Andrea Faciu

b. 1977, Romania

We can all imagine what caressing a human being, an animal or a thing feels like. But how does it feel to touch a city, an urban conglomerate? A city is a conglomerate at large scale, built out of vivid and consolidated material, of the relationships and structures existing between them, between the real visible architectures of the street, of each kind of extroversion, and in a certain way Utopian architectures, in which we construct our networks and the needed areas of action within society, by balancing virtues, impossibilities, necessities and by searching the balance between the common and the special. We all personalise and characterise fable-like the places from which we come, where we are right now or those we want to reach, mostly without realising the exact point where their own subjectivity intersects an objectivity imposed by patterns of thought and definitions not of our own. It is about experiencing, feeling the cities and their inner lives, including the inner lives of the people living in them. I actually touch them physically – and not only physically – I palpate and rummage, dirty my hands with their particular ‘dust of civilisation’.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)