Robert Rumas’s works bear a strong relation to social codes, stereotypes, and the mass cultural fetishes which control society's imagination. Public spaces have often been thematically juxtaposed by the artist with what is private, creating a space where the two realities overlap themselves establishing a vivid and constantly changing ‘common space’. Urban spaces undoubtedly represent such a common space where power, economy, and various forms of existence are manifested.
The artist has been working on intervening in the social flesh of urban agglomeration since 1998. The first Urban Manoeuvres project was realised in Gdańsk two years later. Rumas described the idea of the project in the following manner:
This project is a contextual reflection upon the social functioning of spaces and people. It refers directly to the issue of the stigmatization and appropriation of urban public spaces which determines these particular social relations defined by customs, ethnicity, history, politic, time, space, culture and faith.
Urban Manoeuvres is meant to focus attention on the social specificity of particular cities as well as interhuman and intercultural relations within them, along with creating a map of places where something exceptional, but typical for a particular street, park, or settlement, takes place. The artist paid special attention to pathologies and the question of why they emerge in defined public spaces. Each time, before initiating a new project, Rumas studies the social situation in a chosen city to get familiar with its specificity and history by having long conversations with inhabitants, reading local newspapers, and gathering information on the Internet. Thereafter, he designs a set of signs – pictograms reminiscent of road signs – and places them on pavements, beside roads, in urban settlements and parks, next to train stations, and in the surroundings of various institutions.
If an individual project is accompanied by an exhibition, Rumas presents his city plans on a table (200x200cm) with diminutive signs and sticks to move them, designed specifically for the project which allow visitors to create the maps themselves by marking pictograms on the maps of their cities.
I have my ‘headquarters’ in galleries and it makes me think of war manoeuvres: a huge headquarters table with a map on it of important places marked by miniature signs. My visitors are my staff…
The artist wants to encourage people to speak about the places they live in and ask questions of their concerns for public space, including the threats they recognize in their cities.
Planting signs in urban public spaces is illegal and has the wild character of ‘urban guerrillas’.
All of the signs have characteristic ideograms that are to be read or even decoded. The artist designed a full series of them, e.g.: Exit for Men, Catholic Way, Begging, Gossip, Pissing in the Gateway, Masturbation, Only for Artists, Road with Priority for Men, Sex – 500, The Homeless, Kidnapping, Danger, No Danger. In Bytom, a city with a very high suicide rate, the artist placed a sign prohibiting acts of self-aggression (2004). In the very same city, at the entrance of The F. Kachl City Park the artist placed a sign saying ‘National Prayer’, referring to it as an infamous assembly point of nationalist gatherings. In Szczecin, the city map was also available in the Internet (manewry.szczecin.art.pl). The inhabitants were able to leave comments, justifying why they would like certain signs in certain spaces.
Each realization of Urban Manoeuvres has its own photographic documentation.
Urban Manoeuvers has hitherto taken place in Gdańsk, Kraków, Baden-Baden, Chicago, Tallinn, Vilnius, Warsaw, Bytom, Szczecin, and Vienna.
Author: Ewa Gorządek, April 2016, translated by Antoni Wiśniewski, April 2016
Robert Rumas, Urban Manoeuvres
First realization in 2000 in Gdańsk
Urban public space projects
Culture.pl