(THIS IS THE STREET AND NEIGHBOURHOOD WHERE WE PLAY EX-POSITION)
Szamosközi street (Henry Barbusse street in Romanian), is located at the end of Cserhalom street (Gorunului in romanian), opening on the right side, between the two arms of the Kisszamos river (a place called Malomárok), it’s the street leading to the railway. In the beginning, there were gardens on the two sides of the street, more of a path really. It started developing at the end of the 17th-and the beginning of the 18th century. The eastern arm of the Kisszamos river was terminated in the 1980’, when they started building the neighbourhood.
This street was part of the periferical area between the rivers Szamos and Kisszamos, today it is known as Lupsa. At the beginning of the 19th century, the animal fair was held here, and the latter Széchényi square. It began developing only at the end of the century. In the beginning of the 20th century, the official name of the area between the railway, the Szamos and the Kisszamos, was 3. Kerület (3rd District that is). The Dermata footware factory was built here, today it is known as Clujeana.
The Renner Brothers leather factory. It is a factory built in the noth-eastern part of the city, to the north-eastern direction from the end of the Fecske (Paris) street, near the bank of the Szamos river. It moved here in 1900, from Szászrégen. At first it was in the Berek street, then it moved under nr. 56 Szamosközi (Barbusse) street. In 1930 it was united with the Turul footware factory from Temesvár (Timişoara). The factory was renamed Dermata. Thanks to the capital invested by the Farkas family, the factory became an important, in fact the city’s biggest, internationally known factory. It secured many jobs for the population. In 1948, after the secularization, the factory was named after Herbák János, a young communist man who worked in the factory, and who died in the jail in doftana in the 1940 earthquake. In 1964, in the spirit of ROMANIANS TAKING OVER (?example of not-politicaly correct writing and tone of this article), the factory was named Clujeana.
The center of the city is documentet down to its every little corner. The image of the center of Cluj represented the town, in our day as well as in the 1900s. Despite the fact that on the maps at the end of the I WW, there are cearly stated two labor neighbourhoods, Gruia and Piaţa 1848, they are completely invisible to the city. In paradox, we have drawings and pictures of the industrial buildings around which the workers grativated. But these places, where the worker lives and bulids his everyday life is not of any importance to the artist, or the politician or the bourgeois.
The Lupşa area of Cluj (known by the name of Clujeana area or Piaţa 1848) is an area neighbour to the center, predominated by workers since the end of the 19th century. It is systematically excluded from the public city representations. The center was the face of the town in the 1900s and it still is. The wealthy lived with their own kind, not with the working class- say the people from Lupşa. It is an area of qualified workers, and women disappeared from its representation. The image of the place is dominated by men, working men, strong men. But these representations are the fruit of spacialy located complex rituals. Alcohol is another test-ritual through which real men prove their strength and endurance in comparison to other men. So the bar, or tavern is a place of socialization, but the irony is that the endurance to alcohol and generosity become the trademark of strength and masculinity. Obviously : “Women no!..you couldn’t see women at the cafeteria.” Even though the women seem to be excluded from the representations of the neighbourhood, they represent a very important item of the delimitation of the areas, and in the process of producing boarders between these areas.
Class divisions are also a sort of space divisions as well.
There is an intermediary area, an urban blank spot between the center and the periphery.
Still, one out of three people in Cluj had a gymnasium level education, and more than 35% of the active workforce was made of laborers. Even if there were no more mamuth production units like for example Clujeana, or the Combinatul de Utilaj Greu, which had in the ’80 10.000 employees each, still the processing industry epmloyed a quarter of the citys workforce. The typical company in the labor neighbourhood has in average 15 employees and uses only one section or floor of what the great socialist factorys were back in the day. Even like this, they own 30% of the active capital of the firms in Cluj, and 10% of the total of firms in 2007 (according to the Chamber of Commerce Cluj, 2007).
Since 1870, when the city is linked to the merchandise chain through the railway, and industrial productivity of the Empire, in the urban ecology of Cluj there seem to emerge two labor neighbourhoods: Gruia and Lupşa. Gruia is the CFR (Căile Ferate Române-railways) workers neighbourhood, and Lupşa is the neighbourhood of the craftsmen that were hired in the Dermata (soon to be Clujeana) leather factory and the other factories that appeared around that time. Lupşa, the place where Fabrica de Pensule is situated, has, from the beginning of the 20th, century the current street structure and it is geometrically centered around the square that we call today 1 Mai. But this neighbourhood wasn’t considered back in the day, as it still isn’t considered to be part of the city. Back then it was outside the perimeter of the city that we see today and the historycal center, a colony of workers and laborers too uncivilized to be part of the citys image. Today, when you have a chat with the workers that live here, surpised that someone might be interested in their neighbourhood, they recommend you to go to other parts of the city, more interesting ones, areas that really capture and represent the city, like the center, or those in the “gentlemens” neighbourhood- Andrei Mureşanu.
Fabrica de Pensule, the first example of conversion in Romania of an industrial space into an arts and contemporary culture center. The Fabrica de Pensule is an independent cultural center which concentrates activities of over 39 areas of contemporary arts: artist workshops, galleries and cultural organizations active in the visual arts department, of contemporary dans and theater. The truth is that a phenomenon like FP counts on degrading the socialist construction it is settled itself into. It is an important image of itself. Once noticed, east-european artist can’t afford to forget what a valuable resource communist chic can be. The concrete industrial architecture shriveled from the communist times is much less obvious than the nice, big, brick halls, and exactly because of this it’s still so special. Structurally speaking, the FP building is nothing special. It looks real bad, at that is real good. The renovation interventions are luckily minimal, and they do not alter the socialist image of the building. All sorts of traces (panels of labor protection, workers’ slogans, and not to mention installations like electric panels of high voltage indispensable to some of the equipment that by today is long gone, hydrants, or massive metal doors) are carefully kept and untouched.
The galleries and workshops tip-toed into the existing rooms, without repartitioning. Once in though, they assumed a sort of classical freedom. Most of them arranged area formulas of exposure like “white cube”, almost totally closed to the existing glazed façade.
Frankly speaking, when you enter any FP gallery, you’re torn from the exterior frame, and you’re cought in their world. And then you go out and relive over and over, acutely the necessary contrast between their inside impecalbe white and the misery of the remains of the socialist industry. The separation of the two worlds id perfectly possible. Hence the principle of the space relation at FP.
Everything at the FP is purely of symbolic value. It remains a “Factory”, meaning a place of production; it produces “brushes”, meaning it may have a connection to painting, to art. This has no connection to the old fabrica de pensule though. Eventually nothing translates this symbolic value more than the area itself: art can install itself, even with maximum intensity, in an aera, a space without as much as touching it.
The repartition of the FP into a contemporary arts center or its presence in the neighbourhood of new types of inhabitants of the building was very much unnoticed. Mostly because the FP looks exactly like in the past, as neglected as ever, as the other factories nearby. Actually the factory never had an exciting life, dense and eventful, with no moment whatsoever that would have made a mark in the factorys golden days. Like most of the other labor neighbourhoods, it was destined to be a place of work, period. Nothing spectacular anchors it in the history of the city. The workers link the neighbourhoods past to their own little personal events in life, like marriage, first child, the death of a spouse. And the individual histories articulate amongst themselves in the great turning points of history: the war, the factories in the ’70, the revolution and change of government in 1989, the fireing in the ’90, the asfaltation of the streets. Well, we could even say that the factorys golden days are now- the streets are looked after, new prettier houses on the horizon, thus the area becomes more attractive to others as well. Its life, as well as the workers, is discreet, it runs in the present and it remains periferial in the bigger picture.
To be continued!
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