Following up on “The Wasted Forest“, in January 2008, I continued the project by actually gathering around 60 Christmas trees and recreating a very small forest in an abandoned construction site in the center of Bucharest.

The project was part of the re_luare event in Bucharest, which I organised in collaboration with Elena Ciobanu and Mircea Nicolae.

Following up on “Untitled (after 20 years)“, on the 22nd of December 2010 I took the project back to the streets, using the yellow circle as a background for a series of portraits of passer-byes in the centre of Bucharest. It was an attempt to remind them of the past, of the people that in 1989 sacrificed their life for our freedom.

The people in the photographs are part of those which, in a 4 hours interval, stopped and listened to what I had to say. They are just a fraction of all the people I approached.

I would like to thank Tudor Borduz, “the man holding the dot” (last photo).

Many people spend their life traveling between two fixed points. This repetitive cycle makes them lose interest in the places that they pass through, which become mere clichés of everyday life. Trying to escape the ordinary, people travel to distant places, looking for adventure and beauty. They never imagine that they could ever find what they were looking for in front of their house or in the park next to it. The places that most people consider to be common are in fact an endless source of captivating images that tell wonderful stories.

These images, taken very close to where I grew up in Bucharest, acted as a very strong catalyst for a lot of the photo documentary work I’ve done in Romania and for my Entropy project itself.

The North of Bucharest is the most sought out area of the city in terms of real estate, with land and house prices having reached unbelievably high prices before the 2008 recession. As a result of the large scale development projects that have been undertaken here, the landscape has been completely transformed. Most of this process was related to the Băneasa residential, business and commercial area. The area where the new neighbourhood is currently being built used to be a tree nursery that was completely destroyed as a result. These images were taken in the early stages of the construction works, which have since advanced and will continue for a couple more years.