An improvised football field in Traian Square in Timișoara serves as the backdrop for a neighborhood portrait. The friendly tournament organized by the Casa Jacob Toffler Association in the Fabric neighborhood has, for several years in a row, brought together locals and people from other parts of the city — neighbors, artists, young and old, Nepalese immigrants, a manele singer — for a few days in the fall. Football is just the excuse. The real stake is the visibility of a community under the pressure of gentrification, in a neighborhood where craft beer bars are beginning to replace corner stores, and luxury apartments are gradually pushing to the margins the people who were born and raised there.
*
Paul Breazu is a journalist and cultural worker. He is involved in projects exploring the archaeology of Romanian pop music (Batiscaf Radio, Discotecă, Arhiva de Sunet), the social and cultural history of marginalized communities and groups (PARADAIZ), and the production of experimental events (CUCA, MetaOrganum, FAUNA), and in coordinating the pop journalism magazine TLTXT.ro; he also writes a bimonthly column dedicated to music in the publication Dilema.
Script, composition, recordings, and editing by Paul Breazu for SEMI SILENT in the frame of SONIC SPORTS.
Cast: Laura Borotea, Ms. Nuți, the ladies from Piața Traian, Gabriel Boldiș, Florin Iepan, lookie-loos, public, football players
Additional mixing and mastering: Mihai Balabaș
Thanks: Asociația Casa Jakab Tofler, Arhiva de Sunet, Minitremu, Florian from Prințul Turcesc, Sillyconductor, Anamaria Pravicencu, Adrian Deoancă
Illustration: Eleni Dafini Bacula
English translation (with Deepl) & linked references
Narrator: I’m in Traian Square in Timișoara, in the Fabric neighborhood. It’s a place that, to use the ultimate cliché, is steeped in history. Whether in the weathered facades of the buildings or in the two sculptures silhouetted atop imposing structures, themselves weighed down by that same history. Father and son, as Florian — a local flâneur who has taken on the role of the son — told me at one point. This son has, for some time now, with a slight physical transformation — someone raised his middle finger in a gesture that can be interpreted, non-literally, as an act of resistance — become the trophy of a football tournament.
Gabriel Boldiș (tournament organizer): So, in a way, fooball really shows you the diversity of people in the neighborhood, you know? Like in the first year, for example, there was a team that was supposed to be from that bar — but nobody showed up because they’d been drinking beforehand. Others, too, the players got really drunk, and we had to replace them with some new neighbors, Nepalese guys, who actually scored goals, borrowed sneakers, and received… well, they received from the others…
Laura Borotea (tournament organizer): Flip-flops… they got them from the others, yeah. That was their biggest worry — that they didn’t have any shoes.
Gabriel: Somehow, you know, it actually felt like a carnival atmosphere where… suddenly, everyone sprang into action and…
Narrator: I would like to believe that when, in 2007, Spanish artist Maider López drew the lines and curves of a football field in a small square in the city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, she imagined that her gesture would, 15 years later, open up a new perspective on an important community space in Timișoara. I am referring here to Traian Square, a pivotal urban space in the city’s history, which in recent years has been overshadowed by a series of conflicts caused primarily by external factors. Today, this place is under the gentrifying pressure of real estate capital. Laura and Gabi, the voices you heard earlier, are, along with Pia, Iso, Cristi, Zenaida, and Alex, among those who proposed, in 2022, an intervention in Traian Square that evoked López’s gesture. But not just that one, also a work by the Chilean artist Sebastián Errázuriz, The Tree. Memorial of a Concentration Camp. Or Pied la Biche’s video, Refait, a remake of the legendary 1982 World Cup match between France and Germany.
Gabriel: So, in a way, I think football served as a common language for everyone, whether from the perspective of a gallery owner, the art world, former players, or whoever else.
Narrator: The project “Football as Infrastructure for Democracy” initially functioned as an initiative under the BETA Architecture Biennial and involved setting up a mini-football field in the center of Traian Square and organizing a friendly tournament featuring teams connected in one way or another to the neighborhood. But it was not only the group’s interest in contemporary art that inspired this initiative, but also a historic event at the Fabric: an annual football match between married and unmarried men, organized in the neighborhood since 1936. The event, whose history was captured in 2008 by local artist Vlad Gheorghe Cadar in a feature film titled Fair Play Day — and which I bring to light through a clip featuring the voice of one of the film’s characters — was also a source of inspiration for the organizers of the tournament in the square.
Man in the film: When I got married for the first time, I already had to play on the married team. But I remember perfectly well that our elders in the neighborhood cared deeply about this game and even gave me a mission: “Keep it up, because we’ve carried on this tradition for so many years. Now you carry it on with your friends and… So, a spirit of fair play… from start to finish. And all year round, when we meet, it’s as if we’re brothers. I have records dating back to 1936. So ’36, this is the 74th edition, this year.”
Narrator: This year’s championship aims to reconnect the community, if not to a common goal, then at least to a sense of togetherness that was once lost due to both the pandemic and the new developments in Timișoara’s urban landscape. In the square, strips of grass stretch across the perimeter marked with white lines, shaped like a football field. Their green instantly transforms the space, offering it, in the unusually strong October sun, freshness and a new vitality. Teams are formed, matches are drawn by lot, and the neighborhood children take over the still-untrodden grass. Across the street from me, at the Clover Bet bar, people shield their eyes to look this way, toward the spot where a craft beer bar has recently opened, drawing crowds from around the city center. The tournament, organized by the Jacob Toffler House Association, brings together people from the neighborhood on both sides of the field, as well as locals from other parts of the city. Mayor Fritz, with a face that’s a bit too serious, gives an interview to the local press. Today, football seems to be restoring a sense of justice to a space that no longer felt like it belonged to the community. A few women living in the building next door let themselves be carried away by a wave of nostalgia for a time when Traian Square had a different vibe.
Ladies from the neighborhood: Back then, it felt like we were all in this together. It felt different. There used to be a lot of people around here, but you don’t see them anymore. It’s changed a lot. So, first of all, just this square they built has ruined Traian. So there was grass, it was nice, people would go out in the evening to… outside… to sit on the benches. Now, lately, there are just three or four of us who still go out, otherwise…. When I came here, there were factories, there were factories. It was before the Revolution, anyway. No, wait, it was after the Revolution, but the factories were still there, still running. But… after that, foreign tourists showed up, so I can say our country has been bought up by foreigners, and the factories, and everything. Where’s the UMT, which used to be a factory…? I worked at their store; I worked in retail. So I worked at their store, there. So there were… all kinds of people, people and more people. It was June 1st, the Stockings Factory, the Glove Factory, where my brother worked. They tore it down, they only built villas. Then there was Banatul, where the shoes were made. And the Stockings Factory, and the Stockings Factory. Exactly, I forgot about the Stocking Factory. And the Stocking Factory… Back then there was Banat, Guban… The Shoe Factory, yes. The Glove Factory, there I can say… Yes, at IRB! No, IRB was here. The factory for… for… gloves… Nothing is made there anymore, nothing… It was beautiful. We had a beautiful city, you could say… So we could say it was the city of flowers, clean. So now, to say that it is…
Narrator: On Saturday, on the street behind Traian Square, the voices from the football field and the surrounding area fade away. The air smells of fried fish. Walk a little further, toward the farmers’ market. It’s called Badea Cârțan. The gutted houses are probably waiting to get their facades back. There are three backgammon games going on in front of the gray-haired man, who is confident and calm. Someone has gotten drunk. The lady at the store scolds him. Ripensia, Timișoara’s other team, has just beaten Iași 3–1 at Electrica Stadium, and the weekend brings a sort of joie de vivre to the neighborhood, slightly marred by the engines of some ’90s-style Audis. The fishermen on the river, where white box-like vaporettos pass by from time to time, talk loudly, as if they don’t care about those fish. Next to them rise the spires of Imre Makovecz, Viktor Orbán’s favorite architect. On these winding streets of the Fabric, a little girl hums the theme song from the movie Titanic, while a middle-aged man provides a counterpoint from an old bicycle. At Clover Bet, the old bar in the square, a game of chess is getting everyone worked up. A woman feeds the pigeons in the square, flanked by several billboards illustrating a proposal to redevelop and repurpose it. Some time ago, the debate over this project was heated. Timișoara, gripped, some say, by a frustration accumulated over decades spent in a sort of cultural and economic isolation, wants to be a city on the rise once again.
Laura: Well, I think that, if we’re going to start exactly where it began, it was still a response to a call for submissions for this BETA Architecture Biennial, which had this theme: the city as a common good. And so they put out a call… they had this vision of involving multiple nations and somehow having the entire city represented at the Biennial…
Gabriel: Micronations, yeah…
Laura: With micronations, exactly. And they had some examples in the main exhibition. And somehow they put out a call for submissions. I think it was only posted on Traian, right?
Gabriel: It was only on Traian…
Laura: Yes! And back then there was this excitement because… we were doing our internship…
Gabriel: in architecture
Laura: … I had started a project here, on Casă…
Gabriel: With Iso. Bogdan Isopescu.
Laura: In that sense, when I said we were focusing on the micro-community of the house and what’s here, we always had this underlying idea of expanding into the neighborhood, somehow. I mean, not just sticking to the neighbors right next door, but trying to get to know the other neighbors too and… eventually end up having a conversation or even doing some things in the neighborhood.
Gabriel: And the whole point was to get to know the neighborhood. When we moved here, we started doing some research: after all, what’s the neighborhood like, what are we looking for…
Laura: And you learn about history, but… not to say that history bores us, because…
Gabriel: It was nice.
Laura: Right… but, I mean, we could have heard this historical account from the neighbors, but somehow, we were intrigued by the fact that we felt at home here. We’d lived here in other years too, and somehow it felt different from what we encountered in other parts of Timișoara. And then this proposal came along — a collaboration between architects… with this artistic perspective on married and unmarried people. We were familiar with this dynamic through the lens of Vlad Cadar’s film Fair Play Day. We’ve done some artistic projects here in the neighborhood in past years. Because, well, it’s not a neighborhood where we were the only ones starting to do things, there were already some initiatives going on. And I think we also brought a perspective…
Gabriel: Yes, there were a lot of unrelated details like that. There was the game, for one thing; and then there were your events at the French Cultural Center, which were held right here in the neighborhood…
Laura: The nice ones, in the past. I mean… a kind of street dance that involved the local community; and we also created some installations in collaboration with others…
Gabriel: There was also Iso, who, I think, was basically the founder of BETA; he was part of the original team. And I think it went something like this: Iso somehow brought them all together, day by day, bit by bit.
Gabriel: And there was this carnival-like atmosphere where, all of a sudden, everyone would spring into action and… And it was striking that you’d be sitting there… For example, right? It would start on Friday, and you had to stay out late; then there was Saturday morning, when people… I don’t know, it was hilarious, because right there on the corner, at the House of Monkeys (Casa cu Maimuțe), one of those neo-Protestant bands was playing guitar, and we’d start playing football. But Sunday morning struck me as the most striking, you know? Waking up on Sunday at 9, sometimes it was cloudy and you’d see these big guys out there on the field, huffing and puffing and cursing, and they’re taking this thing so seriously that… yeah, it’s the kind of event where all you’re left with are memories, you know? And that’s super fucking cool, seeing that it can happen again every year. But, yeah, at first they didn’t believe it; in the second year it was a bit over-the-top because of the Capital (n.a. – the Timișoara, European Capital of Culture event); and in the third year, now, the weather was even worse; actually, you remember, even cloudier, but people were just as committed somehow, still… they were there…
Laura: And it was nice that these guys — the reigning champions, or whatever you call them — were explaining it to the newcomers: I mean, they’d smashed headlights, windshields, and so on; and they couldn’t keep it to a small field, so they’d be kicking those bombs, and now they were explaining it to the others: “Hey, look, this isn’t about football”; to the new guys who signed up for the league and were doing the same thing, they’d say: maybe you haven’t figured it out yet, but this isn’t about football, and they’d start lecturing them about what this project is and how we, the neighbors, get together, and actually…
Gabriel, Laura: Yeah, we have a beer here, play a game of football, share a platter, chat with the girls, there are mixed teams, and… Yeah, really cool.
Narrator: The event in the square serves as a community hub. It brings people together in one place, creating a gallery of neighborhood characters. Here you can hear everyone’s stories, such as that of the man who worked in Libya during Ceaușescu’s time and who now suffers because his children have left for Germany. Here, too, you can meet Mrs. Nuți. Having come to Timișoara many years ago from Herculane, she has a personal history connected to Mariana Drăghicescu, the Nightingale of Banat, with whom she sang in her youth.
Mrs. Nuți: That’s Drăghiceasca’s song. Yeah, I used to sing that with her, with… In Herculane, at Cerna. At Cerna, at Hercules, across from Cerna. Cerna is right next to the church. Then comes Hercules, and then Roman was built…
Narrator: Pepe, a thin, tattooed man dressed in baggy clothes, also sings. He makes a living wandering around the college campus or carrying goods for vendors in Badea Cârțan Square. He loves manele music, and when he sings it that evening, the crowd around him begins to split into factions.
Pepe: I don’t know, God has given me talent, worth, strength, and everything good I have. May God help you all! We’re having fun, drinking, eating…
Gabriel: Yeah, after that, music is another element that’s kind of very political, as we talked a little bit about. There was this idea of “pager music”, Arabic music versus the expectations of certain segments of the audience, whether or not to play manele, whether or not to play Lică Băia Fin, whether to play disco or… whatever you play.
Narrator: If this tension is what defines manele music, Pepe’s cheerfulness and sincerity should shatter it. But they don’t. A local, an amateur DJ, walks away disgusted. Later on, a discussion about the problems caused by the neighborhood’s Roma community brings things full circle. Perhaps it is precisely in this unresolved tension that the true value of the gesture lies. The football field failed to erase the neighborhood’s social contradictions; it did not create a temporary utopia where all conflicts disappear entirely. But perhaps it has done something just as important: it has given visibility to a community in transition, creating a space where everyone’s voice can be heard. While real estate developers are redrawing the neighborhood’s skyline with visions of luxury apartments and chic restaurants to replace the variety stores and secondhand clothing shops, the artistic intervention becomes an act of mapping the human. A sort of exercise in archiving a world that is disappearing.
Narrator: Perhaps behind these days of football lies a broader struggle. Traian Square no longer belongs solely to those who grew up there, who have spent their lives in the shadow of the sculptures on the buildings, and who know every story behind every corner. It is gradually becoming a backdrop for another world, one in which Pepe and his stories no longer quite fit in, as Timișoara-based film director Florin Iepan noted in an interview for the Sound Archive (Arhiva de sunet).
Florin Iepan: All of Timișoara is one big real estate hunting ground, you know? And I think that’s the most profitable industry in Timișoara; the real estate sector has by far generated the highest profits, and the biggest interests are centered around it, you know? And a problem that has emerged in recent years has been with the old historic districts, such as Traian, Iosefin, Bălcescu, to a certain extent, but not only those, which, in the early years after the Revolution, weren’t exactly depopulated, but there wasn’t much interest in them, since they were old buildings with issues regarding property ownership and legality. In a way, those areas fell into decline. You see people of modest means, many tenants, internal migration, and so on, and in the last 5–6 years, what has happened in Cluj has unfolded: there is a concerted effort by authorities and real estate interests to socially gentrify these areas. In other words, simply driving the poor out of these areas, most of whom, in Traian, are certainly Roma. The former mayor, for example, made some forceful statements threatening the poorer residents, those with uncertain housing situations in Traian, saying, “That’s it, it’s over; I’m bringing order, I’ll send the police after them,” and so on. And this is a very sad phenomenon because groups of people with no means are being driven out of the neighborhood where some have lived their whole lives. Now, in the case of Traian, we have very strong and recent real estate development across the Bega River, where this Isho complex is located. There is also revitalization of the tram depot area, which is also across the Bega River, near Badea Cârțan Square. And so, of course, there’s pressure on the other side of the river to clean things up and turn Traian into a sort of “jewel” neighborhood, with historic buildings, pastry shops, bars, upscale pubs, clubs, terraces, and so on. And now, this process is being greatly aided by what I consider to be some utterly uninspired projects by the City Hall, which encourage people from outside the neighborhood to visit, participate in activities there, come see jazz performances and movies, and so on, in a clear disconnect from the residents there, since there are many social cases and people who don’t even engage with this type of cultural project, experiments on the borderline between culture and intervention, and so on. But certainly, this European Capital of Culture has generated gentrification in many cities. It was a gentrification machine.
Narrator: The pressure of gentrification in all its forms is starting to be felt, even if for now it’s mostly getting lost in endless discussions. Actions will likely follow words very soon. Secondhand clothing stores from Northern Europe will also become a thing of the past. Likewise, the general stores, which generally offer affordable goods for the residents of an old working-class neighborhood. Real estate development, the favorite pastime of Romanian capitalism, will win the day here as well, just as it has everywhere else, from Cluj to Iași. In an article published this year, anthropologist Adrian Deoancă observed: “Traian Square, the neighborhood’s epicenter, offers today a visual map of this social and spatial polarization. On the right side, a craft beer bar, a fusion bistro with a neo-Romanian menu, and a café where coffee comes with a resumé and is measured in grams. On the left side, a cheap and popular bar, home to both skilled chess players and the hope of winning at the slot machines, a dusty library with few patrons, and apiculture shops that seem to be from another world. As one visitor observed, the bourgeoisie sit on the right, and the neighborhood’s old-timers on the left. Two worlds that share the same square, but rarely meet. The square’s population is like a chemical solution in suspension whose components mix temporarily, but invariably settle and separate.”
Narrator: The football field, with its temporary precariousness and the simplicity of the gesture, becomes a last refuge for a neighborhood democracy that seems on the verge of disappearing. The statue of the son with his middle finger raised is no longer just an act of vandalism or abstract resistance. It is a sign of recognition among those who still believe that the city can belong to everyone, not just those who can afford to buy it.
//
