Before the 5th of October 2003 and before the Performing Places, for nearly two years people where talking about a BIG project involving the British Council and a street festival of some sort. As the time passed it became apparent that something had to happen before things got out of hand. Things really took shape during the spring of 2003, followed by a series of congregational workshops located behind the walls of the Bucharest University of Architecture. A place where young student-looking fellows where supposed to bond and to brainstorm each other to death.
The highly respectable modus operandi was supposed to be inter-dimensional and inter-disciplinary; a propitiatory cross-over between down-to-earth architects, creative new media rookies and performing arts situationists. After attending the workshops and after having inscribed your name on an attached sticker, you where labeled as fluorescent green, red or yellow as pertaining to your own set of moral and professional convictions. It really sounds like "Logan's Run" but this really happened earlier this year!
Aye, that was a sight to dwell on, seeing all the young teeming life, bands of yellow, green and red attracted to their own kind, rarely teaming up. There was fear in their eyes, mistrust for the stranger, the haughty newcomer: architects mistrusting the flamboyant artist, the artists both tremulous and disdainful inside the architectural alma mater.
Out of this came about a dozen or so teams that didn't break down; fragile looking aggregates, loosely searching for some common belief in the revival of the ol' Bucharest city center - Lipscani. Their separate final projects where given to a high jedi council of cultural templars for review, admittance or eternal damnation.
There where rumors about interventionist tactics, pre-arrange results and biased elections - the usual sort of interesting racket one hears about when something really BIG is at stake.
After the beauty contest was over and after the winning parties where glorified with floating balloons and self-congratulating speeches, three winning projects and a special prize headed for home. Aided and abetted by that invisible hand (i.e. Adam Smith) - the British Council and its faithful staff - the four teams waited for their money and their unique chance to assault the historical neighborhood.
A word on the Lipscani area. Scattered new glitzy clubs of the downtown sprout among the abandoned and reconverted mansions, open air terraces flourish among ruined walls. Between second and first hand opportunities, antique shops, wedding accesoires and cobbled streets, lost tourists and weekend gangs of teenage delinquents walk the street maze close to the ICCA/CIAC dormitories. A colorful neighborhood where joy riders, joy boys and juice joints mix.

For the gathered crowd of onlookers the spectacle was one single big never-seen-before disturbance. Just try to imagine on Sunday the 5th from 11:00 PM till 22:00 a huge bottle-made wedding dress and walled-in-person performances; excellent theatrics, showroom-dummies lying inside the rubble and retro 3D gadgets, hanging plastics barriers for the next SARS outbreak; a gang full of slashing noise and tribal-gathering rhythms, expert-hand stencil graffiti's with layers of green grass closing a long dilapidated hallway where street-urchins went high on freshly installed swings.
It turned out to be another pax britannica installment creating a network of safe-heavens for the young and skillful dodgers.
With the French Institute involvement in "Art conquers the street" and "After_Image", Performing Places aka British Council places Bucharest on the same level of site-specificity and fugitive reconversion as London, Berlin or Paris. Yeah, you would be really hard-put to find any visible remains of the whole event.
Now, after the cleaning lady came and now that the locks are back and the passageway has been shot once more, Lipscani - the historical core of Bucharest has lost its innocence.

squatting ST