The sparrows tree
Listen to what you see
In an urban setting filled with wire and cables hanging from posts bent over welded fences, imprecisely stuck among broken tiles and cracked pavement, along coloured panels, iron sheets and trestles connected by pavement chains, tens of phone cabins sort of melt until getting transparent. Abandoned carcases, increasingly turned futile, outdated by the technological progress, an urban species on the stage of extinction, phone cabins are all bundled into a lumber of small things currently called the public space of Bucharest.
We have set in the University Square a structure similar to a red mantle covering an invisible phone cabin and turning it into a temporary stop: a platform for a place to stay, listen to and hear the city. Once entering the pavilion geometrically defined from the urban crowd, one could listen to the public phone, still functional, the history of a name: the Sparrows Tree, referring years ago to the area around the well at the university.
We state thus the recovering and documenting the minor memory equally part of a place full of monuments and major emotional landmarks, as well promoting a new attitude to the urban space design.
The installation was part of the Ars Telefonica project, curators Alina Serban, Anca Benera, Arnold Esteban, Catalin Rulea, taking place between 23 and 27 September 2008 at the Visual Introspection Centre, Bucharest, RO (www.pplus4.ro)
Installation authors – studioBASAR (architects Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan), panel graphic for the Sparrows Tree – Anca Benera and Arnold Esteban (pplus4), the story for the Sparrows Tree – Dorel Rusti, Mariana Celac, Florin Mihailescu
