bogdan achimescu / themes / place

place

1. The Abandonment of Objects

User saperlipopette666 wrote on a forum: "Humanity abandons its material objects as if it was tossing the toys of it infancy".
It may be that changes are too rapid for us to continue developing a material culture. A statue's bronze cools down in a few hours after it's casting, but the authority it celebrates might be gone by then.

Thus the urban object turns into an almost indecipherable archeological artifact before it's even installed in its place.
In a spiral ideological movement, modernity is out, religious zealotry is in, back in, out again, street names have to be re-written to ensure no scoundrel has his own street in the city X but who remembers why he was a scoundrel? The residents of Czernowitz are not aware their streets had a tram. No wonder: an entirely new set of people inhabiting the city, after state borders washed back and forth over it, half a dozen times in one century, grinding and re-setting culture. From the point of view of a traditionally perceived cultural permanence, the fact that the buildings still stand is almost irrelevant.

Large historical processes, like the post-communist geopolitical transformation, are nothing new.
However, these processes combine with:
•the cumulated effect of globally-disseminated, overlapping ideologies,
•the stroboscopically changing social and ethnic tissue,
•the numerous new ways of peer-to-peer interaction.
These factors have attained critical mass a while ago and now lead to the gradual abandonment of material urbanism and its traditional grid.
The city, with its buildings, dogs and statues, vehicles and improvised contraptions, is still physically present but rendered gradually unnoticeable by a crowd that increasingly interacts using de-localized tools. When people do physically meet, they prefer rubberstamped non-places like malls or franchises.

If the nervous system of this new society would have the time to produce its own cities, how would these cities look like? Would a reading of their meaning be possible; would it even be desirable; would anyone care? Would it make sense to erect Claes Oldemburg - style urban objects, or should one stick to Stalinist monuments, since they are becoming just as empty of ideology? Why is it that we think a clothespin is empty of ideology?

Achimescu's series of drawings uglyplaces introduces the modular axonometry of an endless field of objects, contemporary relics of contemporaneity. In a private interview, Achimescu evokes numerous real of fictional sources of this architectural catalog: the designs of obsolete military installations, hard - to - identify relics of failed urbanism in Romania, genetically engineered plants and the places where they are grown, the statue of a tank, etc.
He also claims that the name of the series (uglyplaces) has nothing to do with a value judgment and produces a biographical anecdote to substantiate this allegedly neutral outlook. Whether we do or do not believe in his work's lack of bias, we cannot miss its underlying paradox: if Achimescu does indeed find this utopia to be ugly, he most certainly works its expansion.

2. Fluid Cities

The most fluid yet the most permanent of all materials used to build cities is the human crowd in itself.
Within the contemporary whirlpool, cultural fluids are in fact more permanent than cultural solids. In a counter-intuitive twist of human particle physics, crystalline solids have less presence than the endless variations of a polymorphic humanity. The transient stone architecture is a mere sediment of a permanent flow.

The Third Cityis an accumulation of ambidextrous drawings, building on pseudo-endless variations of a pair of human faces. Produced in a series of roughly 4000 pieces, these drawings are installed in clusters, clouds, or cascades, floated on strings, filling the spatial geometry of the gallery like a vessel.
KukesKukes (the name of a town in Albania where a Kosovar refugee camp briefly existed in 1999) is an installation comprised of 4000 faces, drawn on the flimsy support offered by brown paper coffee filters.
The care invested in personally drawing each face stands in contrast with the humility of the material and its utilitarian nature.
This tension follows an axis that starts with the celebration of each individual and ends with mass social engineering. "I want to do for Jews what Morandi did for jars"- said R.B. Kitaj about his thorough portraits. "To make an omelet you have to break eggs" - said Molotov as he was signing his pact with Ribbentrop. In the unsophisticated recipe of the latter, the eggs were human beings and the omelet was the project of his new world order.

3. Nomadic Habitat

The Cities series, while functioning as a political and historical metaphor, is also a transposition of Achimescu's nomadic lifestyle into his working habits. A more direct reference to environment transformation and urban implants is offered by his installation N.O.R.W.I.C.H.

Vibrating in the wind, precariously installed against the futuristic backdrop of Norman Foster's Sainsburry Center, these translucent domes reveal the diorama-style habitats of fictional characters.

In another iteration of the same theme, transparent, diaphane canopies carry ellaborate drawings of scenes from the Adriatic Sea.
The installation creates an improbable spatial distortion, overlaping this virtuality with the real scenery of a Taiwan garden.