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Collective Author. Private Histories of Public Architecture

Călin DAN, Celia GHYKA, interviu: Simina STAN

COLLECTIVE AUTHOR.
PRIVATE HISTORIES OF PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE
Between the controversial act of building, youth nostalgia and urban memory

Authors: Călin Dan, Celia Ghyka
Image director: Daniel Constantinescu
Team: Iris Opriș (communication and social media), Răzvan Tun (web design),
Sorina Vasilescu (illustrations, publication), Andrei Suhan (production)

The exhibition The Collective Author opened last fall in A5 Studio Space, 5 Piața Amzei Street, is based on a project investigating the oral history of the construction of the People's House, initiated by visual artist Călin Dan in collaboration with Celia Ghyka, as part of his long-term artistic research on Emotional Architecture.

The approach is primarily of a documentary nature, the exhibition being only a first public landmark of a long-term project that aims to create an interdisciplinary framework for the realization of a database with direct testimonies of the participants in the design and construction of the People's House, resulting from interviews focused on the personal experiences of the interviewees.

Who is the Collective Author? From the Great Pyramids of Egypt to the People's House, great architectural ensembles are collective works, based on the joint efforts of many more or less well-known "authors", each of whom contributed to the building according to their training and skills.
The project aimed to identify all the "authors" involved in the design and construction of the People's House and to invite them to share their memories and experiences in front of the camera. The documentary material resulting from these interviews, with references to the urban, social and architectural significance of the House, has a restorative purpose, the project having the ambition to restore the symbolic ownership of this building to the many people who worked on the site on Spirii Hill in the 1980s, not to let the political connotations overshadow the common effort and professionalism of these people.
After all, whether controversial or, on the contrary, appreciated, the People's House is still part of our lives today, and cannot be ignored either in terms of its dimensions or its political significance. Therefore, knowing the dramatic context of the building's construction, as well as the perspectives of its 'collective author', is a necessary exercise in urban memory.

It is in this context that we present the following interview. (M.M.)

House of the Republic... House of the People... Parliament Palace... Parliament
"Paradoxically, the city's most visible building is also its most invisible"
Interview with Călin Dan and Celia Ghyka by Simina Stan
Simina Stan: What is the role of the "People's House" in the contemporary city?
Celia Ghyka / Călin Dan: Of course, from an urban planning and architectural perspective we are talking about a huge object whose physical implantation was brutal, resulting in the dislocation of an important area of Bucharest and its transformation into a non-functional area. From a symbolic point of view, the People's House can be read in multiple keys: as a reminder of a trauma, as an ideological object, but also as an iconic image of the post-1990s period, an image frequently and voluptuously associated with Bucharest, and indeed, with the whole country.
At the material level of the city, the edifice is a functional void, an abstract place that periodically vitalizes itself for certain categories of consumers, either by housing wedding fairs, hydraulic pumps, exotic destinations, etc., or as a backdrop for various concerts and fairs.
S.S.: Why is there now a need for the project "Collective Author. Private histories of public architecture"?
C.G./C.D.: This project has existed, with various titles, in various analog and electronic mappings (of the artist Călin Dan) since around 2000. It was obvious that oral history, collecting individual memoirs had to be the main tools to approach and understand the People's House.
From the phase of tatonărilor until the actual beginning of the project there was that moment of "epiphany", when we realized that everything about this building, the building itself, are not the product of the will of a single person or power group, but the result of an effort both systematic and chaotic of a large section of the working population of Romania.
This is why the Collective Author is necessary, because we have reached that point in the evolution of the trauma related to the People's House where we can look together at what was done, analyze how things unfolded, outside of press or party documents, picking up the countless real stories on the ground.
On the other hand, some of these testimonies are beginning to disappear (some of the direct participants in the project are either no longer with us or have left the country) and are increasingly difficult to uncover. We would like to make sure that this moment is not lost, it seems to us to be important for understanding our recent history.
S.S.: Like a surgical act, the "Collective Author" project emphasizes the change of status. What are the landmarks? What does the exhibition visitor see? What does the "author" see? What does the curator see? What does the architect see? What does the artist see?
C.G./C.D.: The points of reference are the personal histories of the various people interviewed. The visitor sees, but above all listens to these interviews, in a context that brings the People's House closer to and at the same time separates it from the immediacy of perception.
The author sees nothing - he/she is reconstructed through a halo of words. The architect is generally angry with the past, but also a little nostalgic. The artist, the stonemason, the stonemason, the sander, the company doctor, the plasterer see their own youth spent on the building site. They console themselves with an active youth, during which hard work was put in and good money was earned, even if without consequences for the present. The curator tries to hold all the threads of the project in hand and give it an accessible, witty and, why not, humorous form.
S.S.: Which dimension of this project is emphasized? Human, historical, functional, architectural?
C.G./C.D.: Without a doubt, the human dimension of the project is predominant. The Collective's author is a mass - by no means amorphous - of people with histories, ambitions and personal problems. The historical dimension flows from this, history is made through people. There is not yet a clear definition of Collective Author, but we are working on it. Architecture is the unseen but all-powerful dimension of the project.
The ambition of the project is to expose architecture and its making, while avoiding the usual images of the finished construction. One of the stakes of the project is also the unfinished dimension of any architectural project, in the sense that its production does not end with the completion of the site: through use, possession, maintenance, but also rememoration; architecture, and especially in this case large-scale public architecture, continues to be produced incessantly.
S.S.: The "authors" determine the blurring of boundaries and the outcome of this project. So far, what has been possible, and what has not, of what you set out to accomplish?
C.G./C.D.: So far, we have managed to present to the public and specialists a pilot of this project, which is intended to be much broader. We have shown that people have worked on the project and have interesting things to say about themselves and about the building, its conception and realization. We have shown that there is a group of people who are interested in bringing attention to a 'somewhat forgotten' and 'somewhat' silent subject: the People's House. Paradoxically, the city's most visible building is also its most invisible - we would like to make its real stories visible and heard, not the myths and legends that haunt it.
S.S.: Did the "Collective Author" project aim to educate and sensitize, while at the same time offering a critical look at society?
C.G./C.D.: The project aims to collect testimonies. It has no pedagogical ambitions, nor does it issue moralizing opinions. We are waiting for a moment of accumulation from which certain conclusions can be drawn or history can simply be rewritten. But until the documentary corpus is sufficiently consistent, any speculation may seem unreliable. We did not set out to interpret before investigating.
The author of Colectiv is also carried along by history in motion.
A project of the Association for Urban Transition (ATU) (http://atu.org.ro)
Cultural project co-funded by the National Cultural Fund Administration
Details: www.facebook.com/autorulcolectiv/
Did you work or know someone who worked at the People's House? The Colectiv author is interested in your story and ready to listen. Let's write history together! Reach us at contact@autorulcolectiv.net or call 0736 556 013.