THE UPS AND DOWNS OF VLAD NANCA - the joyride

Sometimes Vlad Nanca ends up being a moody person. Otherwise he enjoys making long walks trough Bucharest and all the remaining green pastures of the city. He is perfectly at ease with the benches, the variegated children playgrounds and the smoke screens of Vienna.
At times I say to myself that Vlad really became a fanatic with some aspects of the city we all love to hate. But that is why he probably began reading and collecting the signs. I remember some of his earliest photo’s featuring a bunch of seemingly accidental glyphs, the marks of time, weather and human activity left back.

No graffiti’s there, no street art as such.
But maybe someday, someone should try to find what links the Brownian movement of the black or white marker on the doors and walls, the vermicelli of dust graffiti on dirty car windows and empty showrooms, bridging the gap with the ravaged surface of children playthings, laden with freshly painted rust. There is a lot of unaccounted for design and purpose all around us. There are a lot of objects that are still left forgotten or that are just there, waiting to be placed in some sort of order. The archive is allready well on the way, gathering things that where seen before just as simple childish spellings and accidental drooling saying SCIENCE. Or so they thought.

The playground architecture has been more and more a subject of artistic and political intercourse. Duo van der mixt and also Mircea Cantor and Ciprian Muresan investigated this place that we should never see just as benign, colorful surroundings. It is also a place of unrepentant jingoism under which a dull, grey reality seems to lurk.
Also we can see clearly that some of these newer more elaborate children paradises contrast with the more simple and basic instances. In some places an entire kindergarten facility rises, fortress-like, near the older, traditional swings and slides.
Vlad Nanca noticed that most of the small kids on playground territory like to stay up high. They like this high vantage point from where they can swoop down to the ground. Besides the slide, the merry-go-round is the most telling piece of equipment in a children’s quarter. Apart from following sinusoidal curves, children also learn how to spin around in circles, dizzy with their new concentric feeling.

We always seem to enhance our slides and swings in different ways. This is why children go up the slide again after they’ve come down. This is how the simple direction snakes its way past the photographic obstacles to the repeated joyride of a natural high that could end up down below.

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