URBAN ART (2008)
Urban Art concept was based on the display of ephemeral, non-intrusive art intervention in the public space, communicating with the architecture of the city and attempting to transform it. It is the reference to the context that turns the work of art into a fluid membrane that envelops the building as a second skin. Between 2007 and 2009, Urban Art reactivated four key buildings of Bucharest: Palace of Parliament, Bucharest University, Architecture University and Colțea Hospital, each one of them charged historically in different ways. The most challenging was working on the Parliament Palace, not only in terms of its physical dimensions, but because of the communist symbolism. Working with more than sixty international artists and different art genres, we tried restoring public space its traditional role as the set up for the rituals of communication. We treated the architectural dimension of the city as a unified living structure, rather than individual static objects. The constructed environment is a project of collective design and therefore carries cumulative memory and accepts new input, being continuously transformed by daily human impact, by using and reusing, ending up incorporating very different, sometimes conflictual logical structures. (Marilena Oprescu Singer, curator)