Outlands is a collaborative land art intervention – together with Mălina Ionescu & Marina Oprea– that explores the alternative layers and the ambivalence of a site marked by human intervention, set at Văcărești Natural Park in Bucharest. now a nature reserve in the heart of Bucharest, the park was initially a residential neighbourhood that was demolished during the communist era in order to host a reservoir, however the plan was never completed. as nature took over the unfinished man-made lake, it transformed into its own self-sufficient eco-system. outlands explores the hybridity of this liminal space through a cvasi-archaeological discovery that reveals the latest recent ruins, fragments of a reality that has remained dormant, tracing a link between these and the most recent layers of human intervention: the paths travelled by the park’s visitors on the one hand, and its presence on Google Earth or Maps, on the other hand.
the main component, a massive work of land art, draws a text in a coded alphabet, a message and a sign at the same time, which allows and offers different readings and decodings. based on the old foundations of some hydropower plants that were never built, the artists followed the visible remains of concrete slabs, akin to ruins, from under the new layer of vegetation and reconfigured them in the form of a huge inscription, visible from the air. the message is translated as INTER and illustrates the dual status of Văcărești Natural Park, where the natural and the artificial come together, reminding one of ancestral monuments such as the Nazca geoglyphs, whose precise purpose has been lost over time.
this cryptic alphabet unites the two antagonistic realities that define the Văcărești delta – the natural environment and the artificial construction, and is also present, in smaller and concrete forms, throughout the entire park. the mysterious letters evoke the very mystery of this space transformed by destruction, but reclaimed by nature in a way that would not have been possible without the initial delimitation and without the failure of the attempt to create a reservoir.