First edition of Bucharest Arts and Public Space Festival

By Emea Riga
4Culture Association, in partnership with WASP Studios, launches the first edition of Bucharest Arts and Public Space Festival, which will take place from 15th till 19th of December at WASP Working Art Space and Production and Galateca Gallery in Bucharest.
„The development of the social dynamics, as a result of people’s mobility and the new urban contemporary communities, brings also a lack of knowledge about what our cities can offer, their history and potential for every citizen or tourist. During the first edition of Bucharest Arts and Public Space Festival, artists from Romania, Germany, USA and Belgium are invited to bring a contemporary view on urban space, starting with the cultural heritage – monuments, statues, parks, public gardens, through an artistic approach, including performances, installations and workshops”, declares Andreea Capitanescu, 4Culture’s artistic director.
The program will start on the 15th and 16th of December at 7 pm, with Duet-C Eliade, a participative performance in which the Belgian artist Roel Heremans creates choreographic mental experiences. He uses location-specific, architectural patterns to create temporary spaces in which sound stimulates thought processes and changes visual perception. Heremans examines how a system of collective thinking relates to the specific place in which it is located. For the Bucharest Arts and Public Space festival, Roel delved into the late philosophical works of Mircea Eliade and developed an interactive imagining choreography that deals with the writer’s idea of cyclical time.
The city is highlighted through the sonorous presence of the body-object, a critical observer of the events and passing time, within the Body and architecture in the urban space video-sound installation, signed by Maria Balabas and Andreea Capitanescu.
Voices from the archive of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation, published by Casa Radio is a performative sound installation, in which Maria Balabas searched a narrative thread through texts and vocal timbres, for a common element – a phrase, a verse or a memory. The sound performance was born from all those meetings and voices put together: Ana Blandiana, Eugen Ionesco, Nina Cassian, George Cosbuc, George Bacovia, Alexandru Phillipide, Henriete Yvonne Stahl, Ion Caraion, Maria Banus, Mariana Marin, Serban Foarta, Mihail Sadoveanu etc. In a moment when we don’t know whom to consider a moral and artistic landmark, this incursion in the sonorous archive of the national radio functions as well as a remembering process, identity reconstruction and inspiration.
On Monday, 17th of December, at Galateca Gallery, Michael Douglas Kollectiv & Dana Caspersen invite participants to join a new kind of public interaction to examine the question: How do we, as individuals, impact the level of violence in the world?. During The Exchange performance, participants move through a terrain of action that is brought to life by their motion and is shaped by their experience and beliefs. The performance utilizes simple physical actions, such as walking, gesturing, and physical imagination as tools of exchange for engaging in this collective examination. The Romanian artist Sergiu Matis, who lives and performs in Berlin, will present on the 18th of December, at WASP Working Art Space and Production, the solo performance Nocturne for broken vocal cords. The performance is part of the artist’s Noise Nocturnes, a series of performances and texts that revisit the romantic genre in its fascination for the night and darkness, imitating nature of recycled texts spoken at high speed or shouted, constitute the dense score of the nocturne. Choreographic tools applied to movement and voice make navigation possible through the overload of glitches and fragmented moves and sounds, by supporting chaos with coherence.
In Listening to Sculptures, the photo-video installation that will be presented on the 19th of December, starting 7:30 p.m., at WASP – Working Art Space and Production, Calin Dan and Iosif Király (subREAL) are acting like two reporters armed with microphones, headsets and a recording camera, who interrogate figurative public forum monuments. The performative dimension of the entire Interviewing the Cities project is exaggerated through this series, which poses in a critical light both the public forum sculpture and the mass-media standing in the contemporary culture. SubREAL will highlight at WASP the process of starting the project, presenting different work steps alongside with pieces that became iconic through years, but also some making off images, documenting photography of the photographic process.
The project 2565 main [Relative Position], produced by 4Culture and WASP Studios, represents a collaboration between the visual artist Ciprian Ciuclea and the composer Catalin Cretu, designed as a multimedial space with 3 combined video projections and the sound generated by a mathematical algorithm. The installation will be presented at WASP, on Wednesday, the 19th of December, starting 7:30 p.m.
A series of multimedia installations produced by 4Culture Association and WASP Studios in 2018 will be also presented during the festival, while a contemporary design workshop will be coordinated by Simana Filat, a designer recently awarded by the Union of Fine Artists in Romania. The workshop is dedicated to the high-school students and will take place in the artist’s studio.