Text: Dorin Ștefan Adam, Elena Viziteu
Photo: Laurian Ghinițoiu
Most tourists and Alba Iulia locals taking a stroll through the magnificent Vauban citadel are happy with the main public spaces – plazas and streets. Few of them realise that the place is much richer and much more complex – a sophisticated and labyrinthine system of spaces, with wide arched halls within the walls, passages leading to places that are undisclosed on a first walk.
“Meetings”, our intervention during the “Alba Iulia Music and Film Festival” (September 2017) took place not on top of, but inside the Elisabeta ravelin, turned into an event space during the festival. We also regarded the action as a pilot-project of bringing back to public awareness and reactivating the heritage buildings by creating spaced dedicated to local communities and to cultural projects.
The St. Elisabeta ravelin lies at the crossroads between the urban fabric and the defence walls: a threshold between the intra-mural and the extra-mural. It makes the passage between walls of different heights and perception levels of varied horizons.
The installation is at the same time a response to the place, by its cultural-architectural decryption, and to the social function during the festival and afterwards. It suggests a place for debates, and, in general, for various ways of positioning people in/ on/ around/ alongside it.
A long table takes over the elongated character of the gallery space inside the ravelin.
This is the table where the “community” sits, a narrow table, fit for the long space. The drapings help “keep” the guests together and works in very different scenarios: a soft and perforated of a corridor in the close vicinity of the table, but also a wider and ceremonial background, playing upon the classical architecture of the space and the citadel.
*Pland and front view
Credits
Concept and realization of the installation, project initiators: Dorin Ștefan Adam (Mânadelucru), Elena Viziteu (VIArchitecture )
Performance: Sergiu Dița, Iuliana Danciu –performers, Oana Mureșan –coordinator
Graphic design: Daniel Mihalcea -Visual Communication / Daniel & Andrew
Art historian, curator: Simona Abagiu
Client: Primăria Municipiului Alba Iulia, 2017
manadelucru.ro, viarchitecture.ro
