Roadside Stage
Team: Alex Axinte, Tudor Elian, Maria Daria Oancea, Daniela Pălimariu, Andrei Pripasu, Cristian Stoian.
Location: the intersection between Iv. Zaikin and Sf. Andrei streets, Chişinău
Period: 15-27 August 2014
https://chisineu.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/spatii-recuperate-3/
The action developed as a public space intervention workshop coordinated by studioBASAR and took place within the project “Chişinău Civic Center - a park for community” organized by Oberliht Association.
Zaikin and Sf. Andrei streets are bounding a triangular shaped territory, surrounded by housing, that keeps just the formal appearance and spatial typology of a park, but which in reality has diminished greatly that quality. The garbage bins occupies the heart of the park and stand as its dominant function, together with the car shortcut that splits the park in two.
In 2014 we aimed to consolidate the results gained within the workshop Recovered Places 2013, by crystallizing a single but relevant intervention, both at functional and spatial level. We wished to obtain a support structure that can back up the artistic performance but also that could provoke the functional center of the park by introducing a catalyst public space specific to a park, as an alternative to the current use.
In the first Saturday we got together at a picnic in the park. The white cloth where tomatoes, cucumber, grapes, melons or cookies thread along crossed the roadway together with the kids, the bikes and the cars. It was the first step for the negotiation of the alley and the children where the first to answer our invitation, followed by few curious but shy parents and some youngsters from nearby.
We’ve started the working week with a scale 1:1 model of the structure and the following days we dig the foundations, aligned the beams on which the pallets rested and at the end we clad it all with word board treated with lacquer or paint. We obtained a solid structure, about 8X4m, that embeds a tree trunk and advance diagonally until the middle of the roadway, across the garbage bins. With a thickness of 50cm, the platform has lowered steps on each side and elevates on the last bay to function as seating place or table. The result was a multifunctional structure that leaves open the use possibilities beyond its main function: a stage and something more.
Building the stage and the time spent in the park from morning till dawn where perhaps for the participants to the workshop the main gain and the open construction site enabled the contact with the neighbors. During the construction process, the kids accompanied us all the time and the neighbors contributed to the realization of the structure: stored our tools, provided us with electricity, with access to the toilet, with food, even giving us a helping hand, while in their whereabouts exchanging daily few words with the team.
The group and the stage had inserted into the place, provoking a 2 week accumulation of an expectancy state that peaked with the inauguration day, when the concert of a band run by a local took people out of their homes and gathered them in the middle of the park around the stage and the picnic, the games and the projection of a animation movie that ended the evening had transformed the place in a normal park: without traffic, animated by people of all ages, open and inclusive. Several days later, the second part of the inauguration of the park, again by a picnic, a dance show and projections was a moment the inhabitants wish from now on repeated more often.
Thus, for the organizers and for the inhabitants, the park’s recovering doesn’t seem a mission impossible anymore. The stage and the events it hosted had the force of a re-inauguration of the park itself, by opening a temporary community center in open-air that still remains to be validated by future actions and people’s involvement.
