During a lifetime of publishing, sometimes it was the books I was not able to publish that had the greatest impact on my imagination. Among the most notable of the not-published books I worked on was a project by Mariana Celac called „Tinseltown” –a study of „gypsy architecture” in Romania that she first introduced me to during my inaugural visit to Bucharest in 2000. It was during that same visit that Eda Čufer and I found our way to Timișoara, a city marked by a residential style of architecture made by Rroma craftsmen unlike anything I had seen before or since.
Mariana Celac provided us with a rivermap of the Danube, marking the stops we should make along the way. Like the book I never published, her map delineated a trip I never completed. Twenty years later, Mariana Celac’s half-finished manuscript and map remains part of a half-archive, half-artwork of things arranged throughout my home, a collection that exists somewhere between art and garbage…fragments of experience that remain unclassifiable but that somehow seem too important to throw away. […]