the world as beautiful paralisys 5.4.2013 (1)

7/28/2019 The World as Beautiful Paralisys 5.4.2013 (1)

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The world as beautiful paralysis

On random Saturday mornings, apples falling behind Dam square are like butterflywings stirring in motion unbearable hurricanes. I cringe while four of them breakloose from my blue plastic shopping bag and go running on the sidewalk.I stand still to balance out their unexpected motion.

They stop.I move again."During the toddler stage (ages one to three), the youngster begins to exploreand test their environment. Everything is new, exciting, and waiting to betouched! Parents must therefore be diligent in providing their child with a safeenvironment while teaching self control and self-reliance."

I was quite a lively child, as children probably should be. Once outside the womb, Inavigated still in a womb-like structure for the next 12 years of my life. If I evergot to fall, I had a safety net, I had my small city, my neighborhood, my spiderweb

of social relations, my family.The net had the misfortune of breaking right on the cusp of adolescence.

"Destroyed, replaced, transplanted along with it's foundations on another setting,the building no longer is eternal."Architecture and power (documentary) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsCXGcj3dFM

Sands shifted, spaces changed, what was once open became enclosed. I changedcities, witnessed the uncomfortable death of the marriage of my parents, lost allof my friends. Without a safety net I then decided: I had better stand still, the

movements around me were unbearable. My days proceeded as attempts atordering time. Schedules were drafted, timing was set, structure was initiated, Iadhered to it all religiously. The few digressions which did take place were shortlived, making no impact on the overall attempt at order. I retired in a sense ofknowing. My experience in ordering the world came into being at the same timeas the popularization of personal computers and later on, the Internet. With it Istarted having a crutch. I did feel that the only thing which I now needed in orderto "know" was curiosity. The next step would bring me without fail towards"finding out". The information was out there and all I had to do was refine mysearching skills.

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I stick to my screen, I stick to building worlds out of imaginary ones and zeroes,because here it's easier than anywhere else to build and to destroy without thescars of flesh, the ones which last well into respectable old age. It's also easier tocontrol (or imagine the illusion of control over the world). I am the creator and thedestroyer. Sure, there is a higher level which supersedes me. Nevertheless, I amgiven the tools which imply my control.


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A screen frames an image, it frames several images, it frames the frame and theframed (and the frame in the frame, in the frame), images, sounds, gestures,histories, facts, details, the weather, it's a calm space which can evaporate in amatter of an instant. It's said that once something is put on the Internet it can lastforever due to the easiness in copying and distributing it, which makes contentspread "viraly" and lose it's initial owner, becoming owned by potentially

everyone. In an ever-changing world, there is a trace of stability through thepotential of information to live forever.I find a dual comfort in knowing that traces can vanish, at other times it soothesme to know that I can always find them there.

---I didn't really get out of my attempts to order the world because there was noneed to. Intelligence, or what I perceived as intelligence, made me feelcomfortable. Why change a system you worked so hard for, if you don't feel thatit's broken? It did have the disadvantage of being a virtual system. it's

ramifications did not extend as far as the real world. The reason for this? Thespaces I was navigating and the tight rules I was imposing on them did not allowfor true human interaction. Whenever interaction did happen, it tended to haveone major flaw - it was polite for fear of not alienating the other one. Therefore, itwas never honest to begin with. It was also interaction from which one can hide,vanish behind an alias - safe games for frightened people.

To change the initial system it takes more than being aware of it's flaws. What itdid take was a shift in social structure, spatial structure and ever-shiftingsurroundings.

Surroundings in Bucharest continue to changing dramatically.

On the night of March 25th 2013, Bucharest's mayor gave orders to start tearingdown a well known historical buildings, erected in the 19th century and named"Hala Matache". The building had been in dispute (a trial was started between thelocal NGO's and the municipality) two years prior to it's demise. Regardless of thearguments of conserving the city's history and architectural identity, themunicipality chose the middle of a freezing and snowy late March night (unusualweather conditions for a city in which spring begins in full force in March), whilethe people were deep into their sleep, to begin the demolition of a landmark.Once the process started, there was no turning back. The team didn't finish their

job that night. It only ever needed to get started.This small piece of reality was a duplicate of different times. Times which I did notinhabit, but which the city of Bucharest holds as mementos, scars on it's skin,layers of understanding. Demolitions were more or less the norm in the 1980's.Just as with my own life, outside forces dictated new coordinates. The city hadnothing more to do than obey.

In the 1980's Bucharest was subject to a symbolic change. One of it's most quietneighborhoods Uranus-Izvor, was gradually wiped off of the face of the Earth to


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make way for what is now known as "The house of the people", a maniacalbuilding which spoke of dictatorship and delusions of grandeur. What was torndown with the Uranus-Izvor neighborhood was not just a series a houses but,given the solidified social structure of the place, the demolitions anddisplacements initiated a break in continuity and belonging. What used to be acommunity, was replaced by a purely utilitarian building. Where once we took our

time, now time was accelerated.

It's maybe a stretch to say that just by destroying a tightly knit community, theentire city was dismantled. Ultimately though, that was the goal. You alienate thepeople by taking away from them a sense of spacial, but also chronologicalcontinuity. 30 years later, the city still seems to be licking it's wounds. It's peopleare detached from one another, they stare out the window or to their feet insteadof looking into each others eyes. They each carry the traces of the city, not reallysure how to cope. They all know that something is wrong, yet, they're not quitesure how to fix it.

My culture has experienced discontinuity at least as far back in time as the 19thcentury. There's something in me which inherited a time shift. In IoanaParvulescu's book "In the intimacy of the 19th century" (2005), there are details ofchronological discontinuity as experienced by Romanians in the 19th century,while the country still used the Julian calendar, as supposed to the Gregoriancalendar which was in place across Western Europe.

"In Romania, country of contrasts, people live according to a double calendar, thecalendar of the past, delayed by twelve days, and the calendar of the future,Western, the "civilized" calendar, as Duiliu Zamfirescu calls it. They live the oldestof old according to the old calendar and the newest of new according to the

modern calendar and they are forced to be mobile and adaptable. (...)In reality between Romanians from abroad and the ones which are home there is adifference of 12 days, which makes everything relative: anniversaries, religiousholidays and profane ones and even the feeling of the present. In a certain sense,people from Romania live twice, they live each day in the present and anticipated,if they are in Romania, in the present and retroactively, if they are in Paris, orVienna, or London, or Rome. They have every year two birthdays and twopassings into the new year. When they travel they adopt the new calendar, whenthey return home, they also return to the old time. Nobody before them has hadthe desire to overlap Romanian time, left behind, over the time of civilizedsocieties, nobody before them has had the same clear desire to fix the time shift,

to pick up on the delays. (...) The Julian calendar means stagnation, the other one,progress."

In the year 2013 my country doesn't know how to stand still. But it's accelerationis not progress, it's chaos. To balance it out I spent most of my life learning tostand still for it until I could no longer bear it.

Switching geographical coordinates can be a trigger for paralysis. It can alsoinitiate movement and transformation. It's a matter of what exactly those


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coordinates belong to.

I moved to Amsterdam in August of 2012. One of the paradoxes of Amsterdam Idiscovered seems to lie in the fact that one can let his or her mind wonder to theedge and back again, all the while remembering that the city will support. It will

stand still for you. A feeling of calmness, almost eery, permeates the buildings,the streets, the street signs, the trees and canals, the people. They are there tolet you know, little by little, that you can break the norm, there will be a safetynet.Amsterdam is the kind of city in which one can lose his belongings and still findthem hours, sometimes days, later in the same exact place - artworks, hair pins,keys, phones, jackets and so on.

Bucharest is the place where historical buildings are being torn down againstcourt orders, in the middle of the night, during blizzards, to make way for businesscenters and 6 lane highways. You can fall asleep in one reality and wake up in a

different one. There is no red thread uniting the two, with the exception of the redthread of change.

There is calmness in knowing that the things you left in one place, will remain inthe same place from one day to the next.There is adventure and possibility, but also the unknown, in being confronted withchanges on a cityscape level from one day to the next.How do you gain continuity and a solid grounding in reality if your reality alterssignificantly in a matter of hours? How can you know that you can hold on tomemories if you can so easily be stripped bare of the real?

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It's through being exposed to both the break of continuity and continuity itselfthat I can say I begin to understand a relation between surrounding and individualaction. My Bucharest-Amsterdam experiment, which started out of a need foreducation, extracted from the setting the education process was taking place in,became a lesson exactly through the power of the setting.

Like a child learning to walk, speak, run, play, and seeing that the environmentwill not shift while I push it's boundaries, I began pushing buttons in Amsterdam.

"At the heart of the continuity versus discontinuity debate lies the question ofwhether development is solely and evenly continuous, or whether it is marked byage-specific periods. Developmentalists who advocate the continuous modeldescribe development as a relatively smooth process, without sharp or distinctstages, through which an individual must pass. Meanwhile, supporters of thediscontinuous model describe development as a series of discrete stages, each ofwhich is characterized by at least one task that an individual must accomplishbefore progressing to the next stage."


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http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/Issues-in-Developmental-Psychology.topicArticleId-26831,articleId-26750.html

Having experienced both continuity and discontinuous action and it's reverse Icame to believe there is no either/or in the case of continuity / discontinuity indevelopment. Discontinuity can only function as an outer layer while the inner

layer is a continuous structure. One aids the other.

the world as beautiful paralisys 5.4.2013 (1)

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