Between - Kilobase
Authors: Alex Axinte, Cristi Borcan
Year: 2011
The project Between is studioBASAR’s contribution to Kilobase Bucharest A-H. This publication is a special project realized on the occasion of the exhibition “Image to be projected until it vanishes“, curated by Mihnea Mircan at Museion - Museum of modern and contemporary art Bozen/Bolzano.
KILOBASE BUCHAREST A-H
“Bucharest reminds me of big American cities during the Great Depression” is the latest comparison of Bucharest we heard a few days ago from a young curator studying art and architecture in New York and first time visitor of Romania. It is definitely more refreshing and thought-provoking than the nostalgic label of “little Paris” or the more recent - surely overrated in terms of cultural production - hype about Bucharest as the new Berlin or the new Eastern European frontier of cool. Initiated as an artist-run nomadic gallery, KILOBASE BUCHAREST aims to vigorously explore and push the limits and extents of the art market and the artist’s influence on it both through the content of its projects, exhibitions and its modus operandi. Our decision to start the activity of KILOBASE BUCHAREST with a publication series thought as an experimental alphabet book (or source book) on Bucharest with key words for each of the 26 letters in the English alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z works as a homage to a city that inspired the appearance of KILOBASE. The aim for this publication - the first in a series of three - is to collect fragments of possible identities of Bucharest and to reveal a part of its intricate universe via a chaotic laboratory of thoughts, knowledge, subjective attitudes, pictures and drawings. Eight artists and collectives are dealing with the letters from A to H of this alphabet book collapsing truly eclectic contributions that resist any attempt to give a comprehensive overview.
(Ioana Nemes, Dragos Olea)
Between
Part One
Rows of apartment blocks
I don’t recall how old I was exactly; I might have been in kindergarten already. Now, when remembering, I know it must have been Bucharest but back then I only knew I was supposed to accompany my grandparents visiting some relatives. It didn’t matter where, as long as we were travelling by car! It was a yellow Dacia 1300 that filled my grandfather with pride: he would keep it in the garage, and drive it to the countryside and to the seaside. I don’t remember the road to Bucharest, only a long period of time in which, on the back window, beyond the plush dog that jerkily wobbled its head in the rhythm of the drive and which we weren’t allowed to touch, rows upon rows of apartment blocks would stretch ahead along both sides of the street. We were on one of the big boulevards. Facades with windows covered in whitish curtains, with balconies closed in various fashions, with laundry hanging out to dry, with people that were watching passers-by, or talking among them across different floors, would glide in the slow motion of the car. Our relatives also lived in one of the apartments in the long blocks where, when we got there, I sat in the balcony to watch cars and passers-by on the great boulevard.
Training Day
I was having private lessons in order to prepare for the entrance exam at the university in Bucharest. I had been in Bucharest before, but always went to certain places, usually downtown, and always with someone. Now I was alone, with my drawing wooden tools in the backpack. Three or four times a week, I got down from theminibus in front of Casa Scinteii and took bus 335 to Delfinului Square, where I would continue walking on a wide boulevard bordered by rows of ten floor blocks of flats. In the morning, along the boulevard I would walk past shops open at the groundfloor of the apartment blocks in the former living rooms and bedrooms of the owners that sometimes still had the ceiling light in the middle of the ceiling, that you could enter going up the stairs built on the sidewalk, past hair saloons functioning in the hallways of apartment blocks and past the kiosks aligned on the green areas. In the evening, after eight hours of still life drawing or the construction of isometric orthogonal axonometry without a quarter, in front of the shops there were groups of people seated in a row on chairs they brought from home watching passers-by or playing backgammon, and I would take the bus and then the minibus and when it was dark outside I was back in my hometown.
Wired
In the very beginning, Bucharest was a trolleybus. Seated on our bags, we would wait for ours. Scores of trolleybuses and buses would come and we could see them from afar, before they would take the turn near the park. We looked for the metallic plate number, and if we missed it because of too many heads chocking, there was another chance to spot it sideways, in a dimly lit oval, right next to the middle door. Here it comes, I told you that must be ours, I recognized the way it moved, more like crawling really. Trolley 93 was in fact a big bus with bellows in the middle, the kind we had at home, only it was connected to some wires on top and the purr of the engine was different. The trolley advanced slowly, it was a long way and I was looking out on the window. Whenever I got a seat above a wheel, I would laugh out loud when I was thrown off the seat as it hit a hole in the street or the brakes. Before reaching our station, the trolley would almost empty, and there everybody would get down. Past the station and the market, I would go up the tenth floor of C7bis block, where I ate aubergine salad. The kitchen had a window onto a narrow interior courtyard where echoed voices and cutlery thrown on the table and from time to time the noise of the elevator’s mechanism that resembled the one made by the trolley engine.
The game
After Bucharest became a trolley and a block of flats, I began walking to my cousin’s place. We left in the morning and came back in the evening. They lived one bus station further, in D10 block. Their block only had four floors and there was a communicating stairway in the front and back. Here we would play in his room with small metallic cars or table football and some times outdoors, when he would borrow me his bike for a short ride around the block. My cousin was a professional football player back then and he once let me play with him and the guys from the neighborhood. I was in his team, he told me to run at all times. The field was on the street between his block and the next one, with one gate onto the heating station and the other one made of rocks. I didn’t know the other boys and tried hard to give my best, I was quite nervous and there was my granny watching from the side as well. They were talking among them and calling each other on their names. They called me Carol’s cousin. On our way back to C7bis I discussed with my granny the important moments in the game. She told me I did well and all the time she held in her hand a wallet and a fabric bag neatly folded. In the meantime Bucharest grew and became a big town, with Piedonne movies and crowded swimming places and jeans stores, with other trolleys and many, many other blocks and just one old house from the center, where I entered following a girl. After that Bucharest became study material for school and I became an architect.
Alex and Cristi were born in Ploiesti, in 1979. Ploiesti is a city situated 60 km North of Bucharest. Since 1998, Alex and Cristi live and work in Bucharest. In the last 12 years Cristi lived in 10 places in Bucharest and since 2003 he has a Bucharest ID. In the last 12 years Alex lived in 7 places in Bucharest and his ID address is still the one in Ploiesti city. In 2006 Alex and Cristi founded studioBASAR.
Part Two
The Sparrow’s Tree
The Letter Bench
The Totem
The Generator
