1. mircea nicolae - ten demolished houses
The opening exhibition took place on August 9, 2008, at 21.00, within a home gallery set up in a typical block of flats living room.
Ten demolished houses questioned the destruction of private houses built at the end of the XIXth century and in the first part of the XXth century in the central area of Bucharest, Romania. Currently, these buildings are being demolished and replaced with blocks of flats or business headquarters, thus evicting an important segment of the built memory of the city.
Urban development as well as economy are feeding this large scale process. However, demolitions in the central area of the city are connected to a certain attitude of indifference towards the historical continuity of the urban landscape, coming both from the administration and real estate investors. This special relationship with the built memory will eventually impoverish the city from a cultural point of view, causing present developments to eradicate historical landscapes.
The exhibition was made up of ten objects, whose production took three months to complete. Each contained a brick fragment from a different demolished house in Bucharest. One of the objects (seen above) contained a brick fragment from a demolished house in Iancu de Hunedoara 48 Street that was shaped as a small house using an electrical power tool. It was also made up of poxiline (plastic), poxipol, black and white paint, glitter, water, and a glass globe found in a deserted glass factory. The snow globe was fully functional, being able to display the falling snow effect.
After the opening, some of the brick fragments within the glass globes deteriorated because of the surrounding water. The glass globes contained a self-destructive process which was intentionally integrated into the finished object.
Five glass globes were given to the people attending the opening through a tombola or a raffle. Because of the limited space, access was invitation based only. The other five globes were distributed on the internet through the incepem group, which is a online forum for Romanian contemporary art. The winners were extracted from a hat on the night of the opening using the same tombola procedure.
Participation was only available for people from Bucharest, as galeria 29, although a space for the distribution of contemporary art, was not able to pay for transportation and mail tax. The objects were distributed personally, by myself, to the winners.
