together, without havingto propose any improvement of that place. Theobjective was to just ‘read’ the place and to tell itsstory to others — and to be creative in this storytelling, using visual tools, but also other means ofcommunication. As part of the exercise, theworkshop also had a teaching component. Thesewere not the usual university lectures, but ratherinformal presentations where more experiencedpersons coming from one particular field(anthropology, sociology, visual arts, urbanplanning, and architecture) spoke about theirresearch experiences, their own projects, and thetools they usually use. The speakers were asked totake a bit of distance from their usual activities andtry to look at their own experiences having in mindthe idea of ‘exploration’ — how to get closer to aparticular place and how to better understand itscharacteristics: “what exactly do I do, or othersthat I know of from my own field, when we startexploring a site?”. This proved not an easy thing todo, neither for the persons presenting their worknor for the audience. The workshop participantsoften responded with their own specificperspectives in mind, asking only for theinformation that was pertinent for them. For thepresenters, this posed the problem of how to maketheir work relevant to a public with such diverseprofiles.

As previously indicated, the main objective of the

event was to overcome the lack of communicationbetween various (professional) groups dealing withthe city. We were hoping that if we brought themtogether, representatives of the three groups will bemore willing to ’see’ each other’s perspectives,methods and ways of understanding the city andthey will start paying attention to each other’swork. It would help to do something about theclimate of mistrust and ignorance that existsbetween the different practitioners of the urbandisciplines: the artists do not like the architectstaking over the scene, while architects and urbanplanners are often far too much preoccupied withtrying to solve the practical problems of the city,reluctant to accept other possible approaches suchas exploration, sensitive interpretation, andtheoretical reflection, for instance about how thespaces and buildings they have created areinhabited by people. Sociologists have difficultiesthinking of social phenomena in spatial terms,which sometimes causes an inferiority complexamongst them vis-à-vis the architects and urbanplanners.

I think that in most of the teams and in theworkshop meetings (which took place during theevenings or during the weekends), the primaryobjectives were reached, even though it was notwithout problems and tensions. I think that moretime would have helped to iron out these problemsand tensions and ensure more confidence amongthe participants, but also between the organizersand the participants. It was a rewarding experiencefor me and it is my intention to organize similarworkshops in the future, most probably as asummer school or as some other kind of eventformat that allows more time for team building.

Why organise or par6cipate in aworkshop calledCi6esMethodologies?

by Vera Marin

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Huge oil and gas fields were recently discovered ina problematic urban neighborhood in Romania.Rumors about foreign corporations trying toappropriate the precious land are spreading. TheRomanian authorities, provided with a uniquechance to get rid of the bad neighborhood presentthemselves in the media as rescuers of the area byattracting direct foreign investment. They aredetermined to start up the business. Skimming thecity archives, they found that important data aboutthe neighborhood are missing, so they planned asearch for data in the area. There, policemendiscovered just one photo with a red line in theimprovised gypsy houses. A seventeen-year old

• 99% of the surveyed people declared that this is adangerous area and that they would never go there• On the question ”How did you find out that thearea is dangerous?”, 99% of the surveyed peopleanswered: from newspapers and TV and throughhear-say• On the question ”What is your understanding ofthe disparity between esteem and social stigma”,the majority said: ”I like to be the recipient ofesteem but I don’t know what stigma means”.

It was impossible to finish the survey because oflack of funding. It will be completed with moneyfrom the investors (foreigners and corporations).

kid, owner of the photo, declared: “I love playingwith invisible borders”. Identifying the localpeople was a virtually impossible task, so theauthorities made the gypsies an offer which theycould hardly refuse: “We will make free IDs foryou, but you will have to come with us to thepolice station”.

The strange behaviour of citizens and the missingdata led the authorities to do a survey amongst thepopulation of Bucharest to get a better insight intopublic opinion concerning the neighborhood. Theconclusions were:

Invisible borders

by Marius Huza & Miruna Ţîrcă

InnerCITY: Văcăreş6 Lake

by Ştefan Sava & Mihnea Nicolae Simiraş

The ‘abandoned’ place is a relative concept giventhe fact that a place can be abandoned from theinside while adopted from the outside. Thus, it is amatter of boundaries, of the relationship betweeninterior and exterior, between center and periphery.

A totalitarian system generated such a place in thecity, abandoned from the outside, yet adopted fromthe inside through self-identity. By chance, thisplace is separated from the city through a veryclear and abrupt border. At the same time the onlyproof of its existence, when seen from the outside,is a slight curving of the horizon. It is a remarkableplace, if we consider it through the perspective ofthe concept of the border, of the edge or limit.

It is presumed that a boundary is bilateral, with anexterior and an interior, which is in fact also validin this case, but only in a conceptual sense. From apurely physical point of view, the limit is evidentonly from the interior: in this way it fulfills a

above this environment, which is on the same levelwith the urban space at the other side of it. It is theonly spot where urbanity manages to penetrate thisspace, if only by a few meters. It is an ambiguousplace, a zone of interference, where man is placedin a position of power as high representative of thecity. It is a political place.

These are some frames of the act of knowing thisspace, bits and pieces of representations and ideaswhich we discovered through dialogue, locatingourselves in an alternative space, in between thephysical and the mental, on the border. We did nottry an extensive analysis and we prefer to leave thesequence the way it is so that the images positionthemselves in the space, interacting in variousways, and decomposing and recomposing it in adiverse manner.

fundamental condition of a truly abandoned place.Through the act of crossing the border theindividual enters this new and unknown space andbegins its discovery. He explores and leaves marksand eventually encounters other explorers who arealso adopting and appropriating this space invarying degrees. They simultaneously discover thecenter and relate to the periphery, and live the rareexperience of being central in a periphery.

The next layer of exploration is of a historicalnature. The explorer realizes that he entered theremnants of a historical accident left bycommunism which is now governed by a set ofrules which are strange for the urban individual.Somehow the laws that usually govern the urbanenvironment do not apply here: nature buries andcovers the marks of the accident and continues toevolve by itself, through its own will.

There is a platform somewhere at the border, rising

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Ştefan Sava / Mihnea Nicolae Simiraş - Crossing the border, 2010, detail

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest - the workshop projects

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Space dialogue |excerpts1

Ionuţ Piţurescu, Zelmira Szabo, Cris6an Bălanand Mihai Moţcanu Dumitrescu

Here we are trying to explore and absorb thepossible meanings of the term ‘abandoned’. Andlike others we reach the conclusion that‘abandoned’ in Bucharest does not necessarilymean empty, uninhabited, and devoid of activity.From a larger area (between Piaţa Matache andCişmigiu park) we selected two smaller andadjacent sections: the Matache market and theFeroviar Cinema (or former Marna Hotel). Thelatter is an ‘abandoned’ place, i.e. a deserted ruinand clearly derelict in the physical sense (only theouter shell still stands) but it also somebody’sproperty. It is well guarded. The former is full ofactivity and bustle, an area of cheap commercialstructures which function in an improvised manner,and which stand next to an old and prestigiousmarket house that seems on its way to beingabandoned, or even demolished.

The area: a 110 years old market hall selling fish,meat and dairy products, a vegetable and fruitmarket, open air stalls and other market houses,selling clothes, household appliances and otherthings, the recent structures do not match the old-fashioned market house; intense parking during theday and the week, but almost deserted in theevenings and on Sundays; in the vicinity ofVictoria Square, with much transit traffic, animportant juncture in the transport system (metro,public transportation lines, departure points forinter-city travel, railway station); historicallydiverse functions typical of a central city area, butalso many buildings with similar functions (stores,cinemas, hotels) now mostly abandoned ordeteriorated; inhabited by Roma and urban poor,social segregation; real-estate pressure to buildmulti-purpose offices and high-rises, which form astriking contrast with the derelict and ruinedbuildings that become more frequent whenadvancing from Victoria Square into the Matachemarket area; at daytime the offices headquartersand Matache market share a certain dynamism, inthe evenings both of them look similar in theirabandonment….

A nice shell overgrown with vegetation (and evenfauna).

A suspicious fire.

Prohibited access.

depopulation) and ‘relational’. I cannot find asufficiently concise term.

‘Domestication’: is the appropriation of a space,the creation of its meaning and the transformationthereof through daily use (and adjustment) by agroup or an individual. I believe domestication ofspace also means offering a sense of usefulness topeople.

‘Things going wild’: on the one hand theabandonment of the effort to domesticate (not onlythe abandonment of space but also the other typesof abandonment, i.e. the functional, esthetic andconfigurative), on the other the proliferation ofnon-places (anonymous, uprooted, depersonalized,standardized spaces, supermarkets, office buildingsetc.) under the pressure of commercial and realestate interest.

A dialogue between ‘abandonment’,‘domestication’ and ‘things going wild’: on the onehand the ruins of the Feroviar Cinema,accommodating a flourishing flora and fauna, andon the other hand the buildings of the Matachemarket, apparently crowded and dynamic, butshowing a total lack of concern for context.

We started with a large area and eventually settledon two islands which can illustrate the two formsof abandonment: the classical spatial and physicalone around the ruins of the Feroviar Cinema, andthe social, aesthetic, and configurative one aroundthe Matache market. Both illustrate the notion ofspace as a commodity. In both cases abandonmentis determined by overarching commercial interestsand real estate pressure in the respective space.

We will make a shelf with full and half-full bottlesand jars on which photos of buildings from thearea are glued as labels. The bottles represent theidea of commodity but also the notion of fragility.Underneath the shelf, on a table, we will place amodel of the area in the form of a board game. Theentire exhibit should suggest a stall or a kiosk. Ona nearby wall we will project a film which makesreference to the parallels between these spaces ascommodities and the market area. Should we writeit down, the metaphorical references of theinstallation, or leave it to the visitor’s imagination?Let's write it down for now...

City Hall statements that they intend to keep thebuilding.

In the meantime the metaphor of ‘commodity’ hasbeen introduced.

Here people have been organising and assessingspace by de-contextualizing it. Lately, a market-like situation has evolved, and people are onlyinterested in ‘merchandise’ while walking around,picking convenient items, and paying no attentionto context or circumstances. This has beenhappening for the last twenty years now. It is thecase on several levels, from large houses andconstructions to kiosks, stalls, covered markets,and commercial spaces.

The rest of the contextual issues such as aesthetics,fluidity, coherence, public utility, functionality,providing solutions to the numerous city needs arecompletely ignored. The elements of constructedspace have become commodities and integrateddevelopment has to compromise continuously withlocal post-communist vision. The only criterion iscommercial value: the space is sliced into piecesthat are taken one by one, while nobody isconcerned with the bigger picture. Nobody isinterested in the forest when their concern is justtheir own tree and nothing more... So we maynotice that people are not interested in the qualityof the market as a whole since their attention isdrawn only to individual commodities.

Your keywords: Transit, depopulation, marketmanipulation, pressure, monuments, density,precarious habitation, alienation, degradation,ruins, waste ground, diversity and segregation,picturesque and unwholesome, continuousfrontage, inner yard surprises, intimacy and privacy.

My keywords: organic, fragile, vulnerable,exposed intimacy, instability and precarioushabitation, living in the present, without a past andfuture, climax, euphoria, money, the extremes ofsincerity and cheating, excessively open or gatedspaces, I will add some more…..

‘Abandonment’: can be performed in relation tospace or buildings, it may be institutional (creatinga ghetto) or functional (introducing single function,home abandonment), social (segregation and

1 Compiled and edited by Ger Duijzings

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Acvilele Albe

by Marina Albu

Description

The radical artist movement Acvilele Albe livedand worked in Bucharest, between 1945 and 1948,in a building at Dr Iacob Felix Street 88, called TheIncubator by its members. Vicenzio David, AldousLuke, Hortensia Sandu, Emilian Toader, IzaDamian, Bernard Basalici, Ivan Deatcu, SabinaTesoiu, Corneliu Dima are those we were able toidentify as being part of the group, but it is saidthat there were around seventy artists, philosophersand writers involved in the movement. Some ofthem were refugees who had come fromBessarabia and Bukovina and had arrived inBucharest around 1940; some were Romanianswith Polish roots, threatened to be deported, andothers were ex-legionaries. All had had issues withthe political regimes under which they had lived,and most of them had been deeply disturbed by therealities they had lived through and disillusionedby the ideals they had previously believed in.

Political views

In political terms they were against any kind ofideology, calling it ‘False Knowledge’, ‘Illusion’ or‘False Sense’. They saw ideology as a product ofsocial reality and human consciousness influencedby a mix of political ideals and selfish interests.The group considered that also progressive politicsdid not always correspond with the needs andrequirements of social development. Allideologies, according to Acvile, were used tojustify and legitimize the governing parties, andindoctrinate science and education, thought andconscience, and society as a whole. In their view,ideologies always transform themselves into toolsof domination and persuasion, distortion andmanipulation. True knowledge and experience arehindered by the participation in ideologicalpursuits, i.e. the development, processing,grounding, promoting, and practicing of suchdoctrines. The solution offered by Acvilele wasisolation and seclusion, observation and personalunmediated experience.

Activity

Members of the group defined their actions andworks as being inspired by ‘a fight againstcommanded knowledge’, ‘non-fictionalexperiences’ or ‘individual exploration of the real’,and they considered this as a prelude for theutopian ‘Age of the Demise of Ideology’. Theywere working with drawing and text, they carried

References

Grigorescu, Adriana. 1958. "De când şi până undeîn alb?". In: Revista Artă Nouă, Ed. Culturia, Cluj(Romania), 37, pp. 29-32.Graur, Alexandru. 1965. Mişcări în Ţară. Revolutionand artă. Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, pp. 241-256.

Acvilele Albe or How to Make Sense of Void

“A house that has been experienced is not an inertbox. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space”(Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space).

I chose a building by the stories and myths I heardabout it. The building has not been used for acouple of decades. It stands on the premises of astate hospital. When one trusts a service or aninstitution, a place or a person, one cannot acceptits abandonment. One cannot accept a void whereone expects meaning. So I create meaning. AcvileleAlbe is meaning. I want to create a myth so that Ican fill up a void. A place with history, a place withmemory, is no longer a gap place. The myth coversa period of uncertainty, a gap-time, the after-warperiod. By putting up a sign on the building at DrIacob Felix Street 88, I assign the period between1945 and 1948 to the life and work of the radicalartist movement Acvilele Albe. I supply them witha past. The edifice becomes present. Questioningthe birth of myths, I work together with twoarchitects and one anthropologist, using crowdedpublic places as the stage for our constructedinterviews around the building and the artists’movement. They create new personal identities forthe interviewees, acting as mediators fortestimonials of their grandparents, who had beenmembers of Acvilele Albe, offering backgroundsound stories for the casual listeners around, whichcan be disseminated in time by word of mouth.

out actions which resembled ‘happenings’, as theywere later called, anticipating this kind of activityten years before its first appearance andpopularization in the west. Among members of thegroup, Karl Mannheim’s book Ideology andUtopia (1929) was getting considerable attention,probably because of a three month residency theauthor had spent in The Incubator in 1946, as partof a research he did for the Institute of Educationin London, one year before his death. The Jewishsociologist of Hungarian descent was to become agreat source of inspiration for Acvilele Albe.

The end of The Incubator

The Incubator was attacked in 1948 by Romania’sgovernment, members of the Acvile Albe groupwere arrested and convicted at staged trials, falselyaccused of undermining the ’democratic regime’and of plotting with the ‘Anglo-Saxon imperialists’in order to plan a third world war and attack theSoviet Union. On the walls of The Incubator, afterthe disappearance of the group, graffiti writingssuch as ‘Think for yourself!’ or ‘Already Chewed= VOMIT’ were found, as well as very remarkableconstructed assemblages.

The Name of the Group

Acvilele Albe means The White Eagles, namedafter the solitary birds, which are said to mate forlife. They build their nests, or aeries, of twigs andsticks at a vantage point high in a tree or on a cliff,in a permanent feeding territory and they add totheir nests year after year, using the refuse ofprevious nests decomposing beneath the newadditions. Nests can become enormous, measuringup to ten feet across and weighing well over onethousand pounds. The eaglets (usually two) do notdevelop adult markings until their third year, whenthey leave parental protection and seek their ownmates and territories.

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In spite of our interest in post-industrial landscapesand abandoned spaces which are so characteristicfor Bucharest, we decided to focus our project on amuch more mundane but often overlooked facet ofthe urban abandonment: the empty windows ofshops that have closed down. The economicdownturn has made these a quite common view inall major cities around Europe and beyond, andBucharest is no exception: where only a few yearsago shop windows were displaying an abundanceof merchandise, they are now left empty, and the‘moved’ or ‘closed’ signs have replaced the ‘sales’offerings, questioning our ideas of capitalismwhich we seem to have embraced much tooreadily. The capital’s high-streets, Calea Victorieiand Calea Dorobanţi first came to mind but in theend we turned to an area where closing stores,empty shop windows and commercial space rentalsigns have become a defining part of the localambiance – the area on Union Boulevard(previously Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism)between Union Square and Constitution Square.

On 25 June 1984, Nicolae Ceauşescu officiallykicked off his project to radically reconfigure thecentre of Bucharest, of which The House of theRepublic (now House of Parliament) and theVictory of Socialism Boulevard are the mosttangible results. The official start date was to fallon the fortieth anniversary of Romania’s “socialand national revolution, of the free andindependent development of Romania”, eventhough the demolition and construction works hadstarted more than a year before. Ceauşescu’s grandproject was an earlier dream, based on themonumental buildings he had seen in North Koreaduring his 1971 Asian tour. While he nevermanaged to see his project finalized, since part ofthe projected buildings were never finished or evenerected, the project itself has reached, if onlypartially, its initial goal: the new Civic Center isindeed monumental, the boulevard that forms itsaxis is deliberately longer than the ChampsElysees, and the House of the People (now Houseof Parliament) has become a new touristic hot spotassuming, at least partially, its planned function ascentre and symbol of power which radicallymodified the city, not without a cost as is well-known.

Dominated by the hypnotizing image of the Houseof the People and hidden away by the dense foliageof trees which seem to claim the status of a local

organize our shop window installation along theprinciples of the popular 1980s ‘bunul gospodar’ or‘good housekeeper’ board game (the local socialistclone of Monopoly). Like in the original game, theitinerary around the shops is guided by the roll ofthe dice, taking the viewer on an “interesting andpicturesque imaginary tour, ‘sprinkled’ withhistorical and cultural landmarks, recreationalspaces, cafeterias, shops, etc.” We provided amirror of what these shops could become if wewere to transform the installation into life-sizeform in the abandoned shop windows on UnionBoulevard. Whether they rolled the dice or not, theaudience was invited to playfully explore what liesbehind the façade.

“Unter den Linden”, the part of Union Boulevardbetween Union and Constitution Square is a vividwitness to the failure of the civic centresystematization project: rows of huge empty shopwindows covered in tags and graffiti, with dozensof posters indicating that shops are abandoning thearea and moving elsewhere, numerous bannerssignaling flats for rent or sale (some with the oldphone area codes from a few years ago), andvegetation that wildly invades the pavement can beseen on both sides of the ‘fountain boulevard’.Among the few still not abandoned spaces are twobanks, two temp recruitment offices, some luxuryclothes and furniture shops as well as two trendybut lonely cafes located, in surprising symmetry,on two opposite sides of the street. Even aftertwenty years, commercial enterprises are doomedto fail on the former Victory of SocialismBoulevard. The few tourists and other people whoare out there on their Sunday strolls prefer to walkon the tree-lined alley parallel to the marblebuildings, and so the impressive commercialspaces at ground floor level are not very visible. Atnight there are few lights along the boulevard andnot too many lit windows on the front side of thebuildings either, just the blue glare of TV setswhich the night guards on one side of the streetwatch to make their shifts pass easier. Daily lifeseems to happen somewhere behind the marble‘curtain’ of buildings: that is where the cars areparked, kids go out to play, dogs are walked,carpets are swept, garbage is taken out, and peopleoccasionally gather for drinks in the bars located inthe basement of one of the few buildings thatescaped demolition, or at the back of the newerblocks. The boulevard, with its opulently ornatebuildings, remains just a vivid example of an urbanfaçade.

Our project was to invite people to explore andinteract with this abandoned façade. Since time didnot allow us to develop the in-situ performance weinitially had in mind, we opted for an installationthat recreates a few shop windows for thisboulevard which seems to be stuck in the past, asempty now as they were more than twenty yearsago, irrespective of the type of shop anyone mightattempt to open.

Drawing on this past and present emptiness and thearbitrary character of success of the shops onUnion Boulevard, we developed the idea to

Beyond the façade:a shop window exercise

by Daniel Djamo, Mihaela Ţânţaş, and Emilia Ţugui

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Ioana Gheorghiu / Andra Jurgiu - Three meters from the railway track, documentation photo, 2010

Three meters from the railway track

by Ioana Gheorghiu and Andra Jurgiu

Until six months ago, the track of the trains thatpassed by Şinei Street were twenty-one meters wide.

Before the railway track went out of use, the landclose to it was distributed through a kind of lotteryprocess or just taken by the people who were livinga few meters away from it. Until six months ago,the twenty-one meters were defining ahomogeneous space, property that was claimed bythe train passing by.

Twenty confined spaces (some half garden – halfstorage space, some enclosures for domestic birds)have put to use a space that is vacant since thetrack Bucureşti - Giurgiu went out of use.

In Bucharest, on Şinei Street, people who act as ifthe small suburban community Ştefan Vodă stillexists, do not witness anymore the connectionbetween the city and other countries. The train doesno longer pass by, loaded with sunflowers on theirway to the oil factory, the children are not wavinganymore at the cars crowded with girls and boysgoing on the Summer fair (Moşii de Vară), and if apresident dies, he is no longer brought back to his

route Bucharest – Giurgiu... this is the first railwaytrack. It was a beautiful sight when that guy, thepresident of Bulgaria, died here, the train took himthrough here on the way to Bulgaria.”

“Hear the dogs! Vicious ones, after sunset you areafraid to cross the railway tracks. Didn’t I tell you?It was a railway track leading to Baduc...transporting brick, transporting ceramic plates,floor tiles, transporting materials, but now perhapsBaduc doesn't exist anymore since the train doesnot go there any longer.”

“It used to be nice... when I came here... I playedhere as a child [...] From here the train went to theoil factory... it transported sun flower seeds ..., ascarriages were passing through all night long... youcould hear the train horn, it was making transportsto Butoiu where they made barrels and it wasmaking transports to all these factories... but in theend it did not have what to transport anymore andso they stopped it. [...] We split the land... we drewodds, each of us put those things in a hat and I wasgiven a piece of land at this end.”

homeland by train. Now, the people just leave theirhouse, cross, and go to their gardens.

“I was born here. Near the railway, there, on theother side, at the end of NiculaeDrăgan Street. I was born and got married here.[...] The stretch going up there where the traintraveled to the oil factory to deliver cereals,belonged to the Romanian Rail Company. The tenmeters of land from the railway to the street...those ten meters belonged to the Romanian RailCompany. We had cattle and we rented grasslandfrom the Romanian Rail Company for the cattle...we rented a grazing field stretching from the JilavaTrain Station to the Jewish cemetery. [...] Well, Ihave lived here for fifty years, since I was a child,and I was eight or nine when it happened. Ithappened some twenty-five years ago... the trainran over a mute Roma woman, up there. There wasalso an accident here, a truck filled with timberexploded, its front turned ahead and the driver wascaught under the wheels and got killed [...]. Thetrain stopped going through here... we had a fasttrain going to Bulgaria, one to Germany... all thesetrains ... it is the first railway track traveling on the

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Trips

by Bogdan Bordeianu

The Văcăreşti Lake.

It is a lake that does not exist and has never existedas such. Even the dike, the constructed boundary ofthe lake, has given in under the attempt to fill it.Today it is just a boundary between the city and aplace where the urban landscape ceases to exist.The project is a visual exploration of thisboundary, a ‘mapping’ of it. It consists of threeparts, based on the trips we made to this place.

20 non-existent photographs

These are the images of these photographs.

I applied a scanning technique to the memory cardfrom which the photographs were deleted andfinally I was able to recover these images, theimages of photographs which do not exist anymore.

The last time we visited this boundary, we entered bymistake the premises of a military base.I was accompanied by Sebastian on the last unexploredportion of the boundary. We were getting closer to anarea where we suspected the city would becomevisible.

Two soldiers stopped us and then accompanied us,together with an army officer, to the public bureau inview of writing an official report about the incident andto be handed over to the police. Since the taking ofpictures was forbidden, the last images were deleted.We were turned over to the police, we both received awarning and then we were permitted to go our way.

Urban layers: marking mobilemonuments in the public domain

by Viorela Strat, Andrei Radu, Marius Mitran

We were wondering what ‘abandoned’ spacemeans in the context of Bucharest. Is it exterior,interior, open, closed, real, imaginary, private,public, used, a house or a square? Since we couldnot decide, we starting guessing. We speculatedthat any urban space can be turned, through actionor the lack of it, into an abandoned space. In thebeginning of our project, we focused on spaceitself. Then during the project, we observed certainactivities that transformed a particular space andled to its abandonment.

Our attention was drawn by the temporary removalof four statues in the University Square area (ofMihai the Brave, Gheorghe Lazăr, Spiru Haret andIon Heliade Rădulescu) which were transported toa remote and sparsely furnished area of the IzvorPark, close to the Palace of Parliament. The reasonfor their dislocation was the construction of anunderground car park underneath UniversitySquare, to commence in 2010. We presumed thatwith the removal of the statues, the site was going

Our findings revolved around the concept ofabandoned space. We posited that, given the lackof urban regulations or the enforcement thereof,and the weak resistance against decisions taken bydiverse actors in the city, such as the cityauthorities, property developers or owners ofexisting buildings, it has become possible for anysite in the city to become abandoned. There is noexception to this rule.

What we did was the following. First, we sought toinvestigate how the temporary removal wasperceived by ordinary citizens, interviewing themat both ends of the route that the monuments tookwhen they travelled. Second, we designed asymbol or sign for mobile historical monuments —remodeling the existing symbol for historicalmonuments used throughout Romania — andinserted it along the route from University Squareto Izvor Park through stencils. In this manner wemarked the journey for those that wanted to see tothe statues, walking from the original location to

to be deprived of its symbolic significance. Thespace they left behind is now empty and restrictedfor public use. So the first important change in theurban geography of Bucharest, following the cityhall initiative to restructure University Square, wasthe disappearance of a landmark. After theirdislocation, without much noise and discussion, thefour statues found a new home in Izvor Park. Thisbecame the second important moment in ouranalysis: the creation of a new landmark in Izvor Park.

The dislocation of historical monuments creates aninteresting balance between old and new sites. Weneed to remember though that in 2012, the fourstatues will be moved back again to the originalsite at University Square, which raises anotherquestion: what will happen to the current sitewhere the four statues are currently located? Will itdisappear as a monumental space? Or will we beable to remember what was there before, just likemany other parts of multilayered Bucharest?

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their current one. We also intended to placebilingual plates with the sign on the fence currentlysurrounding University Square, marking the siteand indicating that the statues have been moved,inviting people to follow the signs in order to reachtheir new location.

The purpose of the project was to develop amethod of making visible the multiple transitoryprocesses that take place in Bucharest. That’s whyafter the statues return to their original site inUniversity Square, in 2012, the signs will bepointing in the opposite direction, to Izvor Park,serving the same purpose of marking change andconnecting two symbolic and monumental sites ofthe city.

In their original location, the statues formed avernacular spatial reference for many inhabitants ofBucharest, who referred synecdochally to this site as‘la statui’ or ‘la coada calului’, i.e., ‘at the statues’ or‘at the horse’s tail’ — a reference to the equestrianposition of Mihai the Brave. Without the statuespresent, it is debatable whether the meaning willpersist.

A variety of opinions were gathered from passers-by, both locals and people from outside Bucharest.Reactions ranged from indifference about themonuments and ignorance about their removal, toapproval and enthusiasm for the dislocation andthe statues’ new location. Anger, sadness,frustration, and disapproval also figured among theresponses that we received. All respondents had toanswer the following basic questions: What is thefirst thing that springs to your mind when I say theword ‘statue’? Do you have any knowledge aboutthese particular statues being moved? How do youfeel about that?

Not all respondents addressed the questions fullyor coherently. Below are some excerpts of the

responses that were collected:

University site answers

”I don’t know” (Female, approximately 25 yearsold)

”They’re not there anymore. I heard they aremaking other ones, I guess, or maybe they arerebuilding them” (Male, approximately 20 yearsold)

”I’m going to buy myself a newspaper!” (M, 80)

”They moved the statues to Izvor Park to build anunderground car park here. University Squarewithout the statues?! A square has to have onelandmark at least, but if there’s going to be anunderground car park here in two years, well, that’sfine” (F, 20)

”My heart aches” (F, 50)

”The statues here, they’re missing” (M, 18)

”The Romanian state” (M, 18)

”Beautiful” (F, 25)

”That place [respondent points to the fencedarea]… I know they are moving them to Izvor, butI haven’t thought about it. I don’t have any opinionabout it.” (F, 25)

”I am trying to think of what it stands for. A man offame…” (M, 25)

”Useless, I can get my own statue, right?” (M, 30)

”Michael the Brave, who’s gone….” (M, 15)

”The statue… the first thing… look, here

[respondent takes a look backward towards thestatues’ site] … What?! They’re gone! Oh, Motherof God, who took them? [respondent crossesherself]. They should be ashamed! They weregorgeous! They were around for an eternity.” (F, 70)

Izvor park answers

”Dropped from a plane, totally inappropriate here,they were connected to that place” [UniversitySquare] (M, 40)

”Marble. They are really beautiful, I had no ideathey were brought here from somewhere else, I’mnot from here.” (M, 40)

”Immobility ”(F, 25)

”To be honest, I’m just here to guard” (F, 30) [apark security guard]

”You don’t want to know, that m*** word. Theviewers will see this. I find it odd, I have neverseen any statues around Izvor park” (M, 20) [Therespondent is referring to an obscene word inRomanian, equivalent to ‘blowjob’ which rhymeswith the word ‘statue’ in Romanian].

”You see the old shit buildings, then you see this”[points to the statues] (M, 40, Austrian visitor)

”Michael the Brave, they should just leave himhere, many foreigners will come to visit the Houseof the People and the statues are already here,whereas over there [at University Square] they lackvisibility and aren’t highlighted in any way, peopleare just passing by in a hurry and they don’t evennotice them” (F, 50)

”Michelangelo. I disagreed at first, but now I’mdelighted because they give a face-lift to this parkthat nobody has cared about before. Even though,historically, they should be there [at UniversitySquare]. They look very good over here.” (F, 50)

”A standing person, it looks just like these [pointsto the statues in Izvor park]. The City Hallsomehow needs to spend all that money, there’s anallotted budget every year.” (M, 40)

At the CitiesMethodologies exhibition, theinterviews were collated and displayed on a TVset. Another set screened the process of placementof stencils along the route that the historicalmonuments took. Alongside a map of the city wasexhibited, as well as the newly designed mobilehistorical monument sign and photographs taken atboth sites.

Bogdan Bordeianu - Trips, 2010

Simona Dumitriu - Ro_Archive - Uricani, 2008

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Crumbling sidewalks filled with parked cars,entangled wires on the horizon, a dissonantsymphony of brash commercialism, they have allcolonized the public space of Romanian cities inthe last decade. In cities once marked by a totalcontrol of the ’public’, the public has seeminglyfallen, leaving urban spaces invaded by anuncontrolled plethora of nuisances. Yet this is onlyone side of the story. At practically the same time,a number of Romanian cities embarked on variousurban schemes, using variations of a universalrecipe of repaving and pedestrianizing theirhistoric centres, as well as planting a variety ofplaygrounds, flowerbeds and benches aroundneighbourhoods. Enter here discussions aboutgentrification, commodification of space throughthe new ubiquitous cafes and bars, the nature ofpost-socialist public spaces, national and regional‘exceptionalism’ speculations or neo-marxistinterpretations among the more scholarly circles.The moment I took my academic hat out and putmy urban design practitioner hat on, the stringentquestion became how can one make sense of allthis for better future approaches on interventions inpublic space. This is how the research project onthe audit of public spaces in Romanian cities cameabout. This Space Syntax Romania project wasfunded by a grant for cultural projects of the UrbanObservatory of the Union of Romanian Architects.It aimed not only to understand what goes well andless well in public space design in Romania, butalso to create a framework and a methodology toevaluate the state of public spaces in Romaniancities, and to provide best practices formunicipalities around the country.

The project was by itself a quest in defining andrefining methods for the evaluation of publicspaces. A large body of practice already existed inWestern countries, but there was the challenge ofapplying procedures and methods issued forWestern cities in the particular post-socialistcontext of Romania. Our project did not try toreinvent the wheel, but attempted to adapt it toRomania’s rather bumpy roads where there isalways a surprise lurking around the corner. How

Despite the variety of methods used, there was acentral element in the way we chose them: thefocus was on people in the public space. We talkedto them, recorded their perceptions of the publicspaces, we observed their behaviour in space,counted pedestrian flows, followed them to seetheir routes and uses of spaces. We modeled spaceto see how accessible it is for people. This methodsdesign was invariably based on a ’political’ choice:public space is about people. Not about making cartraffic smoother nor having ‘aesthetic’ design fordesign’s sake. We favoured again a politicalchoice, not people driving cars, but people in theurban space. People who walk, people who sit. Letme take parking for example — we examinedparking not from the point of view of the carowner, but that of the pedestrian. What do peoplethink of the parked cars, do they act as a physicalobstacle for pedestrians, do they act as a visualnuisance for passers-by or people who sit in thatspace?

In this context, do these methods glorify an agendaof ‘city beautification’, as one participant at thetalks alluded? Well, the measures that city officialshave taken might have been connected to a projectof ‘beautification’. Our endeavour, however, wasnot to examine how ’beautiful’ a place is, but howwell it works for the people. This is not aboutimposing a certain aesthetic design model, it isabout a model of public space design that is basedon previous evidence and research on how placeswork for people, as well as an understanding oflocal perceptions.

Urban designers are not ashamed to admit thattheir field is a normative exploit. You research inorder to better understand how to design. There isthe goal of knowledge, but there is also the goal ofpractice. Consequently, these methods have to bedesigned to have relevance for practice. Oneexample is the accessibility studies that SpaceSyntax Bucharest has been conducting, perhapsone of the most significant methodologicalnovelties of this study. Each place has a inherentpotential to attract people because of the geometry

can you understand public spaces in a political andsocio-cultural context where ‘publicness’ is a dirtyword? How can you study squares and streets asrepresentative public spaces, in certain cities where‘park’ is the only word that springs to mind whenpeople are asked about public spaces? The list ofquestions can continue and I will explore heresome of the conundrums that emerged from theresearch and from the debates atCitiesMethodologies | Bucharest.

We looked at public spaces from a multitude ofperspectives, from analyzing the sheer geometriesand configurations of space to exploringperceptions that users have on the design,maintenance, safety and uses of places, frompedestrian counts to semi-structured interviews,from modeling of accessibility patterns toobservation and photography. The endeavour wasessentially an interdisciplinary one, using atriangulation of methods emerging from urbandesign and architecture as well as the socialsciences. One participant at CitiesMethodologiesgave a presentation on interdisciplinarity using ametaphor — the interdisciplinary researchers aretravelers who leave their home port, go and workin the world with others, then return to their homebase, just as researchers return to their homediscipline after working in a interdisciplinary team.The point was, she argued, that researchersinvolved in interdisciplinary work remaincommitted to their own field, just as the travelerremains committed to his home. As an academicand a practicioner who is deeply committed tointerdisciplinarity, I disagreed. I introduced anothermetaphor, which I found more appropriate: thecosmopolitan. Being interdisciplinary, as beingcosmopolitan, is about discovering the world andthriving on the diversity of ideas, theories, andmethods. You do not return to your home port justsatisfied that you saw how the others work, but youtake what you see fit and valuable from all fields,you do not stay bounded by disciplinary limits, justas the cosmopolitan is not bounded by nationalboundaries or ‘home’.

The good, the bad, and the ugly:shaping a methodology for theevalua6on of public spaces in Romania

by Gruia Bădescu

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of the street network. The accessibility analysisacts at two different levels — the global and thelocal. Places with high local accessibility are bettercirculated and have the potential to attract manypassers-by, therefore commercial activities canthrive in such places. Other have a lesseraccessibility and are more suited as places ofrelaxation. We obtained a model of the global andlocal accessibility using specific Space Syntax GISsoftware. Yet this gives us information about thepotential, and not what happens. Measuringpedestrian flows told us how many people walkthere or not. If the pedestrian flows do not matchthe predicted accessibility model, then somethingis wrong. The explanation comes from observationat the site and from what people tell you. Then youknow what directions you want to take with thedesign — do you want to encourage flows ofpeople or a space for relaxation or a mix of both.

The focus on people when you talk about publicspace came as an important shift in the Romaniancontext. In Romania, where architectural educationencourages the concept that architects and plannersare the city makers par excellence, specialists havelittle consideration of the views of ‘others’, ‘non-specialists’ on the ways the cities should look. Forexample, NGOs that deal with city issues aregenerally treated by the architectural communitywith contempt, being regarded as ‘dilettantes’ whoshould not speak up against ‘the specialist’.Participatory planning remains in Romania astrange concept, dismissed by specialists as naïveand foreign. One of the reasons is connected withthe modernity-born fetish of ’the expert’. Anotherone is the general distrust that architects have inthe level of urban culture of Romania’s townsfolk.Romania’s urban dwellers, it is argued, are mostlyrural folk who have been transplanted to the cityby the socialist policies of industrialization. Thesepolicies changed the social fabric of Romaniancities, and in Transylvania, their ethnic one as well.As a result, their claim to urbanity is contested andtheir opinions on urban space are seen as dubious.People should be just the recipients of urbandesign, not stakeholders whose opinion matter.Even in our project team, when I advocated theimportance of ’soft’ methods such as semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, therewere initially some voices that belittled therelevance of such an exploit — “You want to talkabout what people think?! Look at their tastes:people are very fond of the giant dinosaur shrubsplaced by a certain Bucharest district mayor inmajor intersections”.

The calibration of people’s perceptions with theexpert’s voice became a central methodologicalconcern. The results were striking. Peoplegenerally revealed the same concerns as the expertwith regards to a place, with one big exception:they generally disapproved of hard landscapesdesigns replacing green and unconditionallyappreciated green public spaces. Here I needed myacademic hat back on, and I reminisced of myexploration of why green public space design isappreciated by Romanian townsfolk, which led mesome years ago from city design into ethnography.The answers, also then, were found by listeningwell to people.

Exhibition views:subREAL - Interviewing the cities, Füsün Turetken - Street elevations, Anthony Luvera - Prologue for Isha,and the projection room

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Inside the cavity of the block

Elena danced near Obor, a major intersection andsquare in Bucharest. She was surrounded by herfriends and cousins when I arrived. Between twoblocks of flats, in a pass-way, the children hadpositioned themselves in a half-circle. The hallwayamplified their voices and hand clapping. They hadcreated a semi-open, semi-protected stage.She danced and they sang. I started recording themwithout any introductory words. Only toward theend of the recording did we begin to speak.People passed. They struggled to avoid thechildren’s bodies. The passers-by avoided eyecontact. Elena in turn gracefully avoided thosestrangers with her moves. She never stoppeddancing. They sang, and the lyrics seemed to comefrom an adult world: a world of husbands andwives, of skirts being pulled down, of desperationand abuse. Like Elena, these children wereimmersed in that world.Powerful or defenceless? Adults or children? Thedistinction is porous and unstable.Staged or fly-on-the-wall recording? Cinémavérité? How is the camera influencing the event?How do we read stories into and project fictionsonto their dancing and singing event, in the liminalspace between childhood and adulthood, a spacefor the powerful and powerless?

Re-enactment

Can you transpose a game from A to B?I first witnessed the game in Ferentari. It was arainy day and I didn't have a camera with me. NextAugust I asked the children from a yard in CaleaGriviţei to play the same game with me. They did.They told me they are puradei [small Gypsy kids]Each child played the game differently, thoughwhen I saw it, the women came and talked first:“...at least he’s not hitting me that hard, and onlyonce in a while.”“...what!? ...hit me... he doesn't dare…”“...so I told him, if you are going to spend all themoney in the pub, how do you expect me to makefood, go to Vasile and Gica, ask them for food...”“...I wonder how I should handle this. He came with theother woman and we are all living in the same bed...”

And again I don't remember when and how thedesperate mothers and wives were gone and thekids came carrying a piece of fake wood, dirty andwet. The resemblance of a mortuary process, aburial captured my attention. Four of them werecarefully carrying the dark red almost woodenpiece.They stopped.One girl, Corina, prettier but leading the others in abullying manner (how much bully can you bewhen you are five or six?). Younger and shorterthen some boys, there she was definitely the leader.So the kids stopped, laid the piece on the pavementand formed a row.First, Corina laid down on it, closed her eyes: “...Idreamt a flower...” and she woke up. Next secondshe was on her feet pushed by the others.Next one laid down: “...I dreamt a lamp andspring...”“...I dreamt a rabbit and...”And they would push, and rush to be on thatdreaming red moist board.Corina was there to keep everything in order. Shewould cheat sometimes and dream two times in arow, and then just smile at them, the leader'sprivilege of abuse.Sometime after, the convoy of kids moved toanother spot on the pavement and started thedreaming game again, and again.And it was, as I said before, grey and muddy andwet, the smell of a wet dog came close to me...everything was almost black and white, so muchthat the colours had been washed by that cloudyday. And this is a true story.The mothers from Griviţa were sceptic of meplaying the game with their children. What will thechildren get in return for their playing and beingfilmed by me?! One of them had her hair beingdyed bright red. Another punctured the whiteplastic bag and pulled the hair through the holes." I already thought of bringing chocolate andjuice." They agreed for the children to play the‘dreaming game’ with me. We started.The game collapsed again for football, grapes anda super-8 camera.“I dreamt that I had a wife”“I dreamt that I was a football player”“Should I dream? But, why? Why?”

Elena the ladybug and re-enactment

by Irina Botea

Walking-writing, inside, in-between, amongst, in flux. Measuring, dividing infragments, intervals of lefts and rights. Game-walking. Dream-gaming. Talking.Recording that replaces the listening and the seeing.

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Ladybug, video, 2007 - exhibition view

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Thinking about the perception of cities in oureveryday lives, we often tend to neglect the factthat we experience them in a ’synesthetic’ manner.Cityscapes are also sensescapes, that is,multimodal sensory spaces that correspond witheach other in the representation of the city, yetrequire specific methods of investigation. Whilevisual and acoustic aspects of cities may berecorded, reproduced and designed, other sensesresist systematic approach and description.Between 2007 and 2010, an inter-disciplinaryresearch team from three universities based inVienna and a Viennese museum explored both thehaptic and the olfactory experience of cities, with afocus on public spaces. The general aim was todeconstruct the aesthetic metaphors of‘atmosphere’ and ‘flair’, by looking for their originin perception, and to analyse their sensory features,in particular those which might be specific for theAustrian capital. The project’s aim was also toidentify locations suitable for design interventions,sensitize decision-makers, practitioners in the fieldof architecture and design, as well as the generalpublic to the non-visual qualities of public space,and draw attention to everybody’s responsibilityfor shaping, deliberately or not, the olfactoryprofile of the city.

The methodology of the project included thechemical analysis of samples collected in differentplaces (identification of fragrant compoundsthrough gas chromatography and massspectrometry), the psycho-physiologicalinterpretation of the effects specific odours (e.g. ofvegetation) have on affective states, as well as anew botanical classification of scent-families, andthe recommendation of blossom-scented plantswhich are suitable for the climate of Vienna, etc.

My own research within the framework of thisproject focused on the description of the olfactoryexperience and the assessment of possibilities touse odours in a positive and aesthetic manner,countering modern urbanistic strategies to repressodours and create homogenous ‘blandscapes’. Inorder to reach these research targets, I usedquestionnaires and in-depth interviews withdifferent categories of citizens (i.e. people fromvarious age groups, subjects with visualdisabilities, people who were born in Vienna andresidents who had arrived from elsewhere, tourists,etc.), besides traditional philosophical methodssuch as textual analysis (applied to the history of

aesthetics), hermeneutics and first-person accountsof experiences (phenomenological descriptions). Ialso explored with my students the possibility ofraising our awareness for the odoriferousdimension of the urban environment by drawingtwo types of ‘smell maps’. Firstly, they wereinvited to produce mental maps which requiredeach of them to draw a map of Vienna and locateon it the smells which occurred to themspontaneously, using symbols or colours that wereexplained in a legend. Further parameters (such ashow to draw the map, which symbols to use, andhow to describe odours) were deliberately leftopen, in order to heuristically test the possibilitiesof visualising odours. Secondly, they were asked toproduce monitoring smell maps, which requiredthem to select an area to be explored at least once amonth. They downloaded maps from themunicipality website and recorded on themwhatever odours they encountered during theirwalks and trajectories, using freely chosen symbolsand explaining them in a legend. An alternativeway to do this was to keep a diary of the smells fora particular area, e.g. for an underground line,which were more difficult to map.

On the whole, the research emphasizes theinfluence of social practices and narrative identityon the sensory perception and the distinctions anddiscrepancies between the constructed ‘image ofthe city’ and its ‘atmospheres’. The difficulties inexploring this topic derive from theunderdeveloped verbal competence of most peoplein describing the olfactory experience, thetransitory character of odours, not to mention theparadoxical requirement that creative agents haveto confront, i.e. to design smellscapes whichescape regulation and evolve rather involuntarily inlong-term cycles, by means of repeated practicesand as a result of the interplay between on the onehand planned and the other contingent andunpredictable factors. Therefore the deliberateproduction of atmospheres should also includesociological and anthropological knowledge onlifestyles.

Concerning the suitability of methods, in-depthinterviews are preferable to questionnaires, yetthey imply a thorough search for real ‘experts’(who are not necessarily to be found among visualartists or architects). On a different level,interdisciplinary research of sensescapes still needsto develop methodological solutions in terms of

creating and developing a set of shared tools, but italso needs to find new ways of communicationbeyond the enshrined and specialized scientificjargons of each discipline. Last but not least,universities still lack experience in backing upresearchers in terms of managing interdisciplinaryco-operations between institutions.

During CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest, I invitedthe participants to draw mental smell maps forBucharest, which led to the following conclusions:many of the twenty-one ‘smell maps’ that weredrawn mention food, including international andlocal fast food and home cooking; there was also ahigh frequency of green odours of vegetation(blossoming trees, burned leaves, cut grass) andwater bodies (lakes) in the northern part of the city,as well as traffic odours, mainly exhaust fumes andgasoline. As expected, a specific (‘humid’) odouris ascribed to the underground, like in other bigcities. Also organic smells, either of humans or ofanimals, are conspicuously present in the mentalsmell maps that were drawn. However, incomparison to Vienna, dust seems to play a muchmore prominent role in Bucharest, due to variouscauses (old books, traffic, buildings sites, industrialareas, etc.), as well as a persistent, yet hard-to-describe odour of fish, maidan (vacant ground),sewage and smelly and stale water. The olfactoryprofile of Bucharest is made complete by thedampness of the ubiquitous old, abandonedbuildings. In general, the ‘localisation’ of odourslacks precision in terms of zones or city districts.The river Dâmboviţa is almost absent from themental image of Bucharest and the city lacks asymbolic centre. Stronger than in the case ofVienna is the awareness of social stratification,which can be identified in the spatial distributionof smells in the affluent neighbourhoods and theworking class districts. In the Cotroceni districtand the Dacia and Aviaţiei Boulevards it smells of‘money and power’, of linden trees and car airrefresher. Juxtaposed to this, suburbs like Rahovaand Ferentari, Crângaşi and Pantelimon smell ofhomeless people and of the rotting garbagedeposited on the streets or at the market. Bucharestis a city where ‘clean’, ‘corporatist’ smells mixwith the smells of ‘fish’ from the ‘chaotic andunpredictable’ suburbs. The exercise, even if donein a tentative fashion, showed strong evidence ofhow sensory experiences and urban smellscapesare linked with social practices and values, as wellas personal interests and biographies.

Sensory cartography:urban smellscapes

by Mădălina Diaconu

33

Smell maps as narratives: olfactory ‘biographies’, Bucharest, 2010

34

Although I am born and raised somewhere else, inthe cradle of a small Central European town,Bucharest is my city of choice. I spent there whatwe use to consider for some reason the best part ofour lives – my youth and the prime years of mymanhood. I would characterize the relation withBucharest in those years as mainly emotional, notin the nostalgia sense, but more in the sense of atwo-way subliminal traffic: Bucharest was doingsomething to me through the language ofarchitecture, through its urban malfunctions,through the light, and through its intricate socialstructures. I was doing something back to it,

through my daily routines, through my ownbreadwinning practices, and through my passive-aggressive art ambitions. Writing was in the 1970sand the 1980s very much the medium, so I guessthat a lot of the bad poetry written by me back thenwas indebted to Bucharest, to its melancholicdemise from the status of a big city to its self-destructive absurdism. Later on, in the 1990s, thisemotional interaction became more straight-forward with the help of my group activities withsubREAL, manifest in videos and installations, andlater in photographs.

Emo6onal architecture:the beginnings

by Călin Dan

Moving to Amsterdam in 1995 introduced anotherparadigm in my urban condition and from there onBucharest became more and more an object, whilestill remaining a state of mind. In 2002, I coinedthe concept of ‘emotional architecture’, decidingthat this will help me to identify the traumaunderlying my relation with the city back home.The emotional architecture is neither a constructionof brick and mortar, nor is it a state of mind, or afeeling; it is a dynamic flow of micro-events whichoccur constantly, and mostly unnoticed, betweenpeople and their habitat, between urbanites and theurban tissue, between citizens an their cities,

Sample city - production photograph, 2003

35

between architecture and those who live within andaround it. I would have never noticed probably thisflow of micro-events — with sometimes macro-consequences — if it would not have been for meliving in Bucharest in such interesting times as thelate 1970s and 1980s. Retrospectively, it looks likea standard case of emotional architecture at work.Soon after my arrival in the city that I wanted toconquer, Bucharest got badly shaken by adevastating earthquake which left many deaths andmany ruins behind. In the aftermath of thiscatastrophe that proved to me how fragilearchitecture is, the events preparing the advent ofCeauşescu’s Palace started to unfold rapidly.

Behind the closed doors of Power, decisions weremade to change the face of the city radically.Architects started to work frantically on proposalsfor a new political and administrative city centre.Bulldozers were simultaneously put at work,demolishing indiscriminately whole areas ofmonumental living quarters, landmark institutions,hospitals, markets, churches, monasteries, andschools. We, the students from the art historydepartment were sent around to register‘interesting’ old buildings in areas that were tocome next under the bulldozer. So, I started myprofessional life as a little messenger ofdemolition, a useless agent of memory. Frombehind their curtains, the local people werewatching us take notes with almost the same fearand hate as the loathed securitate agents when theyappeared in their streets accompanying the removaltrucks and the ominous demolition equipment.

Next to being an immoral (because passive)witness, I became a candidate to the status ofvictim. Houses in the areas designed for demolitionwere cheap, so I ended up as a young head offamily owning a small place in a charmingneighborhood right on the edge of the no man’sland where the gigantic Palace started to takeshape. Huge trucks were shaking the wood frameof our house, day and night. At the beginning, theywere taking away the rubble from the old housingareas. Later, they were bringing materials for thenew thing to come. The whole area sunk under athick cloud of dust that did not leave for years.Water and gas pipes were breaking constantlyunder the pressure of the traffic. Washing, cooking,sleeping, and warming up became random affairs.Getting into the city, a two tram-stops trippreviously, became an adventurous march throughthe mud. Meeting the neighbors became a burden,since people were overly suspicious or simplydepressed. Some older ones committed suicide,cutting short the unbearable tension of the fearedvisit from the removal team.

When it all stopped, Bucharest was another placealtogether. In 2002, I started to look at it as asubject for a film. Not as a film set – but a subject.So, every day, for months I traveled around in anold dusty taxi, stopping in areas that seemed tobring back something of the old city. There, Iwandered around, took notes, made photographs. Iwas no more the useless angel of demolition, butsomething of a city therapist. The taxi was mycouch, the city my patient. Or was I the patient?Was Bucharest the couch where I was putting mytrauma to rest? Was the taxi driver my therapist?Sometimes we were completely lost in an

environment that we both believed to be sofamiliar to us. Wandering through this medium-size city produced by a relative short chain ofhistorical events proved to be as exciting aswandering through an old metropolis with aspectacularly long past. A decade of relentlessdemolition and construction cut the old tissue tothe bone, ruptured the veins and arteries of the oldbody, made it into an unrecognizable mix of old,new, ruined, and half built, all alternating withlarge areas where a wild nature claimed what wastaken away from urbanity. Obviously – that wasthe subject of my film: the incredible abilityBucharest has to compress centuries of change,multiple layers of existence, various accidents, indramatic fractals of sculptural coherence. All I wasmissing was a mere detail – essential though: howcould I wrap all this into a coherent narrative?

The answer was in my childhood, in that smallCentral European town. Back there and then, myparents were reading to me from a book withRomanian folk tales whose hero was Păcală (thefool, the one who fools you while being fooled), acharacter comparable to the Shakespeareanbuffoon, or to the famous Thijl Uilenspiegel, theliberator of the Flanders. From all the stories withPăcală that entertained my early years, one stayedwith me for ever, obsessively. It goes like this:when their parents died, Păcală’s older brothersdecided to leave the village and try their lucksomewhere else. Their young brother wanted too.But he was stupid, embarrassing, and had no horse.So, one elder brother says: “We leave onhorseback, so why not meet later in the afternoon

in such and such place, at such and such inn? Wewill wait for you there. And hey, do not forget topull the door after you when you leave – there willbe no one to look after the house in our absence!”And so they went. A few pages later, the twobrothers are having some wine at the inn, under theporch, when they see far, far away a tiny silhouetteemerging on the horizon: a man with a huge doorattached to his back is marching at good pacetowards them. It is Păcală, pulling the door, as told,but then forever.

Why did this event generated by a semioticconfusion (between pulling and pulling) stay withme for so long? Was it because the burdened manis such an accurate icon for the condition of theurban migrant, for my condition? Was it because,more than an icon, the ‘man with the door’ is awalking sculpture, and a walking sculpture is bothfunny and scary (as the commander from DonGiovanni, for instance)? It is enough to say that inevery house that I inhabited during my wanderings,there was always an extra door left afterrenovation, and every time I was thinking aboutcarrying it through the respective city. Luckily, Idid not, and then the time to delegate thisperformance to an actor for my Bucharest filmcame. The film is Sample city, and it is a carefullyorchestrated following of the ‘man with the door’in what is actually an attempt to connect in a non-story the points of time-space fracturecharacteristic to the city. The wanderer is both anembodiment of the accidental history of Bucharestand a personification of what could be the humanversion of an emotional architecture event.

Sample city - video still, 2003

36

Margareta Kern and Anthony Luvera in conversa6on

A rocky boat: reflec6ons onresearch, process,and representa6on

AL: What a great recording device you've got here.

MK: It's really handy. I use it a lot in my workwhen I interview people.

AL: Do you have a collection of sound recordingsthat accompany Guests, the work presented atCitiesMethodologies | Bucharest?

MK: Yes. Although when I made the recordingsmy inclination was to use transcripts and this iswhat I told the women I interviewed. In thebeginning of my work on the project I was focusedon researching and hearing about their personalexperiences of migration as I found that thesestories were largely missing from official historiesand national archives. I was looking at ways to

record their stories and at the same time besensitive to their privacy.

AL: Do you feel that the translation that occurswhen you transcribe an interview offers some kindof protection for your subjects and you?

MK: I feel it can provide protection to the subjectsby offering anonymity. They can speak moreopenly and freely about their personal experiencebut it can also make them invisible. For me itprovided a certain degree of freedom to be able toedit the text without being tied down by theoriginal document.

AL: I can relate to some of what you are sayinghere. When conducting interviews with

participants for Residency I explained that I mightuse the sound recording or a transcript with theirAssisted self-portrait and photographs. I wanted tobe as clear as I could about my intentions for therecordings but at the time I didn’t know exactlyhow I would use the interviews or if I even would.It was very much a process of research andexchange based on trust and my curiosity abouttheir lives. I was keen to hear about theparticipants’ earliest experiences of photographyand to learn about how they felt about beingdescribed or represented as homeless.

I’m interested in how the processes oftranscription, editing, quotation or selection mightalter the original documents, the original terms ofthe invitation issued to the participant, or the

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Opposite page: Anthony Luvera - Assisted self-portraits series and Prologue to Isha,exhibition view, 2010

Margareta Kern - Guest, installation, exhibition view, 2010

interviewees’ intentions for agreeing to take part inthe work. In much the same way that we’reundertaking this process of sitting here, drinkingcoffee and recording our conversation, when itcomes to editing and transcribing the recording itwill be transformed and be manufactured intosomething else.

MK: I think a degree of editing in anyrepresentational process is inevitable and necessaryif we are to create the work we feel satisfied with.But the editing process happens beforetranscription. When you and I switched the voicerecorder on just a few moments ago somethingshifted. We know we are being recorded and in away we become more aware of editing ourselvesbefore we speak. When I stepped into the livingrooms of the migrant women there was a shiftbecause they didn’t know me. They would haveonly just met me and were probably thinking:“Who are you? What do you want?”

AL: Did you find that moment uncomfortable?

MK: Yes, absolutely.

AL: I love how in that kind of moment therecording device, whether it’s a camera or a pieceof sound recording equipment is very much, asSusan Sontag described, a kind of a passport. Forme it’s a moment full of discomfort and curiosity. Ihave ambivalent feelings about this experience butI find it compelling at the same time.

MK: This discomfort doesn’t have to be a negative

in a festival in London called This Is Not AGateway. I decided to focus on three participantscalled Ruben, Picwick and Gypsy, and to inviteRuben to work with me to install the work in theexhibition.

MK: How did it go? What was the exchangebetween you like? What was Ruben’s response?

AL: I brought a stack of material to the exhibitionspace; photographs, workbooks, Polaroids,drawings and Assisted self-portraits. We tested outdifferent selections and arrangements of thematerial, and ways of putting the work up. It wasvery much a process of us both trying things outand discussing what we liked and what didn’t like,and why. It was a process of push and pull fromboth sides; a negotiation focused on constructing astory using the material that I have collected. In theend Ruben said he was happy with how he wasrepresented and he came along to the private viewwith a number of his friends and seemed to takegreat pleasure in the night.

MK: I find your series Assisted self-portraits veryinteresting in that respect. You seem to beaddressing questions of self-other representationthrough the title and also through the image wherewe can see the subject operating the cable releasewith their own hands. To me this seems a keycomponent to the work — the fact that the camerais triggered by the person in the photograph. We asviewers are made aware that we’re looking atportraits of people who have experiencedhomelessness — an experience I associate with a

thing. Perhaps it’s also about being in a new space,an unknown space, where you're not feeling sure ofwhat is going to happen. Recently, I undertook aresidency in the Department of Social Science atthe University of Bath where I was talking to asociologist about the double-bind of being aninsider and an outsider that researchers often face,and how this creates a level of discomfort. He saidthat he saw this as a constructive discomfort —much along the lines of how you described it. Inthe context of art-making I see it as a form ofcritical discomfort. It sometimes feels exciting andsometimes it’s terrifying.

AL: One of the things I’m keen to do with thepeople I work with is to address something of thesource of this discomfort by asking questions like‘What do you think about being represented ordescribed in a certain kind of way?’ or ‘How wouldyou like to be represented?’ To make an Assistedself-portrait I met with each participant a numberof times in various locations chosen by them toteach the individual how to use a 5x4 field camerawith a tripod, handheld flashgun, Polaroid andQuickload film stock, and a cable shutter release.The final Assisted self-portrait was then editedwith the participant.

I’ve always been interested in seeing how I mightinvolve subjects or participants in the process ofcreating their representation. More recently I’vewanted to explore how I might extend thisconversation in relation to exhibiting the work andin possibly constituting the collection as a publicarchive. A short time ago I was invited to take part

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Workbook for Assisted self-portraits, featuring works in progress with and of Ruben Torosyan, Ruben Torosyan / Anthony Luvera

lot of uncertainty and vulnerability - and seeingthem using the cable release becomes an incrediblypotent symbol of their own agency over their livesand over the production of the image.

MK: When I started working on Guests I becamefascinated with how academic researchers workingin the social sciences negotiate the process ofresearch with tangible outcomes and the level offictionality that this process brings with it. I thinkevery text is very much constructed. I thinkeverything is constructed.

AL: Certainly. Even when research projects orprocesses are purportedly conducted in a way thatis seen as organic, first-hand or transparent, therewill always be a level of interference, manipulationor construction involved in some way. Prologue toIsha was the first time I picked up a video camerawith the intention to make something for publicdisplay. I wanted to record everything in myencounter with Isha with this equipment — theprocess of preparing for the interview as well asthe actual interview — so I switched the camera onpretty much as soon as I stepped through the door.Then in editing the footage what seemed to mosteffectively represent my interests in documentaryrepresentation was this setting up process; the pushand pull of the relationship between myself as thephotographer, Isha as the subject, and the recordingequipment as a conduit. It seemed right to dispensewith the documentary interview itself and justretain the prologue to the interview.

MK: So in a way you turned the camera on to themechanism of construction rather than theconstructed story.

MK: But do you think you can ever represent thoseexperiences?

AL: Well, I do think it’s possible to represent thepeople I work with and something of theirexperience of the world but I don’t think theserepresentations, whether they are created by theparticipant or me, are necessarily the truth.

One of the things I find interesting in your work isthe idea of manufacturing other people’s memoriesor experiences through participation. How youcreate a kind of workstation in which the audienceis invited to become active. I like how there is notjust one line of narrative that the viewer is invitedor prompted to follow but rather how there are anumber of different storylines to pursue andassemble. The audience is very much invited toactively construct his or her own route through thematerial. I’ve found it interesting to watch youdevelop this body of work over the course of anumber of years, unfolding different presentationstrategies for the same collection of visual andwritten material.

MK: Yes, you saw this work develop right from itsfirst showing in CitiesMethodologies London inMay 2009. Over the past year and a half I haveused different strategies of display in order to workthrough the research process and to understanddifferent types of materials, and vantage points Ican take. I’m glad to hear from you that a sense ofmanufacturing or constructing multiple narrativescomes across as I felt this was important to attemptto convey. In the end I wanted to bring into thepiece that experience of working through the

AL: Yes, although even this may be seen as thecreation of another story, something that wasedited, selected and narrated in various ways. Thishas been one of the threads I’ve been keen toexplore in much of my work. One of the keycomponents of Residency is images that documentsome of the process of working with participants.Selecting these images was uncomfortable in someways. For even though they might be seen asproviding a view into the process of constructingthe Assisted self-portraits, a certain process ofediting and selection also occurred in order toincorporate these images.

MK: It seems to me that you are alluding to layersof construction that presuppose there is anauthentic moment when the layers are peeled offand that all other moments are just constructions,whereas I am not so sure. On the other hand, I amreally wary of going to the other extreme, andsaying there is nothing there when we peel thelayers of construction. I think there is a tensionbetween different modes of construction, ordifferent realities, and their representation. Whatboth our practices are trying to engage in, Ibelieve, are social realities of others, our own andthe critical issues around the representation of thisengagement.

AL: I agree that the idea of a pure or authenticrepresentation of reality is flawed, but what I ammore interested in is seeking out possibilities forsharing the subjectivity presented in the work that Imake. To find ways to learn about other people'sexperiences and points of view, and to devise waysto represent these alongside my own view.

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Margareta Kern - Guest, detail, 2010

material and to give the viewer an active positionof a creator of meanings and narratives. I wanted tomake the process of creating stories by the viewermore conscious, which is why the work is set up asa cross between a research space, an archive and aworkstation.

AL: It seems to me that we both share a stronginterest in the research methodologies of the socialsciences. I have always been very curious aboutthe relationship photography has to these processesand strategies for acquiring and representingknowledge. Especially in relation to howphotographs might be used in archives. In a senseit is in archives that photographs are able tofunction in their most pure state as free-floatingbundles of information poised to be anchored bycontext. The slip and slide of different contexts bydifferent archive-users for the same image is potent.

MK: It’s what makes photographs so wonderful, sointeresting to work with.

AL: Especially in relation to how an individualmight be represented or perceived. How have thewomen themselves engaged in the process ofmanufacture in the installation of Guests?

MK: One of the women I met in Berlin, Zora,came to a collective reading of the transcriptsduring a group exhibition called ‘Exposures’ thatrecently took place at an ex-factory in Banja Luka,Bosnia-Herzegovina. There was an interestingmoment when after different people in theaudience took turn to read out sections frominterviews, Zora was asked why she decided to

their stories. I could have set up my mediumformat camera and taken photographs of thewomen in a similar way to what I have done in thepast, but I questioned what would these portraitstell us about the complex historical, social andpolitical context of their migrations to West Berlinfrom socialist Yugoslavia in the late 1960s? All thismeant that my engagement with the work wentbeyond the scope of the residency and became along-term project. Because I questioned thesemodes of representation and my position withinthem, it was a very uncertain process but more andmore I am seeing how this uncertainty is the rightplace from which to make my work.

AL: In a similar way I felt very uncertain aboutflying in to Belfast every Monday and comingback to London every Thursday through the periodof making Residency. I felt a double outsider. Iwasn’t homeless and I wasn’t from Belfast. And Icouldn’t help but have these thoughts in theforefront of my head every time I met withsomeone and asked them to share theirphotographs with me, to create an Assisted self-portrait or to take part in an audio interview.You’re right, it can be difficult to have confidencein uncertainty, in giving yourself over to processand following lines of inquiry.

MK: Yes. It’s like you’re on a really rocky boat andyou don’t know where it’s going to take you.

http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.comwww.luvera.com

leave Yugoslavia in the late 1960s. She spokeabout her experience of moving as a ‘guest worker’to Berlin and her reasons for staying on to livethere for nearly forty years. There was somethingreally moving about that moment, something sodirect and spontaneous.

Currently I’m thinking about ways in which I wantto engage the women further with the project,especially in the light of Zora’s spontaneouscontribution to that public event. I have remainedin contact with all of the women I interviewed, andI’ll be returning to Berlin in a couple of months tovisit them again. I’m considering whether to keepmy engagement with them private or to make itmore public, or whether I should incorporate themin the work more directly.

AL: Do you need to? Why do we need to representthe experiences we undertake as artists?

MK: This is a very interesting question. Perhapsit’s partly because if we don’t have ‘proof’that theengagement took place then our interactions withothers are absolved into life. I believe a lot dependson what position we take towards these types ofengagements and their representation.

My project started during a two-month residencyin Berlin, and I was expected to complete a pieceof work in that period for an exhibition. However,the more I delved into the subject of memory,labour and migration, the more I felt I needed totake time to understand its complexities. I had onlyjust made connections with the migrant women,and I wanted to take time getting to know them and

Assisted self-portrait of Maggie Irvine,Maggie Irvine / Anthony Luvera,from Residency, 2006 - 2008

42

Most people passing through city spaces are armedwith their mobiles, photo and film cameras, tabletsand laptops. They make innumerable shots, notes,connections, endlessly actualizing the invisiblemap of parallel and cross-cutting movements andpaths. If inhabitants make the city, then the city isalways on the move: shaping a reality ofcommunication with others and also – at least inWarsaw – with the past.

Mobile city

In a way one could call Warsaw a post-city.

It is a post-war city — still after 65 years —because of the extent of destruction caused byWorld War Two. It may sound paradoxical, butcontemporary Warsaw’s founding myth isgrounded on the ruins of the war. The city’sfoundation stone, if you like, was picked out of therubble. Especially from the Communist perspectivethe new (socialist) life was to be organized out of‘the ruins of the outgoing past’. Popularimagination, however, took its cue more fromromanticism, perceiving Warsaw as the woundedand bleeding heart of a country and nation that hadbeen at war. From this romanticized perspective,the official map of the rebuilt city was just a maskfor the real Warsaw: the mediatised city waspopulated by ghosts of patriots and soldiers,making Warsaw a city of burning offerings andsacrifices. The map of memory was made up ofmany local points marking places of real fights andkillings. It became a decentralized construct, butnevertheless one rich in meaning.

In the aftermath of World War Two, Warsaw – withpublic discourse controlled through Communistcensorship and with the centers of political powersituated here – struck onlookers as a homogenousspace organized around a phallic symbol of power:the Palace of Culture and Science. More thantwenty years after the end of Communism, theinfamous gift from the Soviet Union still remindsus that we live in a post-communist space.

Mobile people

Warsaw is also a post-1989 space. The Autumn of

the People (1989) opened the city and gave it backto its inhabitants, who were allowed to manifestnot only their will of freedom but also their beliefin the free market system, which was still strong atthe time. The streets, formerly empty and undersurveillance, now became open to cheap sellers, tocolours, and to informal economic activities and anew aesthetics. Vast (and very expensive) spaces inthe centre were appropriated by people, eventhough last year the city authorities regained it inthe name of constructing a ‘real’ cultural centrethere.

Warsaw does not have a strict centre and atransparent net of streets and crossroads. One canhardly find a bus or a tram not bearing the tag‘change of route’. In the twentieth century thestreets changed their names four, five, sometimesmore, times. Clubs and cafés appear and disappearin the quick rhythm of being in and out fashion.And even the most experienced taxi drivers are notable to predict where will be the worst traffic jamtoday. The city seems volatile – for newcomers itseems unfriendly and chaotic, but for others it isdynamic, inspiring and energetic. In the aftermathof the war it became a mono-ethnic and mono-cultural place, now it flourishes again withgrowing class, social, political and also ethnicdiversity (as a sideline, it would be worth lookingat the issue of its mono- or multi-lingual characterin terms of Bakhtin’s polyphony).

In 2002, the Polish artist Joanna Rajkowskaplanted an artificial palm tree at one of the mostimportant intersections of Warsaw. She entitled herproject Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue evokingthe long-forgotten connections between the street’sname and the city’s Jewish inhabitants: during thenineteenth century, the avenue used to be theinformal border of the Jewish part of the city.

The two landmarks – the Palace and the Palm Tree(the latter of which also hints at the associationbetween the word ‘palm’ and ‘craziness’ in thePolish language) – not so far removed from eachother demonstrate the changing nature of the citytorn between a dynamic nowadays and a heroic butdestructive past. They bring out the notions of the

Mobile Warsaw: media in the cityand the city as a medium

by Iwona Kurz

private and public spheres, of centres andperipheries, and also of heterotopias. They make usthink about the people who used to live here. Theydisturb every attempt at assuming a ready orseamless identity.

Mobile image

There is a famous anecdote about SigismundFreud: when he was asked about the structure ofthe psyche and its complexity, he answered thatour mental apparatus indeed resembles the map ofa city (using the example of Rome as he did), butalso a very special map. He wanted us to imaginethe city through time, as something that exists notonly in the present but through all itsmetamorphosis during history. The comparison hemade between the map of city and the psychic mapis interesting but it surely also complicates things:it causes problems for a researcher wishing todraw, along the lines of Michel de Certeau, all thepaths of tactics and strategies, constructing the cityand the life of its inhabitants.

Such a research requires taking into account thecomplicated network of dimensions that mediate intime and space and define the subject in the city:the past and the present, the daily routines andfestive calendar, the historical, modern, formal andinformal aspects of urban life, issues of race, class,gender, and places of living (the kind of housing,which part of a city), and even – in a sort of post-human note – the very notion of humanity (as thereare also cars and dogs, for example, living withus). Similarly, the representation of the cityincludes well-known images and hidden images,which need to be retrieved from the deeper layersof common fantasy. There are images citedeverywhere, circulating in books, the press, inpostcards (as popular views), and there are theembodied images — as certain symbols provokespecific behaviors, being closely connected withsocial and bodily practices. Unending anniversariesof historical events, especially The WarsawUprising of 1944, stir up marches, rolls of honour,but also games and more trivial forms ofcommemoration. Last year — since the Smolenskcatastrophe — we have seen similar bodily

“Everyone who walks the busy streets of a city takes imaginary snapshots”Charles Simic

43

manifestations associated with one of the mostimportant symbol of Polish tradition: the cross.Trying to think about cities one has a long list ofprominent predecessors, like, to name just a few,George Simmel, Friedrich Kittler, Richard Sennett,and of course Walter Benjamin whose ArcadesProject is a perfect example of a research lookingfor a form mirroring its very subject: dispersed,fragmented, dissociate and dissociating city space.

Contemporary interpretations have to be based onexisting texts of culture (literature, film, poetry,popular songs), but on bodily practices as well,also the ones that seem invisible or banal. Thisrequires a sort of continuous workshop of theeveryday — and for that purpose artistic input isneeded. One may think of media projects: blogs,collages, montage movies (the model for which isDziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera),camera interventions – and of course performancesresponding to everyday or festive practices.

A Walk Through the Ghetto (2009), a project of theIsraeli group Public Movement is a very goodexample of such a performance. The groupexplores the political and aesthetic possibilitiesresiding in a people acting together, operating inpublic spaces, performing public choreographies,repeating overt and covert rituals. In Warsaw theyproposed a walk — a reversal of the marchescelebrating the anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising.The former ghetto, which was turned into debris in1943, is nowadays a living district of Warsaw, butit is nevertheless an ambivalent space, producingdifferent meanings for different groups: for itsinhabitants, for Jews living in Poland, for Polesand for Israelis coming here to commemorate theirmurdered ancestors. In their performance, PublicMovement invited people living in Warsaw to walkthrough the space but they included into this banalpractice some disturbing, sometimes mockinggestures and behaviors: a Muslim prayer, thefamous gesture of Willy Brandt, president ofGermany, who fell to his knees at the monument ofHeroes of Ghetto (1970), the singing of theEsperanto anthem and of a Polish song referring tothe killing of workers in December 1970, all ofwhich was a playful game of free publicexpression. It was at once a march, amanifestation, a new and alter- or counter-memorial ceremony, a guided tour, and an urbanwalk along a specific route.

In a mobile and dynamic city nothing is obvious,even though we tend to forget that in our dailyroutines. Inhabitants (and researchers) — livingtheir lives in pace with the rhythms of the city —try to recognize this, mediating and mediatizing thecharacteristics of urban environments. They adapttheir sensorium to the urban environment — and inthe endless process they recreate it throughdifferent technical media. The mobile city cannotbe grasped in immobile form.

CitiesMethodologies | Bucharest: views from the opening and talks

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The context

Eastern Europe is no longer exotic, it is now morethan twenty years ago that the Soviet Unioncollapsed. In the last two decades contemporaryartists coming from this region produced theirworks and became known on the international artscene, making the realities and legacies ofcommunism more or less known to the Westernpublic.

However, totalitarianism and dissidence, theabsurd urban realities created by forcedmodernization (such as in Bucharest), and theresulting cultural backwardness are no longer newsto anyone. This mix of issues created a visuallanguage, which sold well for a while, then becameslightly outdated because of new art coming fromplaces like China.

Nevertheless, on the street, within the everydayrealities of post-communism so to speak, thisattitude of detachment is hard to be found. TheSoviet Union and its local dealership, theRomanian Communist Party, still make theirpresences felt in the most tangible of ways,requiring constant response and feedback from thepeople living in that environment.

Whether it is the buildings (seventy percent of thecity’s population lives in communist-built blocksof flats), mass culture (conveniently andexhaustively appropriated by advertising after ithad been created by propaganda), or even person-to-person interaction, it seems that The Golden Erawhich started over sixty years ago is still shapingthe present, or it is at least supporting it, as anygood old foundation would.

For instance, the House of the People built byNicolae Ceauşescu is still a dominant model for thevillas of nouveau-riche politicians andbusinessmen who made their appearance after theRevolution of 1989. The same mix of plasterpillars, Neo-Classicist kitsch and pure nonsensecan be seen in the centre of the city, but also in thegated communities on the northern limit of the city,even if a later taste for architectural minimalismadded some diversity to this brew.

A new modernization campaign under the bannerof the EU is paradoxically bringing to life some

old communist plans. Ceauşescu was expecting tostart building 25-storey apartment buildings in the1990s, and that is exactly what the City Hallstarted doing around the year 2000, lagging just alittle behind the communist five-year plan. It doesnot matter that Bucharest is not suitable for tallbuildings because of its humid, soft underground.Nor does it matter that historically the capital wasa garden city made up of low-rise privately-ownedhouses.

And speaking of those old houses standing aroundthe central area, they are still being demolishednowadays, just as they were before 1989. Today, itis not the communist Civic Centre which is tryingto take their place, but high-rise office buildings. Avery low interest in the preservation of the builtheritage of the city prevails within the ranks of thelocal administration and business alike.

To wrap it up, citizens are still looking towards oneanother in fear and anger, but now under thepressure of money, not politics. Nowadays it is notthe secret police or the burden of ideology, but thesheer force of the market that drives people awayfrom each other, back into the isolation of theirhome, of their car, of their restaurant table at themall.

The city as raw material

Why should one want to live here? This is aquestion that usually comes up after you get toknow Bucharest. The answer is simple, forbusinessmen at least: there is big money to bemade. The same applies for the administration ofthe city.

Even for artists, the city is an incredible resource.You just go out in the street and somethinghappens. A building is demolished, expensive carsdrive by in very poor surroundings, a bridge isbeing built, but it takes longer than expected anddouble the money. All injustice is there to beobserved, out in the open. On the aesthetic level,one can even delight oneself with visions ofinterwar Modernism contrasted with post-warfunctionalist doom embodied in the apartmentblocks.

Moreover, for someone keen on working on thestreets of Bucharest, there is such an abundance of

Bucharest: the city as raw materialand role model

by Mircea Nicolae

material that one starts to wonder where to start.The former communist factory awaits its visitors.Maybe it sits just around the corner. The same goesfor the old, redbrick mill from the 1900s. One hasto go there now, before it gets completely coveredwith graffiti, before people who recuperate metalfrom it will make it collapse completely.And there is always that friendly, smiling, laughinghole in the pavement. Lots of sand and graniteblocks to do things with. Only in Kiev andKishinev (Chişinău) did I find such fertileconfusion and disarray.

By comparison, Western European cities seem tooneat and a bit sterile to work with. In Bucharestyou always feel that you are shopping for free,whether it is materials, striking images or subjectsthat you are looking for. The city is very generouswith its misery, its paradoxes and its resources.They are all wasted on the compassionate and theindifferent onlookers alike.

The city as raw model

Looking at Romanian Modernism before and afterthe war one is sometimes tempted to ask if there isany connection to its European counterpart.

Sometimes Western models and modes areimplemented in such a manner, that they seemsubstantially transformed, either via a differentsocial structure (a sort of pre-modern, feudalaristocracy before the second war) or via a lack ofeconomic resources (which made communistapartment blocks have very few formal variationsbased on a very limited number of basic models).

The connection is undoubtedly there and thedifferences are not always that big. However, thefinal product is always the result of a translationprocess, which mutilates and adapts theinternational discourses and standards to localneeds. The main characteristic of this process is thepossibility of endless negotiation, with utterdisregard for any criteria that might otherwiseseem as fundamental or essential. Ecology, law andhistorical continuity become easy targets.

In Bucharest, the underlying assumption is thatnothing matters too much and that all is temporary– an interesting philosophy, if one is able to take itpositively. On the negative side, the irritating gaps

45

between thinking, saying and doing are alwaysthere to be observed, and can even be experiencedintimately. Mistakes in building, in saying andacting are so obvious, that one is always tempted toeither laugh or cry. Sometimes it makes sense totry to be intensely indifferent, but there is alwayssomething keeping you awake anyway. Beingcritical is part of being a citizen, although civicaction and coherent collective discourse is lacking.

You stumble in the street. A metal stump standsonly several centimetres above the asphalt. Absurdcontraptions are everywhere; prosthetic-likeobjects just the same. Broken chairs, brokenwindows, broken doors still work because theyhave just been repaired in a fast and cheap way.

Everything seems to come together, or come apart,under the rule of the same convulsive algorithm:the landscape changes every five minutes, what is

modern looks old, the shantytown is quitecontemporary in its appearance, precarious thingsseem durable and what is durable is alwaystemporary. In the end, certainty fails to certifyanything.

The ancient, the modern and the hyper-modern aremixed and together they either look too old, tooscrappy, or too boring altogether. However, theynever seem to look uninteresting, revealing insome way or another the realities or ideas of thepeople who either built them or use them.

The city is in fact so transparent, deviant andcurious in its workings that it calls for anenormous, engorging need for analysis andobservation, as well as for an infinite series ofpractical solutions, whether they are cultural orpragmatic in nature.

Mircea Nicolae - Glass globes, production stage, 2010

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Bucharest today is a city confronted with rampantpolitical resignation: the seven town halls (both thesix sector or municipal ones and the mainmetropolitan one) are hotbeds of corruption, andcivil society is too weak to form a credibleresistance against the construction anddevelopment mafia since the population remains,for the most part, passive. In this rather grimcontext the future of public spaces cannot be verybright. Usually neglected by the municipalities,small public spaces (squares, street alignments,parks, etc) are nevertheless once in a whilesubjected to huge and useless investments such asfor exotic plants or kitsch ‘amenities’. This kind of‘care’ for public spaces is reinforced particularlyduring the regular electoral campaigns, in order toimpress the awed population.

Meanwhile, important public spaces, such as parks,lake shores, sport clubs and swimming pools aredismantled in order to make place for malls orother real estate developments. This happens in themost discreet way, far from the public eye. Inaddition, the public spaces surrounding thecommunist apartment blocks are more or lessabandoned by the municipality, and if not they aremutilated by weird and expensive ornamentalobjects. Where public administration is generallyignoring these small (but extensive) spaces,neighbourhood dwellers are using them in a varietyof ways. Green surfaces are transformed intoparking lots, garages are placed on the vacant and‘free’ land, and little shops are erected.

Those spaces which have fared better are usuallycared for by neighbourhood dwellers. Somepeople, those that live on the ground floors of theformer socialist apartment blocks, create their ownprivate gardens in front of their windows, on whatis in actual fact public space, thus increasing theinhabitable surface. Others are creating shared do-it-yourself spaces, improvised and used by groupsof neighbours, indicative of a DIY mentality thathas the potential to transform temporary spaces(Haydn and Temel 2006). Yet, in spite of the lackof coherent policies at the municipal level, theAdministration of Public Spaces sees it fit tosometimes destroy these informal and improvised

arrangements based on small personal andcollective investments in the name of ‘civic’ valuesor aesthetical or ethical arguments.

In this context it is appropriate to talk about a fightfor public space and public spatial resources. Thecity authorities, in tandem with the big developers,are imagining public space as a repository of allsorts of empty plots, ready to be filled with hugestructures, according to a sort of logic ofexploitation that defines these public spaces asunused capital (Haydn and Temel, 2006). Groundfloor dwellers, on the other hand, are imagining thevery same plots as private spaces, as tentacles oftheir apartments, while others have appropriatedthem to park their car, fighting with the otherneighbors over whether a parking lot can be‘owned’ and if so by whom. Women are dreamingabout informal playgrounds for their kids, men aredreaming about grills, beers and backgammon.Meanwhile different professionals are imaginingperfect mono-functional solutions: architects aredreaming about new houses to be constructed,town planners are imagining new streets or otherkind of infrastructural solutions, landscapearchitects keep talking about urban ecology and themaintenance of green (non-ornamental) areas.

In this conflicting ambience we have tried, togetherwith our students, to imagine how to create acongruous environment in the Drumul Taberei andMilitari areas. Those are two of the largestassemblies of communist apartment blocks inBucharest, with more than half million peopleliving there today. The usual approach to such aproject would be to start with a birds-eye-viewstrategic plan. This is the ‘professional’ attitude,consistent with the way in which thoseneighborhoods were initially conceived anyway(what the Danish architect and urban designer JanGehl has called bird-shit urbanism, where thearchitects’ droppings are deposited on the landunderneath). This top-down perspective does notpay attention to the little gestures nor the littlespots of conflict or harmony. It is an abstract imageof a future city that nobody can imagine in everydetail. Nevertheless, as Mies van der Rohe taughtus, “God is in the details”, so we have tried to

approach a large scale project from a bottom-upperspective, starting from the details in search of amore general vision. Thus, in the framework of anurban landscape planning project the studentsanalyzed the vernacular spaces around the blocks,as well as the general open space framework of thewhole district, aiming to understand both privatenecessities in the proximate spaces of dwelling butalso the urban general layout of green and public spaces.

The project, which students develop during thefifth semester of their studies in landscape design,has two aspects. The first is a more anthropologicalone, focusing on actual space uses, and onindividual and community behavior in andapproaches to public space. Interviews andobservations made in situ reveal a series ofappropriations of public space, generating bothconflict and cooperation between groups ofdwellers or between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. The’insider’ status is not necessarily granted on thebasis of one living in the neighborhood, but ratheron forms of participation in joint activities such asgardening, spending time in the self-builtpavilions, sharing the play-ground or other publicspaces. Thus, along the lines of Norbert Elias’sconcepts of ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’ (Elias,1987), it is possible to discern a detached‘outsiders’ approach and a parallel vernacularconstruction of public spaces and of thecommunity, generated by common practices andinvolvement in DIY projects for a shared benefit.In the light of the fact that the decisions that matterare usually made on a higher political level, thiskind of vernacular interventions are normallytemporary intrusions in a site that seek to makealternatives evident (Haydn and Temel 2006).Where the ‘insiders’ are explaining their actions asa reaction to the lack of care shown by the localadministration and as a solution for their needs, the‘outsiders’ (authorities, developers, urbandesigners, or even the uninvolved dwellers) areoften claiming the illegality of the vernacularoccupations, an attitude that is more often than notalso motivated by their own private projects.

The second aspect of what students are doing is todesign an urban plan, focusing on green

Looking down on or looking up toBucharest’s public spacesMilitari and Drumul Taberei between vernacular design andurban policies

by Ioana Tudora and Mihai Culescu

47

infrastructure and public spaces networks, whichaims to propose a coherent and comprehensivegreen system, integrating and connectingperipheral natural areas, urban parks, andwastelands recovered trough landscape design. Atthe same time, based on the first part of the study,the aim is to integrate the vernacular perspectivesand practices of the ‘insiders’ and to proposefurther detailed projects that can be matched withand incorporated into the ‘outsiders’ perspectives.Thus the strategic plan is not generated by a‘general’ vision, but is rather the result of a processof negotiation between the existing realities anddaily practices of actual space use and the more‘abstract’ necessities of the entire city, like publichealth, accessibility, social integration, urbanecology and sustainable development.

Unlike most urban design projects our aim is not tosearch for aesthetical solutions, i.e. design for thesake of creating generic beauty, but to try todevelop an ethical approach, based on functional,social and ecological requirements which canrespond to both the general strategic demands andsmall communities’ needs and identities.

References

Elias, Norbert. 1987. Involvement and detachment.Contributions to the sociology of knowledge.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Ferguson, Francesca and Urban Drift (eds.). 2006.Talking Cities. The Micropolitics of urban space /Die Mikropolitik des urbane Raums. Basel:Birkhäuser.Haydn, Florian and Robert Temel (eds.). 2006.Temporary urban spaces. Concepts for the use ofcity spaces. Basel: Birkhäuser.Lörzing, Han. 2000. Design of urban spaces.Bringing a piece of landscape into the city.ECLAS Conference Proceedings, Eindhoven.Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin(ed.). 2007. Urban pioneers. Berlin:Stadtentwicklung durch Zwischennutzung /Temporary use and urban development in Berlin.Berlin: Jovis.

Chart created by students: Simona Boboceanu, Andreea David, Raluca Dincă, Cristina Stănescu

ISBN 978-606-8296-22-7

Biographies:

Gruia Bădescu is a urban design consultant at SpaceSyntax Romania. In 2009 he finished his Masters Thesiswith the >tle Public space in the post-socialist city: thecase of Bucharest, at the London School of Economicsand Poli>cal Science (LSE). He received his BA ingeography and European studies in 2007 at MiddleburyCollege, Vermont, USA (thesis with the >tleArchitecture, iden.ty and poli.cs in the reconstruc.onof German ci.es a�er the Second World War).

Irina Botea is a visual ar>st, whose works combinecinema verite and direct cinema with reenactmentstrategies, audi>ons and rehearsals. She lives and worksin Bucharest and Chicago, and she is currently teachingat The School of The Art Ins>tute of Chicago. Solo andgroup shows include: New Museum (NY), Na>onalGallery Jeu de Paume (Paris), Reina Sofia Na>onalMuseum (Madrid), Gwangju Biennale 2010, U -TurnQuadrienale (Copenhagen), 51st Venice Bienale, PragueBienale, Kunst-Werken, (Berlin), Casa Encendida(Madrid), Salzburger Kunstverein, (Austria), KunsthalleWinterthur, Argos Center for Art and Media (Brussels),Artefact fes>val (Leuven), Ro?erdam Film Fes>val,HMKV Halle (Dortmund), Casino de Luxembourg,Kuns=orum, (Viena), Foksal Gallery (Warsaw, Poland),MNAC (Na>onal Museum of Contemporary Art(Bucharest), Museum of Contemporary Art in Szczecin(Poland), Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowki Castle(Warsaw).

Călin Dan. With a background in art history and theory,Călin combines in his work research and free inven>on,developing projects that bring together social concernswith aspects of entertainment and pop culture. Călinreceived interna>onal recogni>on with his videos andphotographs from the series Emo.onal architecture,where he explores the delicate balance betweenpeople and their habitat. His work has been showcasedin interna>onal film fes>vals (Osnabrück, Oberhausen,Ro?erdam, La Rochelle), art biennales (Venice, SaoPaolo, Sydney), art museums and galleries in Europe,the USA and Australia. His videos are distributedcurrently by Video Data Bank, Chicago.

Mădălina Diaconu is Dozen>n at the Ins>tute ofPhilosophy of the University of Vienna. Between 2007and 2010 she was project manager of the researchprogram ’Hap>c and Olfactory Design: Resources forVienna’s Crea>ve Industries’. Relevant publica>onsinclude the monographs Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken.Eine Ästhe.k der anästhesierten Sinne (Würzburg2005), Bukarest – Wien. Eine kulturhistorische Touris.kan Europas Rändern (with Lukas Marcel Vosicky, Berlin2007), and Sinnesraum Stadt. Eine mul.sensorischeAnthropologie (forthcoming). She co-edited thevolumes Sensorisches Labor Wien. Urbane Hap.k- undGeruchsforschung (with Gerhard Buchbauer, James G.Skone, Karl-Georg Bernhardt and Elisabeth Menasse-Wiesbauer; Berlin, London 2011), and Senses and theCity. An Interdisciplinary Approach to UrbanSensescapes (with Eva Heuberger, Ruth Mateus-Berr,and Lukas Marcel Vosicky, Berlin, London 2011).

Ger Duijzings is Reader in the Anthropology of EasternEurope at the School of Slavonic and East EuropeanStudies in London, Director of the Centre for South-EastEuropean Studies and Co-Director of the UrbanLaboratory at University College London (UCL). Hepublished widely on the conflicts in the formerYugoslavia, and is author of monographs on Kosovo(2000) and Srebrenica (2002), and co-editor of a

Na>onal Portrait Gallery (London), Belfast ExposedPhotography, Australian Centre for Photography,Fotofreo and Les Rencontres D’Arles Photographie. Hiswri>ng appears regularly in periodicals and peer-reviewed journals including Source, Photographies andHot Shoe Interna>onal. Luvera lectures on under-graduate and post-graduate degree courses in thephotography, visual art and social sciences facul>es fora number of ins>tu>ons, including University of theArts (London), Central Saint Mar>ns College of Art andDesign (London), London College of Communica>on,Sotheby’s Ins>tute of Art, University for the Crea>veArts Farnham and University College Falmouth. He alsofacilitates workshops and gives lectures for the publiceduca>on programmes of the Na>onal Portrait Gallery,the Photographers’ Gallery London and variouscommunity photography projects across the UK.www.luvera.com

Vera Marin has a PhD in Urban Studies (UAUIM,Bucharest and IUL – Ins>tute for Urbanism Lyon) and isthe president and coordinator of ATU – the Associa>onfor Urban Transi>on. She has a Masters degree inProject Management (SNSPA). She teaches at UAUIM –Urbanism and Architecture Ins>tute Ion Mincu and is afounding member of OAR – the Order of ArchitectsRomania. She has coordinated or par>cipated in a largenumber or research projects, such as the researchconsor>um ACUM – Art, Urban Communi.es,Mobiliza.on (2005-2008, coordinated by UAUIM) and REAL.

Mircea Nicolae was born 1980 in Romania. He studiedat the University of Bucharest, where he earned adegree in European Cultural Studies from theDepartment of Literature, with a final thesis on theHouse of the People. Then, he enrolled for a Masters inthe Anthropology of Space at the Ion Mincu Ins>tutefor Architecture, Bucharest. Nicolae currently lives andworks in Bucharest. He has developed a dis>nc>vebody of work researching the economical and socio-poli>cal structure of Bucharest through anonymousinterven>ons in public space. He reflects on the socialconsequences of consump>on, urban legisla>on andarchitectural produc>on. His latest work calledRomanian Kiosk Company won the Special Prize at the2010 edi>on of the Future Genera>on Art Prize. Thejury consisted of Daniel Birnbaum, Okwui Enwezor,Yuko Hasegawa, Ivo Mesquita, Eckhard Schneider,Robert Storr and Ai Wei Wei.

Ioana Tudora teaches at the Landscape ArchitectureDepartment of the Agronomical Sciences University inBucharest. With a Master degree in Urban Form andUrban Planning (UAUIM, Bucharest) and a PhD inSociology (SNSPA, Bucharest), her main fields ofresearch are: landscape architecture and planning,urban open spaces, urban sociology and anthropology.In 2011 she was invited professor for Project Studio andMaster disserta>on co-tutor at TU Wien, Department ofUrbanism and Landscape Architecture. Since 2010Ioana Tudora is project manager for RPR – The Bureaufor Contemporary Studies. She takes part in a largenumber of research projects, such as the researchconsor>um ACUM – Art, Urban Communi.es,Mobiliza.on (2005-2008, coordinated by UAUIM) orLE:NOTRE Green Infrastructures e-learning course.

Mihai Culescu is an associated landscape architect forRPR - The Bureau for Contemporary Studies. Since 2007he is a teaching assistant at the Landscape ArchitectureDepartment of the Agronomical Sciences University inBucharest.

volume on post-war Bosnia (2007). He also worked as aresearcher and expert witness for the Interna>onalCriminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. Since twoyears, he is carrying out research on urbantransforma>ons, social inequality and the nouveauxriches in Bucharest. He has also been engaging incollabora>ons with visual ar>sts, resul>ng, amongstother things, in the experimental film Lebensraum /Living Space, with Rastko Novaković (2009). Hedeveloped the idea for Ci>esMethodologies and co-organised its first edi>on at UCL in London (2009).

Simona Dumitriu teaches at the Photo-VideoDepartment of the Na>onal University of Arts inBucharest and is a member of the visual researchproject Ro_Archive. As a New Europe College fellow,she does research on post-1945 Romanian art. She hasa PhD in visual arts, with a thesis on the archive asinstrument and concept in contemporary art.

Aurora Király is a visual ar>st, curator and culturalmanager. Since October 2001 she is the director ofGaleria Nouă Associa>on – a NGO which supports andpromotes contemporary art. Between October 2001 -March 2008 she curated an important number ofexhibi>ons and events at the Galeria Nouă exhibi>onspace. Star>ng from 2007 she coordinates WitnessesXXI - Revisi.ng the Past (project in progress) – acollec>on of video interviews with Romanian ar>sts, artcri>cs and curators from different genera>ons. In 2006she was the editor of the bilingual book Photography incontemporary art. Trends in Romania a�er 1989published by Galeria Nouă at Unarte Publishing House,Bucharest. In 2007 she joined the research team of theNa>onal University of Arts Bucharest and she started toteach at the Photography and Time-Based Media ArtDepartment.

Margareta Kern is a London based ar>st, originally fromBosnia-Herzegovina, whose prac>ce explores thepoten>al of image-making as a cri>cal engagementwith the social and poli>cal sphere. A graduate ofGoldsmiths College (BA Fine Art, 1998), and UniversityCollege London (MA Visual and Material Culture/SouthEast European Studies, 2010) her work has been shownextensively including Impressions Gallery (Bradford),Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary ArtBudapest, Ins>tute of Contemporary InterdisciplinaryArts Bath, HDLU Gallery (Zagreb), Kurt-Kurt Gallery(Berlin), and Margaret Harvey Gallery (University ofHerefordshire). www.margaretakern.com

Iwona Kurz, PhD – head of the Department of Film andVisual Culture at the Ins>tute of Polish Culture atUniversity of Warsaw. Main fields of interest are:gender studies, history of nineteenth and twen>ethcentury Polish culture from a visual studies perspec>ve,anthropology of the body and everyday life,anthropology of visual culture. Author of Twarze wtłumie [Faces in the Crowd. Views of the heroes ofcollec.ve imagina.on in Polish culture 1955-1969;Bolesław Michałek Award for the best film studies bookin 2005; Nike (Literary Award): short-listed for the bestbook in 2005], co-author of Obyczaje polskie. Wiek XXw krótkich hasłach [Polish Everyday Culture. 20thCentury in Short Entries, 2008], editor of Film i historia.Antologia [Film and History. Anthology, 2008],Antropologia ciała i płci. Wybór tekstów i zagadnienia[Anthropology of Body and Gender, 2008].

Anthony Luvera is an Australian ar>st, writer andeducator based in London. His photographic work hasbeen exhibited widely, including in the Bri>sh Museum,London Underground’s Art on the Underground,