ICR Gallery

turns into
InstantGarden, a pop-up space that generates the idea of a
hidden garden like Savorgnan Park located in the neighborhood of Santa Fosca square, on the most dynamic tourist axis of Venice.
The secret garden, calm and peaceful in complete contrast to the nearby tourist traffic, was created in the 17th century and is accessed through very narrow entrances hidden from the view of passers-by. The surprise of discovering this garden park inspired the Instant Garden project.
On the other hand, Instant Garden draws on a recent history of the transformation of public green space in Romania. Green space in cities in central and south-eastern Europe is a real problem.
In-depth studies have shown that after 1989, the year of great political and economic changes, the index of green space per inhabitant in the cities of these countries fell sharply as a result of the retrocession to former owners of land containing urban or peri-urban green spaces and the construction of new buildings on these green areas.
At the European level, the officially recommended green space index is 26 square meters per haystack and the World Health Organization recommends a level of 50 square meters per haystack. In this context, in Romania, Bucharest has a ratio of 9 square meters/car of hay, according to some recent statistical recalibrations. In the last 30 years after 1989, Bucharest has lost about 1,700 ha of public green space.
The garden is both a metaphor and a symbol of socialization and communion. In the 4th century BC, Epicurus established the Epicurean school in the very garden of his home near the city of Athens. The garden became the site and symbol of Epicurean philosophy as well as of peri-urban community agricultural practices.
Two thousand years from now, in the year 2020, the concept of the contemporary garden has been subjected to a difficult, pandemic examination.

A new utopian-experimental garden model will emerge in the midst of epidemic gridlock, for purely psychological reasons. As the pandemic, all over the world, has forced people not to leave their apartments, the bottleneck has produced the need to rethink and adapt domestic and private space, to find a 'green corner'. Balconies and terraces, even whole rooms, have been transformed into pseudo personal gardens, some even producing vegetables. The practice of urban agriculture has been accelerated. Many years ago, a Romanian, Andrei Feraru, in Paris, had a very bold project: the Apartment Feeding. In a playful way, this project prefigured the social-domestic behaviors of people in apartments: in the midst of a global pandemic, access to food, access to public space and communication was massively restricted. There was speculation, such as advice on how to grow and keep plants in major crises.
That's why the Instant Garden tells a second story, that of the GeneticSeed Bank and the agrarian economy. Romania is still an agricultural powerhouse: the Saligny silos in the port of Constanta, among the first prefabricated concrete buildings in Europe, are a symbol of this. They are also a technological, inventive and agricultural symbol. Over the years, the Suceava Genetic Seed Bank has been an international landmark in agricultural research on seeds and agricultural crops.
The Instant Garden invites to a global architectural experiment:

How do we become prosumers?

GENETIC TREASURE CONSERVED AT THE SUCEAVA GENE BANK

The most important ally in the realization of the European Green Pact, which involves, among other things, the transition to a sustainable agricultural system and a non-traditional food model, is biodiversity for food and agriculture. In Romania, its plant segment is conserved, according to international standards, at the Suceava Gene Bank.
A remarkable diversity, covering all agronomic categories of plants relevant for national agriculture, from cereals to legumes, industrial, medicinal, aromatic and ornamental plants, is in the Bank's current collection.
This natural capital, preserved under controlled conditions of temperature and relative humidity, consists of more than 25,000 samples, stored at -200 C and +40 C, of which distinct varieties are 19,037 genotypes belonging to 597 taxa, from 368 species, 221 genera and 39. botanical families.
Emblematic of the biocultural heritage preserved in the Genebank and numerically predominant is the collection of landraces, the so-called peasant seeds, most of which have disappeared from cultivation with the shift to an intensive farming system and the widespread introduction of modern varieties and hybrids.
Plant genetic resources are the biological basis of food security and an essential element in the transition to a sustainable agriculture, able to face the challenges of climate change, environmental change, technological change and market demands. They are the strategic component for agricultural research and the main ally of breeders in their creative efforts to develop new plant varieties adapted to environmental conditions, highly productive and with superior nutritional qualities.
Plant genetic resources encompass all cultivated plant species and their wild relatives, including genetic diversity resulting from the dynamic interplay between natural and artificial selection, practiced empirically or scientifically over thousands of years of agricultural development. These resources consist of sexually or vegetatively propagated genetic material of actual or potential value belonging to the following categories of plants: wild species, weeds, traditional cultivars/local populations, breeding/research material (lines, synthetic populations, clonal selections, genetic stocks, mutants), and improved varieties (conventionally and modern varieties).
Historical facts
Born out of the need to maintain a fund of biological material with known and easily accessible properties for breeding activities, the Suceava Gene Bank, whose founder is dr. eng. Dr. Mihai Cristea, became a national, independent and unique entity in April 1990, prior to that date, operating for two years as the Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory within the Suceava Agricultural Research Station. It was under the direct authority of the Ministry of Agriculture. until the end of 2009 when it merged with the Central Laboratory for Seed and Planting Material Quality in Bucharest, where it operated until March 2018, when, following its organization, it became a public research institution under the Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences "Gheorghe Ionescu Sisești".
Mandate and activities
The main mission of the Genebank is to maintain a secure repository of genetic material from all sexually propagated plants of significant importance in Romanian agriculture.
In order to fulfill its role, the Bank carries out specific activities, such as collecting, studying, regenerating/multiplying the genetic material introduced in the collections, preserving it by placing it in the 3 types of collections: seeds, "in vitro" cultures and living plants in the experimental field, and storing the relevant information for each access in databases specially designed for this purpose.
The Bank also provides biological material for reintroduction into culture in cases of genetic erosion caused by natural or human-induced factors, thus minimizing biodiversity loss.
Through the exploration - collection activities of traditional varieties still cultivated in certain areas of the country, the Gene Bank contributes to reducing or eliminating the effects of genetic erosion, thus preserving the key component of biodiversity relevant to food and agriculture, known as plant genetic resources. The Gene Bank acts as the national focal point for the implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and represents Romania in the international network in the field.