Look for the Boys, and You Will Find Them Everywhere
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On the street where I grew up, the houses look all different from one another and during the heavy winter, the grey skyline complements the newly built modern residences. Right behind me, there is a patch of barren land, trash, and a tall brick-red metal fence! There is barely any grass ever growing. I am looking in the distance, guessing when the regular commuter bus will arrive at the station.

The bus is emerald green, and inside, there are Dutch text stickers telling the passengers to «leave an empty spot for wheelchair users in the designated area». I ride along the periphery for around 20 minutes as the bus jumps up & down the uneven roads, penetrating the outer layers of the Capital’s suburbs. Just one stop away, I encounter a kindergarten, built during the last few years that I lived in Romania; dark grey, Norwegian architecture, great for children :)) Immediately next to it, there is a specialty coffee bar, and a curly-haired DJ in his mid-thirties is playing House music for the parents waiting on their children to finish their day. This landscape strikes me as odd!; there were days when there was no asphalt on our street. Further down the street…there are some houses that look like they could fall apart at any moment…

If you look for it, you can still see the horizon, covered more and more by [construction sites]. The last bit of empty land is now dry, hosting a few species of plants that can thrive in arid fields, {at least until the developer of a new gated community pours cement over them}. «Vibrant communities where people share the same values and aspirations,» writes the website of one of them, and I think it is true.

The 461 turns left and enters the highway. Even in the brightest and most colourful sunset, the new apartment blocks and office buildings to my right look bland. From afar, they are aspirational. Passing them in a hurry, they make you feel insignificant. After all, people of Bucharest gather here from all corners of the city to work a very respectful, very corporate job.

With no place to linger, only to transit, you are almost where you are supposed to be, {somehow always in a car}. Thinking about this landscape, I am struck by a feeling that it is so MAN-ly and lifeless. The men build the buildings, the men give the jobs, the men drive the buses. Romania wants to be too much like the West, and the Boys will make that happen. They will buy the lands, they will build the churches, they will cut the woods, and they will launder money. They will be elected mayor for 20 years in a row; they will be corrupt. They will tell you the West is sick! with depravity, but they will bring its sickness into your neighbourhood. When the *Western* man comes window shopping in Romania, the Big Boys will give him your oil, your water, or your gold.

This is Pipera, a large neighbourhood on the northern periphery of Bucharest, located between Voluntari, a semi-rural town in Ilfov County, and the socialite Sector 1 of the Capital. Up until its industrialisation in the late 60s, this place was defined by pastures and forests. It remained physically separate from Bucharest up until the 90s, when a booming land market led to its rapid development. Pipera covers around 15 square km, and it is connected to the city by metro, bus lines, and the A3 highway. Among the high volume of skyscrapers and car showrooms, this district hosts numerous private schools and luxurious real estate projects. Despite this connectivity, the landscape is interrupted by construction sites, sporadic patches of grass, and scorched fields with ruderal plants.

In the interwar period, an aerodrome emerged in the area, thought to be built by the French and kept by the Romanian State. During Ceaușescu’s rule, Pipera became an industrial platform designated for factories and heavy labour, later connected to the city by metro as a project to bring workers in. Set up in 1975, FEPER was one of the prominent factories, responsible for computer peripheral components, gathering thousands of employees in the area, along with other factories such as ICE Felix (electronic computers), ROCIN (kinescopes) or Electronica and Turbomecanica facilities (electromechanical components).

Nowadays, Pipera is integrated into Bucharest’s economic landscape and it harbours what the centre cannot accommodate: large corporate parks (such as IRIDE Business Park, a hub hosting Raiffeisen Bank, Nestle, Orange, among others), a high volume of commuters, and rapid and careless housing construction. In the pursuit of Corporate Modernity, Pipera has become a site of *capital* imaginaries, rather than civic life.

Meanwhile, real estate projects such as ‘H Pipera Lake’ build gated suburban establishments, that shelter residents from the bustle of the city–yet in doing so– they reproduce class division @ the edge of the city. Even high-profile grifter Andrew Tate served part of his house arrest in his former mansion in Pipera, during his time of doing business {crime} in Romania. Such presence only strengthens the dialectical character of Pipera, and this site becomes an amalgamation of newly-capitalist ideologies of development that continually pushes previous margins outwards through a process of gentrification. This shows that peripheries are not unwavering, immovable, but active organisms absorbing what the centre deems incoherent within its mythical order.

The Centre is a Hole in a Sphere
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The periphery = structural element without which the centre cannot exist. The word derives from the Greek prefix ‘peri-’ (around) and ‘pherein’ (to bear), referring to a line surrounding a circular body. A centre continuously redefines itself by what it is not, rejecting and pushing objects on its outsides.

In the essay ‘The Gender of Sound’, Anne Carson suggests that dominant institutions, such as the metropole, require zones of rejection, which are deemed as improper, excessive, or disruptive. In demonstrating the complex array of regulations in preclassical and classical Greece, she looks at the well-documented laws of Solon. ‘Silence is the good order of women’ is a core convention, aiming at silencing the sound of women mourning. Any performances of ‘katharsis’/[funeral] lament were considered extreme and polluting. Such rituals were deemed impure and disturbing, and regulations were put in place to designate them to spaces outside of the city.¹

Laws were passed specifying the location, time, duration, personnel, choreography, musical content and verbal content of the women’s funeral lament on the grounds that these ‘harsh and barbaric sounds’ were a stimulus to ‘disorder and licence’ (as Plutarch puts it).²

These regulations reveal an early logic that maintains its authority by expelling what it considers destabilising. In early formulations of the Western city-state, the control of women’s sound practices reflects an urge to spatially separate between order and disorder, purity and pollution, sacred and excessive. This impulse is carried on by Neoclassicists, and it is given the name of ‘Greek Prejudice’ by Reginald Wilenski.³

They wanted to see in ancient Greece and Rome a rational, harmonious and restrained culture, as white and pure as the colourlessness they presumed in their statues. The archeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii around the dawn of the eighteenth century corroborated the idea that other forces were thriving in the Classical world; statues were polychromatic, ornaments were plentiful, and eroticism spread its fecund roots across regular life.⁴

Attitudes such as this one are at the root of a long Western (now globalised) tradition of structuring bodies and objects into hierarchies. The persistence of this repression of matter underlines how Western traditions repeatedly construct ideals of order by displacing what they deem abject and excessive elsewhere, reinforcing the necessity of a periphery even within their own foundational myths. Or, as Mary Douglas explains, dirt is ‘matter out of place’.⁵

What is determined by the colonial system is now a rather different kind of meaning-loss than this one: for colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life world—very different from that of the imperial power— remains unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to. Such spatial disjunction has as its immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole.⁶

Jameson explains how this hierarchy of the physical distribution of matter in the administrative system of a city highlights how the centre pushes many of its economic actors outwards. The nucleus remains pure, reserved for leisure, and continually reproduces the aesthetics of the ruling class. ‘Filth’ is pushed to the margin: think of literal dumping sites, as well as ethnic minorities or racialised groups that are secluded in marginal districts of a city or metropolitan area.

In an E-flux article {titled ‘Infrastructural Horror’}, artists Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich reflect on Jameson’s theories of imperialist spatial_distribution. As they explain, the urban disconnections between the metropole and periphery reflect an older pattern of separating daily life from the suffering and exploitation in the colony. The pleasure of the few and the myths of normalcy are maintained exactly by keeping the two different realities on opposite sides *physically*: comfort and pain! Material is extracted from a periphery => refining, cleaning, stripping away the violent origins <= newer, domestic, disguised, convenient, warm spaces that can conceal social, &/ecological violence.⁷

For the longest time, the Pipera neighbourhood and its adjacent areas have been –separated– by the city through infrastructure. Aside from the metro, which was the only efficient connection to the city, accessing Bucharest without a car has always been a struggle with {delays and improvisations}. In middle school, I had to take a crammed minibus with middle-aged male workers {…}, which dropped me at a tram line that would take me further into the city. Later, a bus route with long waiting times appeared. In this bus, I would mainly see older women and men, and students, mostly part of low-income communities – basically the demographic that does not usually have access to a car, nor the autonomy that it grants…

Nowadays, there are a few bus lines and a semi-recently inaugurated highway. Better connectivity to the city has been part of an agenda of ‘development’ in the area. The influx of residents seeking to live a quiet life outside of the city has resulted in even more housing projects, businesses, and shopping centres.

This new modernity is antithetical to the material reality of the place. Pipera is a site where pressure accumulates and becomes evident. Social groups *coexist*, but do not connect: the lower working class (some of whom are South-East Asian immigrants, part of a recent labour influx in the service sector) shares space with upper(-middle)-class Romanian families and foreign businessmen. As a casual commuter [when I am back home] I can say that There is a lot! of visual and structural chaos. Nothing stays the same, everything is changing all the time. Chaos is not always bad, but it manifests into a landscape of separations and tensions. If ‘perception is embodied’, the bodily experience of this place is exhaustion.⁸ The bus is my main connection with the regulars of this place; people on the bus are always cheerless, tired, annoyed {rightfully so}. It is the most honest reaction to long work hours, perhaps ‘ugly’ urban planning, Romanian politics etc. – it’s a reaction to the material of the world, which is the direct result of ideology.

Architect Krzysztof Nawratek writes that the margin is an active institution that reflects which diversities are expelled from the urban limits.⁹ Even though the *physical* edge of the city has not yet fully incorporated Pipera within the {Capital}, its status is currently shifting. Pipera is an economic power centre, concentrating corporate headquarters, IT campuses, and bank offices. It is (as of the last 20 years) a project of accelerated ‘Western’ modernisation. It is no longer a ‘homogenous’ leftover, but rather a fractured terrain of centres and margins. Romanian scholars call Bucharest ‘a genuine predator for the surrounding settlements’, noting that the cooperation between the Capital and the communities in the metropolitan area is complicated, and that rural communities oppose it {because ‘social segregation and functional specialisation’ strengthen exclusions and conflicts, tensions & social fractures in the metropolis}.10 Consequentially, these communities start acting as small towns with their own identities.

To me, the social stratification of Pipera is an odd scenery of class disparity and infrastructural failure. While being pulled into the orbit of Bucharest’s administration, Pipera performs a paradox of expansion: its fragments coexist without forming a shared public realm. There is no social, civic, or infrastructural cooperation: roads stay congested even between the peak hours, pedestrian space is scarce and improvised, and public services are unevenly distributed. To put it simply, Pipera is a spatialised hierarchy of value.

¹ Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound (London: Silver Press, 2025), 17.

² Ibid., 16.

³ Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 174.

⁴ Laura López Panigua, Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2024), 21.

⁵ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966), 36.

⁶ Fredric Jameson, 'Modernism and Imperialism,' in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 157.

⁷ Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich, 'Infrastructural Horror,' e-flux Architecture, 2024, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/621479/infrastructural-horror.

⁸ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004), 95.

⁹ Krzysztof Nawratek, Holes in the Whole (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 73.

¹⁰ Ioan Ianoș, Andreea-Loreta Cercleux, and Radu Daniel Pintilii, 'Remarks on Identity Building of Rural and Urban Communities in Bucharest Metropolitan Area,' 2010, 174.

Corporate Horror
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Monsters are a part of {folklore}; they are beings passed down orally, that shift shape over time. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that the monster is an embodiment of a specific cultural moment, dependent on time, space, and feeling.¹ They offer explanations for illness and death, lessons about social behaviours and community norms, they reflect nature’s unpredictability, and they encode social fears and exclusions. In Cohen’s vision, the monster explains current anxieties of a certain society ‘in a culturally intelligible way for that community’.²

THE MONSTROUS EAST: Eastern Europe seems to be abundant in folk and mythological creatures which have led to a schizophrenic construction of Eastern Europe as the birthplace of evil: the hideous and the frightful, vampirism and lycanthropy, witchcraft and black magic, diabolic rites and cruel customs, occultists and satanists, demons and fiends, spooks and ghosts, lesbian femme fatales and dangerous temptresses.³

There is a long history of portraying Eastern Europe as barbaric, much of which is mapped by Maria Todorova in ‘Imagining the Balkans’. As she reflects, a division between the East and the West comes as a formulation of 18th century philosophers, in an attempt to reorient Europe on a different axis (compared to the previous division between a North and South). The East was ‘behind’ the rest of Europe in terms of institutions, economic systems, industrial technologies, and rational cultures.⁴ The early use of the term ‘Balkanisation’ in the New York Times in 1918 explains the process of fragmentation of a geographical area into smaller, potentially hostile units.⁵ It became synonymous with ‘dehumanisation, de-esteheticization, and the destruction of civilisation’.⁶

The monstrosity of the East does not actually originate in the East itself, but in a Western cultural fantasy that has projected fear, excess, and moral instability onto its margins. Historically populated by folkloric figures such as vampires, witches, shapeshifters, disobedient bodies (muma pădurii, zburătorul, pricolici, strigoi, iele, balauri, căpcăuni, sântoaderi), the East has been portrayed as contamination and threat, a necessary Other through which the West could once again define itself as rational, disciplined, and pure.

Eastern ‘monstrosity’ does not disappear with modernisation, they have just shifted their shape. In our times, the ‘monstrous East’ is marked by the failure to develop economically, socially, ideologically, infrastructurally, etc., in the image of the West. This pressure to perform the West reflects in the fractured Romanian society and its ’black sheep’, its Othered agents, its internal monsters.

In a society that is profoundly patriarchal, racist, queerphobic, ableist, and classist, the Other is the one rendered (sometimes partially) outside of the bounds of systemic aggression and dominance. The further away from being a Patriarch, the closer you are to being marked as a monster. In 2026’s Romania, the Other is the UberEats immigrant driver, or the religious-Other, or the Roma trans woman, or the drug addict, or the sex worker, or the unfit-for-work, or the homeless.

Monsters make explicit a different as-if, an as-if not of default social roles, but of default ontology. Monsters are beings in some people’s worlds, but not everyone’s worlds. This is why thinking with monsters is such a great way to analyze how to live in an ontological state of as-if.⁷

‘The Othered’ defy the social rules of {development}, {Europeanness}, {civilisation}, and {purity}. Such agents frequently challenge the space they encounter. If anything, it’s the people who linger when movement is expected. The Patriarch dictates which monsters we should fear: the poor people, the ‘dirty’ people, the ‘queers’, and those whose visibility threatens the illusion of order and coherence.

What if the monster is the omnipresent entity that governs the landscape? If, as Musharbash and Gershon suggest, monsters inhabit some worlds but not others, then the corporation is precisely such a being both [hyper-visible and invisible] at once. This monster is neither dead nor alive; it has no particular consciousness, yet it rules. It is neither individual nor collective, neither material nor abstract. The Corporation is legally a ‘person’, but has no flesh. It occupies buildings, but it exceeds them. It is responsible, yet unaccountable.

Perhaps the most powerful monster is the one that presents itself as salvation, and precisely the one that is unaccountable. It stands tall in broad daylight, branded and protected.

The landscape communicates. It is a physical affirmation belonging and exclusion; it is a tool for identity construction. How does Pipera’s chaos and fractures shape its inhabitants? How does a noisy street, a church, or a McDonald’s mirror identity and redirect movement? How do advertisements, architecture, building materials, and dumping sites train bodies into certain alignments? As Sara Ahmed writes:

Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.⁸

Once we understand landscape as orientation, we can begin to see how peripheries re-enact direction and redirection. Feelings of fear, disgust, happiness, and safety are preconscious bodily reactions to symbolic communication from our surroundings. In this case, the embodied experience of a location is an instrument to perceive, process, and understand the greater forces of alienation and inclusion that are at play.

What are the sensations that settle in a body traversing Pipera’s bumpy, congested roads, beneath glass towers that dwarf the body? How does the dense soundscape shape our perception and desire? Whose faces populate the scene, and how does that inform us about our own belonging?

Our physiological responses are meant to guide us, but what happens when our bodies are dulled by poverty or exhausted by chronic stress? Under these conditions, the monster doesn’t need to hide anymore, and resisting it becomes easily coded as a secret agenda or backwardness. And just like that, things stay unchanged.

¹ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 'Monster Theory (Seven Theses),'' in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

² Yasmine Musharbash and Ilana Gershon, eds., Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023).

³ Petrică Mogoș, 'Editorial: Brief Histories of Struggle,' in KAJET No. 3 – On Struggle (Bucharest: Dispozitiv Books, 2019), 17.

⁴ Maria Todorova, Balcanii și balcanismul (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2000), 33.

⁵ Ibid., 77.

⁶ Ibid., 83.

⁷ Musharbash and Gershon, Living with Monsters, 19.

⁸ Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.

Adopting Inferiority
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I propose we look at Pipera as a symptom of a larger movement in the Romanian culture, rather than an {isolated & unfortunate} anomaly. I will speak of *desires*, as opposed to monsters, and what Romania aspires to correct and achieve. Perhaps the framework of self-colonisation may be more precise than that of gentrification alone; because it unfolds a deeper internalisation of external hierarchy. Gentrification explains who is displaced, while self-colonisation explains why the displacement is necessary and even desirable.

Gentrification describes economic reordering and displacement within a capitalist urban logic: investment enters, property values rise along with living costs, and those who can’t keep up [leave].

Self-colonisation describes the deeper psychological and cultural mechanism through which a marginal space reproduces the hierarchies that once subordinated it. It is about the internalisation of the ‘Greek Prejudice,’ about ‘whitening’, cleansing, and aligning the landscape with Western modernisation. Alexander Kiossev writes:

I wonder whether it is not possible to call such cultures self-colonising? The reason for such a strange name is rather simple - in such cultures the social and symbolic "Order of Modernity" is not carried out by means of forceful colonisation in which the native culture is totally conquered and destroyed by European conquistadors, and the natives are exterminated or enslaved. […] It seems that the self-colonising cultures import alien values and civilisational models by themselves and that they lovingly colonise their own authenticity through these foreign models. […]
That is to say - by adopting these alien universal models, the self-colonising cultures traumatise themselves – for they also adopt their own inferiority, their own painful lack of essential Substance and Universality.^*

His ideas help explain why transformation in places like Pipera are rarely framed as violence. Romanian discourse surrounding development, mainly led by the political class, is fully aligned to aspire to Western norms, and it is almost always marked by a very specific talk of improvement and correction. This is, of course, in favour of a part of the people in power. When the EU spares money for your ‘developing’ country, you kind of have to align with their ideologies. How can you launder EU money, if you are not going to get it in the first place? And just like that, development becomes proof of belonging. To criticise it risks sounding nostalgic, or provincial.

Romania’s geopolitical position at the eastern edge of Europe intensifies this dynamic of self-colonisation. Our history is shaped by successive empires and some decades of socialism. We have repeatedly been positioned ’behind’ the West {socially, culturally, institutionally, economically}, so we entered a long race trying to catch up. But what if we are actually just selling ourselves voluntarily?

Under the pretext of Western alignment, Romanian political elites have often embraced foreign investment and resource concessions as proof of economic openness. While these agreements are not formal conditions for EU, Schengen or NATO membership, they reveal how peripheral states may over-accommodate external capital in order to signal reliability and modernity. Afterall, 51% of Romania’s national oil resources are owned by Austrian company OMV. Apa Nova water company is controlled by French group Veolia.

Within this context, landscapes such as Pipera become a visual grammar of modernity and aspiration, because they signal discipline, efficiency and rationality; on the surface, they promise proximity to a centre that is geographically distant but culturally dominant. Yet, what I want to highlight is that marginality does not prevent the reproduction of hierarchy. The paradox is that Pipera is simultaneously peripheral and central: it concentrates a significant amount of capital through multinational corporations, particularly in the technology, finance and outsourcing sectors.

This very configuration reveals a form of dependency. The presence of foreign corporate headquarters, attracted by relatively low labour costs and favourable fiscal conditions, situates the area within global economic circuits while maintaining the broader region in a position of structural ‘behindness’. Pipera thus operates as a node where global capital is accumulated locally, even as the wider national economy remains positioned at the periphery of the {social, cultural, institutional, and economic} modernity it tries to achieve.

So how can we ideologically navigate a visual landscape that advances toward a notion of modernity rooted in the West, while remaining peripheral, while also reproducing new forms of exclusion by pushing bodies and objects outward?

^* Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures,” in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999).

Afterword (On Attachments and Detachments)
•••••

We all internalise centres and margins long before we can name them. They settle deep into our bodies and unconsciously transform into orientations, indicators of belonging, or hesitations. I can speak from within my own coordinates.

As someone who has grown up in this area, I hold its memories and rhythms in my body. As someone who does not live there anymore, it is somehow easier to look, frame and analyse, while keeping a certain distance. That can create a gap that might not allow me to contain the stories and experiences of others.

As a child, living outside the city represented a class marker and a sort of impediment to reaching places quickly. It shaped how fast one could arrive or how late one could stay. It quietly indicated your perception of time, and it turned mobility into a privilege.

As a queer Romanian, the emotional experience of the periphery is one that I can recognise intimately. It is the feeling of being outside, yet oriented towards an inside that you can never reach. You must learn to read its signals and understand that your belonging is never guaranteed.

Speaking from this position, I must acknowledge both my attachment and my separation. When depicting Pipera in my film pictures, I construct a *specific, personal* encounter, one more dramatic in tone and more monumental in time, where markers of failure become strikingly clear. The black and white images, high in contrast stay still: they do not show faces of people and they represent a short, fleeting moment in the history of this neighbourhood. A lot of {emotional, physical, journalistic} information has been omitted, and I do not claim that I cover it.

These visual elements can assemble into a posture of powerlessness that is deceptive by flattening its complexities and frictions. Yet, I think it might reveal new ways for artists, writers, or cultural workers to approach artistic discourse regarding Eastern Europe. Are we reformulating an already prescribed perspective? Does this representation ask for pity by reinforcing a phenomenon of self-colonisation and exoticisation of failure? How can we bring new ways of understanding our landscapes??

Looking back @ the past 4 years of studying graphic design, I understand that design is about structuring, guiding, communicating, and decision making concerning matter and movement. ‘The manipulation of physical materials, that operate symbolically, affects the world’.^* The interaction between matter and movement is responsible for affect and experience. Designing is not a utopian force; it can be (and it is) authoritative. And if matter embodies consciousness, then it embodies prescribed structures. For me, ‘designing’ has revealed the ‘preconscious’ ways in which we orient and respond to the world.

How can understanding the underlying design of our civic life allow us to rework our worlds? &&& How can designers become more attentive to the visual messaging embedded in the environments we encounter day by day? By recognising how these structures guide behaviour, shape perception and reinforce hierarchies, designers may begin to imagine ways of intervening, resisting, and working alongside {monsters, plebs and freaks} in shaping our immediate localities.

^* Laura López Panigua, Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2024), 25.