RomânăSomething is amiss when the place where you were born no longer sends you any message – no call, no vibes, no sense of revulsion – and no longer hides any mysteries. At such a moment the city dies along with you as abruptly as mid-spring can turn into late autumn for the simple reason that you are the only person in the entire place whose wisdom tooth has started aching.
When the great singer, via his unseen heralds, plastered the whole city (months in advance of the event) with posters displaying his own face, I suspected that we were in for something pretty bad. We are seeing a new kind of visual terrorism to which advancing years have made me even more sensitive than I am to the uncouth behaviour of motorcyclists who seem to be permanently convinced that accelerating their speedbikes between every two red lights to the point at which my eardrums are about to burst is a sure protection against premature ejaculation, hair loss and peridontal disease. It involves the following stages:
- Take any singer, in this case one of the date-expired variety, the kind who can barely fill a modest roadside bar in his own country.
- Some months before the concert, print millions of posters of him with which to plaster the town.
- Mount a campaign of visual terror against the population and simultaneously disfigure the public space by illegal bill sticking.
After these steps have been taken, the next stage is the organisers being gripped by panic as they realise with horror that the megastar is not going to be able to fill even a quarter of the stadium, despite the turning of all those trees into paper for the posters. Then follows a strategic partnership between them and the local government representatives and the relocating of the concert from the stadium to the pavement. With unprecedented zeal, they mobilise impressive numbers of functionaries to take part one and all in uglifying the whole city centre, without people who are visually sensitive like me being consulted. Fences are erected, the police keep their eyes on you as if you were a potential offender, the people with the drinks concessions put up their gazebos, the light bounces off the fluorescent jackets of the forces of law and order, and in a word the city you once knew no longer looks at all like itself. Any space large enough to breathe in is choked and any open space is blocked off in front of your nose. You feel like heading for the Gobi Desert in order to be able to see any distance.
Here there should follow a lengthy discussion of the importance of the public space, but that would require somewhat more thorough documentation than my insignificant photographs. I took pictures on the day of the X concert of megastar Y, and then I took more pictures three days afterwards, from roughly the same angles, using a fixed eyelevel lens. Afterwards I wondered whether the observable contrast between the two sets of pictures seemed a normal one. I am not trying to plumb some subtle aesthetic, social or civic depths here but merely thinking about what is normal: normal for my city, normal for its local authorities, and normal for its inhabitants, among whom I humbly count myself.
