The Enchanted Gardens of Ada Kaleh

Ada-Kaleh was an ancient island on the Danube, between Serbia and Romania, inhabited by a Turkish community descending from the old defenders of the Ottoman Empire. This landscape, described as an utopia with the qualities of an immense lush garden where people used to live in harmony, was destroyed and flooded by the Romanian communist government in 1970, leaving behind pieces of collective memory.
The island inspired stories, myths and exaggerations. The only trace left of this entire cultural landscape is an impressive archive of documents, paintings, surveys, and writings. The work, as a whole, is a celebration of this archive.The project is a multi-layered unfolding of the archive, formulated as a series of attempts to augment the spatial imaginary of Ada Kaleh. It proposes an experimental recovery of the submerged island using investigation, curatorial work, graphic reconstruction, and fragmentary architectural interventions. These methodologies respond to the identity of the site and its remembrance, creating an alter-ego of the island.
The name of the project references Ferdinand Bac’s “Jardins Enchantés” - a book about an imaginary journey through 36 gardens inspired from his own designs. This is the departure point of the project, because it illustrates a highly unexplored connection between physical and imaginary space, that have the potential to enhance and expand each other. The project is an investigation on how spatial narratives and artistic curation could contribute to conveying the essence of cultures in peril. It experiments with the intertwining of cultural production and cultural preservation processes.