GROUNDS OF CARE

Bodies, Buildings and Other Broken Matter

Former Govora Spa Town, Romania
Advisor: Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Special thanks to: Studio Govora
2023, Harvard University

In a culture of replacement, this thesis looks at ‘broken’ fragments – in our bodies, buildings and landscapes, in an attempt to reframe the agency of repair across an entanglement of temporalities. Once a bustling Romanian spa town with a small power plant thriving on the soft extraction of minerals and hot waters, Govora’s healing landscapes now sit abandoned, prey to commercial redevelopment.
Through a petrographic approach, a writing through rocks, this project attempts to reveal understandings of what is below ground and render the ghostly figures of what was above. It frames a story about the passing of time in the recovery of bodies, organic and inorganic, within a post-industrial landscape, questioning the ‘groundedness’ of any intervention which might lie in it – specifically, through acts of burial, insertion, assimilation and detachment (building upon the framework of Mastenbroek’s ‘Dig it’).

Geology

Century

Decade

Day

ASSIMILATE

BURY

INSERT

DETACH

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LARA AVRAM

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