“It Was Beautiful, Eventually!” Nature and Ruins in Văcărești Nature Park - Călin Cotoi
From the late 1700s to 2016, when it became an urban nature park, Văcărești Pit was a mixture of wastelands and modernization projects on the southern fringes of Bucharest. While always integrated in the productive and power circuits of the city, the area was also a spatial and temporal gap: created by invoking, dismantling, and re-appropriating parts of the past, as well as imagining different futures[1]. Around Văcărești Pit, real estate developers, people displaced from their homes, ecologists, politicians, visitors, passers-by, scientists, hopes, fears, fantasies, “casino capitalism,”[2] wild animals, and plants have gathered from all over the city. All these formed a more-than-human “contact zone,”[3] where wild nature and industrial ruins coexist in direct, intimate contact.Read by actor Daniel Popa , with an illustration by Cristina Barsonyhttps://theanthro.art/it-was-beautiful-eventually-nature-and-ruins-in-vacaresti-nature-park-calin-cotoi/