Decaying Landscape

One of the most interesting and unexpected sites in Bucharest is the Văcărești Delta

Ion Puican, 06.11.2021, 12:40

The place
is an anthropic lake in the Văcărești neighbourhood, in the south-west of the
city. Spreading nearly 200 hectares, the lake was originally designed as part
of the complex engineering works on the river crossing Bucharest, Dâmbovița, and
was supposed to be part of the flooding defence system designed in the
communist years.

Its construction
required the demolition of one of Bucharest’s most beautiful religious
buildings, the Văcărești Monastery. The original project went unfinished after
the fall of the communist regime in Romania in 1989. In the years that
followed, the area was reclaimed by nature, and turned into a genuine delta-with
diverse vegetation and animals ranging from birds to fish to foxes, rabbits,
otters and so on. The Văcărești Delta grew into a stable ecosystem, and a habitat
for protected species. In 2015, the Văcărești Delta was declared a nature park
(Văcărești Nature Park)-a protected nature area and the first urban nature park
in Romania.

This October
the Văcărești Nature Park played host to a project entitled Decaying Landscape,
designed to bring people, nature and art closer together. We talked to the
project manager and curator Gabriela Mateescu about the organisation of the
event and the ideas on which it was based:

Gabriela
Mateescu: Placed in the urban nature scenery of the Văcărești Delta, this
project called Decaying landscape is a cross-disciplinary artistic
cooperation and at the same time a research effort resulting in performances, land
art works and site-specific installations. The event was organised by Nucleus
0000 Association and co-financed by the Bucharest City Hall via ARCUB, as part
of a programme entitled Bucharest: open city 2021. Bucharest is a city
suffocated by concrete. But among the heavy slabs outlining the city, nature
claims its place. On the site of the long abandoned, communist-era artificial
lake of Văcărești, an ecosystem has formed over the past 30 years, with no
human intervention whatsoever, right at the heart of the country’s largest
urban settlement. Grown into a true delta, an autonomous ecosystem in the
middle of Bucharest, the Văcărești Park is the right place to contemplate the state
of nature and the effects of human intervention.

Condensing an
entire universe into a micro-space, artists from various fields have deconstructed
post- and trans-humanist theories in the language of contemporary art. Gabriela
Mateescu told us more about the participants in the Decaying Landscape
project:

Gabriela
Mateescu: On the 24th October, people were invited to walk
around and discover the works of female artists Roberta Curcă, Mălina Ionescu,
Gabriela Mateescu, Andreea Medar, Kiki Mihuță, Marina Oprea. Lost in the
landscape were also the students of a performance workshop called microRave -
attempts at becoming a landscape, coordinated by Andreea David, Maria
Baroncea, on music written by Chlorys. A week before the event, we invited
youth from Bucharest interested in art to come to the Delta for a dance
performance workshop, taking advantage of the last sunny days of autumn. To help
the visitors in their search, we put together a map with the GPS coordinates of
the works, and mounted them at the Delta entrances and among the works. We also
had 3 guided tours where the public walked the arts route together with the
artists and the organisers. The installations were collected the next day, to
keep the area unaltered.

The artistic
concept involved a hybrid space-brought to life by both the daily urban excitement
and by the noises of the delta in the heart of the city. This area was
temporarily revived in order to plead its own cause-a cultural function, to be
precise-as the most appropriate place for contemplation, a means to reconnect
with nature, a possible meditation on the harmful effects of improper human
intervention on nature. Gabriela Mateescu also gave us some details on the public
and their responses to the project in the Văcărești Delta:

Gabriela Mateescu:
Apart from the regular public of artistic events, we had people simply going
out for a walk on a sunny day, who thus had an opportunity to see random works
of art, which they were amazed with and interested in. And their curiosity was met
by the explanations given by the artists and the project team. (tr. A.M. Popescu)