The ChişinEU – POETIC INTERVENTIONS action is part of an attempt to radiography Chisinau’s public space through the light of artistic interventions, in which the participants in the action were encouraged to take hold of several streets segments, as well as texts and inscriptions on the facades of buildings, billboards or other surfaces, visible to the city’s inhabitants. Public space had an important role in the process of accumulating texts and other materials, being a primary source of information and influencing capitally the content of the works that the participants in the action produced later. Strolling through Chisinau, in a process of exploring the city, they became preoccupied with extracting information and writing texts, and their bodies joined a process of activating the space through which they moved, transforming it in a space of message production and dissemination.
The three journeys taken by the artists, writers and poets allowed them to familiarize better with the city and its specificity, offering a frame for information acquiring. They outlined a direct method for exploring the political, but also the social and economical, inscribed on the walls’ facades and in the anonymous inscriptions found along the three main city highways, selected according to a specific objective.
One of the action’s aims was to identify messages that the inhabitants of Chisinau conceived and expressed by the means of words and texts inscribed in public spaces; these were supposed to be collected (recuperated) as sources and raw material. During the examination of Chisinau streets and boulevards, the participants remarked a severe lack of voice and expression on the part of the city’s inhabitants, these being in some cases jammed, and in other – replaced by painted boards and advertisings belonging to various local – or, more often, foreign – companies.
At the same time, the layering of different discourses and types of messages could be observed and promoted depending on their particularities, without them intertwining in any way, making thus manifest the lack of almost any communication between the government representatives, private companies and civil society or simple citizens, which proves that Chisinau public space is visibly marked by the interests of some investors and commercial structures, but also by the interests of political groups that, for the most part, exclude the city inhabitants from configuring it according to their needs and specifics.
The present publication aims at reintroducing the citizens’ voice in the public circuit, by the means of texts written by participants in ChişinEU – POETIC INTERVENTIONS project.
In April 2010, an ash cloud generated by a volcano whose name only Icelandic speakers can pronounce correctly, paralyzed Europe. At the other end of the continent, 10 poets embarked on a search for poetry in the cloud of public inscriptions that Chisinau’s inhabitants can tell better, beyond the clouds covering them, either from the East, or from the West.
And all this happened only in order to find the meeting point between poetry and the voices from today’s Chisinau streets. We didn’t have to search for too long. Still, it is the city where M. Eminescu and V. Micle meet even now, just between August, 31 and Stefan cel Mare Bd.
We mapped only three streets, with historical names for Chisinau: Dacia Boulevard, from the city gates until MallDova, Moscow Boulevard, which goes up to the North-East of the Capital, and The Iasi Highway, which goes slightly down to the West. On each street you can find the whole city, the same way in a city you can meet the whole world. With all its political motivations: both the one belonging to romance, and the one influenced by the economic and, inevitably, the political motivation included in gastronomy.
The poetic map of Chisinau is now in the hands of anyone who wants to develop it further, and the bird profile that the Moldovan city sketches on any map is ready now to fly towards the readers.