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Radu Tîrcă and Ștefania Hîrleață are students at University of Architecture and Urbanism 'Ion Mincu', Bucharest. At present, they lead their theoretical research on the subject of thermal towns and diploma projects in Govora Baths under the guidance of Stefan Simion, Irina Tulbure and Ilinca Paun Constantinescu. As students, they won second prize and best student project in a BeeBreeders international architecture competition - Mango Vynil Hub, third prize in a Zeppelin national competition - Prototip pentru comunitate, as well as other mentions in other competitions.
IMAGINARY OF MIGRATION
In 2021 the editorial team of Mazzocchioo has the honor of curating the Romanian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. As an answer to this years general theme, Fading Borders is a curatorial project that engages with the topic of migration by bringing together two complementary projects – Away and Shrinking Cities in Romania. Each one tackles the issue from a different viewpoint. The Imaginary of Migration is a personal collection of what migration can mean in a broader understanding of the term. It is neither objective nor exhaustive, nor does it claim to be. Instead, it’s about what we felt was an essential third point, acting as a counterpart to both the precise data of shrinking cities and the profoundly human stories of Teleleu.
Migration might be a surprising angle to approach contemporary architectural and urban thinking or production. What MZCH polemically chose to address is this connotation of migration as a reservoir of imagination and as a vehicle and engine for the circulation of ideas. We thought of departures and arrivals as places and experiences – such as Ellis and Angel island; of people coming together and of nations getting in contact – the tower of Babel or the United Nations; there’s the wandering utopian cities of Archigram; we thought of architects who migrated and changed their way of thinking architecture – as Mies did almost a century ago; also thought of exotic love or to discovering new places and we wondered about how we see things for the first time, without the layer of habitude – maybe as Gauguin saw Tahiti or Eliade discovered India; and there are also the built symbols of migration such as the famous statue of liberty which travelled the world from Paris to New York and its antithesis – the Berlin wall that splits one world into tragic pieces; and, finally, there’s the future history of migration which will never limit itself to the charted territories – there will always be places on Earth to be discovered, but what about Space?! You can find our answers below.