Brick fragments from 25 demolished houses, shaped with an electric power tool, and then placed inside 25 glass globes found in a deserted glass factory. The project questions the destruction of private houses built at the end of the XIXth century and in the first part of the XXth century in the central area of Bucharest, Romania. Currently, these buildings are being demolished and replaced with blocks of flats or business headquarters, thus evicting an important segment of the built memory of the city.
The performance is based on an experience that Anri Sala had while driving across Arizona, listening to baroque chamber music on his car radio. As he pulled into a rest area, an unknown radio station playing country music intermittently interrupted the baroque music. Anri Sala commissioned a composer to transpose this sound experience into a musical score, performed by a baroque trio, a country band and a radio announcer.
Together with a teacher and the students of a local technical secondary school, Van Dorpe worked towards an image that translated the power and energy of both the low budget exhibition initiative and the youngsters. A black Renault Clio was turned upside down and the necessary adjustments were made to enable the car to keep on running, however without moving forward. During a performance at the opening night of the exhibition, the physical power that the car developed was shown as a dynamic spectacle – accompanied by a drummer and T-shirts printed with technical details of the car.
