13.02.2025 / Perspectives
“Contrast” is the word that best describes the capital of a country that right now is swinging between an intricate sense of nostalgia and the perspective of an uncertain future.
Author: Giovanni Gabriele Manca, M.A. Candidate
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
– William Blake
Reading this poem may bring us to a marvelous natural scenario, made out of bird chants, green bushes, and a lovely sea breeze that gently moves the crowns of outstanding trees. An astonishing place, in which we can truly sense the beauty of nature and her amazing force. A space where we can be one with the world we are surrounded by, where the man can experience his limits in front of the universal, feeling quiet and scared at the same time. Is it not true, after all, that “the world is too much with us”, as William Wordsworth used to write?
But this is not the only case in which we, as humans, can perceive that particular feeling. The beauty of art stands in its powerful spirit of adaptation: a language form that can help individuals in different ways and different spaces. That is why we, if we are really interested, can find art even in a completely different environment, such as a large urban agglomeration, made up of tall concrete buildings and wide busy streets, wonderful palaces, and horrendous ruins, hope and fear… a place like Bucharest, the city of the living contrasts.
Due to its complex history, the city has undergone many changes over time: from adopting the French architectural style in the early 1900s (observable in the Cretulescu Palace), to imitating the rigid North Korean socialist pomposity that fascinated Ceaușescu back in the 1980s, visible in the ministry buildings and in the most famous Palatul Parlamentului. All of this has led Bucharest to live as if trapped in an eternal cycle of destruction and construction, in which only a few churches can fix the memory of a distant past: mystical ruins outside of time and space, similar to those we can see in the paintings of Friedrich, Moll, and Böcklin.
“Contrast” is the word that best describes the capital of a country that right now is swinging between an intricate sense of nostalgia and the perspective of an uncertain future. “Contrast” is the word I used most when I had to define to my friends the feeling that this city has given to me since I arrived here in September 2024. The contrast is everywhere and lies exactly in the middle: between the old ugly buildings and the beautiful new ones, between the expensive cars of Sectorul 1 and the cheap ones that you can see in Sectorul 6, between the remnants of the communist past and the still current democratic transition, between the faces and the speeches of its citizens. It was this kind of contrast that unconsciously pushed me to take that photo, where a street lamp, on which are stuck two stickers, one against the old regime and the other bearing the image of a bitcoin, seems to divide the city’s past from its actual present, separating a run-down edifice shrouded in shadow from a modern one that reflects the light of the sun. The street lamp seems to take on the meaning of a divider, pointing straight to the sky, perhaps the only space in which we can resolve all of our internal contrasts.
Departments: FRI Media Lab; Society, Crisis, and Resilience Program; Policy Analysis and Outreach Department; Research Department; Center on Global Affairs and Post Development.
Themes: Cities; Civic Engagement; Civil Society; Communism and Totalitarianism; Democracy and Democratization; European Union; Freedom of Expression; Human Rights; Media and Journalism; Social Inequalities.