Well, here we are. We’ve been in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) for a little over a week. We were invited by the local collective
And what’s going on with this park? Well, like any other urban space, its current appearance is the result of a series of historical processes: it was created in the 70s by the Romanian state railway company (CFR) for the use and enjoyment of its workers, housed in a nearby neighborhood—however, Feroviarilor has always been a public and freely accessible place. After the end of communism in 1989, CFR went into crisis and abandoned the park, while the city seemed to turn its back on it. Until in 2010 the football club CFR 1907 Cluj-Napoca reached an agreement with the train company whereby it undertook to fix the park in exchange for being allowed to build a football field for training; the field was built—for this, several trees in the park were cut down and the nearby building of the old slaughterhouse was demolished—but the promised rehabilitation of the park does not arrive and the deterioration of the park continues to this day.
In recent years, some campaigns and protest actions have been organized to demand the recovery of Feroviarilor, including an ideas competition. Currently, given the football club’s failure to comply with the agreement, the local government is negotiating with the Ministry of Transport the transfer of the park to the City Council, and it seems that civil organizations such as AltArt want to take advantage of the moment to put pressure on the various actors. That’s where the Artizen initiative and the participating artists come into play, as we are invited to carry out a series of interventions in the park during the days of August 12, 13 and 14, in which an open day will be organized with various events and activities.
This is part of the situation we have found ourselves in. What are we going to do here? Well, the very idea of landing in a place and inventing something ourselves with our mechanism seems quite strange and not very sustainable to us. But in any case, within these premises, we have tried to maintain coherence with our ways of doing things. We will tell you about it in the next installment!