Brezoi: practices of rhythm Contact : Mihaela Efrim Fundatia Comunitatea pentru Dezvoltare Locala Brezoi Strada Lotrului nr 42 Brezoi-1074 tel.fax 00-40-50 778331 http://www.brezoi.net/ photo credit : Fundatia Comunitatea pentru Dezvoltare Locala Brezoi

If in Sincrai, the dance workshop has spontaneously initiated change, in the case of the Custom Park project in Brezoi, the cultural aspect has proved even more of an accelerator and a "mixing' agent within the existing socio-economic dynamics . The cultural event planned to be " a working camp to renovate historical building " was contextualised in this case within a previous experience, being consciously involved in a market strategy . Brezoi is a locality with 12ooo inhabitants located in the middle of some of the highest Romanian mountains. It is a mono-industrial town typical of the communist period when its development was focused exclusively on the timber industry. In the last ten years the timber industry has collapsed and the unemployment rate in town has increased . Between 1996-1997 the Foundation "Community for Local Development" Brezoi implemented a Program of Active Measures to alleviate the unemployment in the area (PAEM). The foundation set up a "Custom Park" and built two houses which are school workshops for wood processing, wickerwork furniture, carpet weaving and traditional embroideries. As a result of the PAEM Program, over 150 persons were trained, some of them continued the activity as individual entrepreneurs in the area or started to work in other European countries. Starting with 1997, the Foundation has developed another project co-financed by EU- The FIDEL program for local economic development. The foundation adopted sustainable policies in developing production made by wood and wool without pollution and purchasing ecological equipment for timber drying, wool spinning, sawdust, briqueting . The low technics of the traditional crafts were supplemented with new technological additions. A "business incubator" was opened for small emerging enterprises, handicraftsmen and local craftsmen . Another step in ensuring conditions for local socio-economic development was to set up a core of touristic infrastructure in the area, by starting with a working camp to renovate buildings and historical monuments open to international students, another Phare collaboration). This periodical event was supposed to draw attention and generate new dynamics in the area which has a high potential in mountain- and agro-tourism. Being insured to specific procedures of the Phare programs, Michaela Efrim has initiated and successively implemented all these projects in her home town which is economically a dying town. In a way the "becoming" of the Brezoi community and her own individual "becoming" are topologicaly connected. The rhythms of activity in the Custom park are most of the time resounding the fluctuations of her diary. "Power" and "size" in transitional practices are always network effects. The transitional practices have to negotiate between dynamics of change and resistance to change... They are liminal actors and poietic agencies that alternatively embody fixity and fluidity, resistance and empowerment. My friend, Mihaela is not a master-architect for Brezoi, but a poietic agent... She articulates a rhetoric of making within different materials, knowledges and conditions: she experiments without contradiction assemblages between "laissez faire" ideologies and "faire avec" practices, as a policy to stimulate desire in the community. Desire itself -as noticed by Grosz- is "an actualisation, a series of practices.(...) It assembles things out of singularities and breaks things, assemblages, down into their singularities. It moves; it does". Michaela "moves" and "does" when she translates the European global policy of integration and its institutional implementation into "micro-politics of desire" (Guattari), taking care in assembling and preserving singularity, unicity, rarity within the small scales. Yet, the Custom Park is not only a collective space of production but also a "device to produce subjectivity through individual or collective re-singularisation"(Guattari ) and to avoid homogenisation within professional formation and economic development. By introducing "mixity" and "social morphing" within a mono-economic and socially homogenous community, the "Custom Park" has important consequences in the urban regeneration of Brezoi. Within its apparently "traditional" architecture, it promotes contemporary concepts of urban design. Being at the same time (or successively) an administrative institution, a space of production, a service agency, a park, a museum of traditional crafts, a business incubator, a school and an information centre, the Custom Park is a work-in progress-cross-programming which re-centre and re-orient the city both spatially and socially without closing any possibility for future developments. Sincrai was an inferential model for Brezoi. Michaela has participated in a colloquium organised by the "Soros Foundation for an Open Society" in Sincrai and learned from their experience that an "event" could generate new dynamics or accelerate the existing ones. The idea of a working camp for historical building renovation in Brezoi emerged with the dance workshop in Sincrai. The seductive power of the dancing bodies and their commercial success made that the organisational details of the " six pairs of dancing children" story stirred the post-industrial space of Brezoi confronted with unemployment and economic dissolution.