Views on disused urban spaces are usually divided into two classes: one view, usually nostalgic, towards a more or less splendid past, and a view that only focuses on the future potential of the place. Feroviarilor is no exception: caught between these two opposing lines of flight, the park, in its current state, has become invisible and seems to have been forgotten by the city; what happens there becomes despicable, worthless. But things are happening in Feroviarilor, now. These are the things that interest us.
First of all, it should be noted that the park has become, due to its abandonment by the institutions, a denormativized place, a space that no longer responds to the regulations and regulated uses of the urban environment. On the one hand, nature has stormed the park, blurring its original layout to the point of disappearance —only the main avenue, its fountain and lampposts and the skating rink are still recognizable— so that the improvised paths meander through the park following the trajectories defined by its walkers. The vegetation, freed from the forms imposed by the landscaper, prevents the control and surveillance of large portions of the park that is inhabited by some homeless people; furtive sexual encounters take place there; perhaps the retail sale of drugs; it is transited by young gypsies with a defiant attitude; some teenagers seem to use the park as a playground or rather of adventures, which surely include the first activities not authorized by adults; other people, usually older, simply walk alone; others do so in the company of their dogs; garbage abounds in some areas of the park and wild plants and shrubs, weeds, proliferate everywhere.
A question assails us: how to pay attention to all this that happens? With the time we have, it would be presumptuous to try to make an in-depth, more or less ethnographic, analysis of the different uses of the park. However, something awakens our curiosity: some people collect fruits and leaves from various shrubs and plants. Thus we are interested in what, perhaps being the most obvious, goes unnoticed, what, like the famous letter, we do not see because it is there, in front of us: the vegetation, the weeds that spread around, which constitute an indistinct background on which the activity of the park unfolds.
We ask Ruth Borgfjord, from
AltArt
, if she can put us in contact with someone who knows about plants, preferably not a scientist, but someone who has knowledge of their practical uses as medicine or food —not only their names and classifications— a popular knowledge, like that of the people who come to the park to collect the fruits of the myrobolan plum or the leaves of the hazelnut. We are lucky, Ruth introduces us to her friend Tudor Gomoiescu and with him we visit Feroviarilor on Sunday at noon. Tudor began to be interested in plants and their properties thanks to his grandparents, who taught him as a child to recognize a few species. In his company, the park begins to reveal itself as a different environment, it ceases to pretend to be a wasteland when we begin to differentiate numerous plants from among the mass of apparently homogeneous vegetation: wild rose bushes, chicories, wormwoods, several types of plantain, knotweed, yarrow, sage, parsnip, quinoa, St. Benedict’s herb… Almost all of them have some beneficial property for people: their leaves, roots, flowers or fruits are edible or with them you can make infusions or poultices that cure or alleviate some type of ailment.
Deleuze quoted Henry Miller: «Grass only occurs in the midst of large uncultivated spaces. It fills the voids, grows between – in the midst of other things. The flower is beautiful, the cabbage useful, the poppy drives you crazy. But grass, grass is overflow, a whole lesson in morality. » Following Deleuze we can say that, unlike trees, with their tops and roots and their points of arborescence, the weed destroys dualities, overflows them, is grass and road at the same time, grows between – in the midst of other things. In Feroviarilor, grass grows everywhere, overflows any planned, segregated and specialized space, making indistinguishable the places of walk and rest, of contemplation and recreation. Likewise, like grass, the people and groups that nowadays frequent the park overflow those same planned uses. Some of them are socially considered as abject subjects, they are in truth people in conditions of great vulnerability in many cases; almost certainly they do not constitute a revolutionary political subject, but perhaps they do offer us a small moral lesson.