10 characters, a map, a story and a layout in search of Mitica

Location: Bucharest, Historical Centre
Period: June-September 2009

Who's Mitica? attracted the Bucharest public in an active way to celebrate the city and included a (re)discovery of the historical and cultural city, through a participative art project, conducted together with Bucharest city dwellers.
Who's Mitica? proposes an informal, interactive and participative (re)discovery of a part of the history of Bucharest. The public art project was organized under the I love Bucharest programme for the anniversary of 550 years of documentary attestation of Bucharest.

It brought Mitica, a mythical urban figure and now a large sculptural object, created by visual artists, along with other 9 characters representing 10 cultural-historical sites of the old center of Bucharest.

In the collective imagination, Mitica is the typical Bucharest dweller. For this project, Mitica was also a storytale character. In the story of a lady traveller who come to Bucharest to find the one who had stolen her heart at a ball in her town, in Targoviste, the old capital of Valachia. Eight other characters joined in in her quest of Mitica. These were fantastic, comic, realistic and historical figures of Bucharest in the past few centuries: some of the leaders of Valachia, an officer, a rich man, a lawyer, a merchant, a typical city dweller and even an intellectual dragon.

How and where the characters were created?

Ten visual artists together with children, highschool pupils, students and volunteers worked in a series of creative workshops that took place during the summer, in the yard of the Sutu Palace, the City of Bucharest Museum.

All parricipants first became acquainted with the museum of the city and the history of ten special places in the Old Centre and then imagined ten characters speaking about them in an artistic manner. Figures of lords, officers, travellers, merchants, ladies and gentlemen of different centuries were recaptured through the characters (overdimensioned sculptural figures) created by the artists and their little helpers.

Wood, polystyrene, fabrics, paint, feathers, paper, beads and many other were the materials used for hands, legs, moustaches, hats, shoes, clothes and all the other details of the atrworks.
The children learnt different artistic techniques, drew, painted, made collages and worked in a creative and cheerful environment.

Looking for Mitica, a weekend in the Old Centre

The people of Bucharest met the ten characters during the weekend that marked the anniversary of 550 years since the documentary certification of Bucharest. This took place between the 18th and 20th of September 2009, on the Days of Bucharest event, organised by ArCub and the Bucharest City Hall.

A few hundred guests (tourists, city dwellers, students, parents, grandparents, passers-by) came to help the lady traveller find Mitica.

They started the adventure with the help of a map that they completed following the story, divided into 10 parts, 10 stages of the adventure of the lady traveller and the characters that she crosses along the way, each of them giving out clues.

The end of the quest contained another challenge: imagining an end to the story of the lady traveller and Mitica. The most inspired and imaginative were gratified with books, art courses or little souvenirs.