Socialist realist in nature, the "Woman with Grape" statue by Bela Szakats, located in Academician Corneliu Miklosi Square, is a focal point where various social fabrics and urban layers meet, in an accidental collision that gives dimension of the historical transitions of the Fabric neighborhood .

More than 50 years after its installation, as part of an extensive project to re-ideologize the new residents who were allocated the former bourgeois apartments of the report palaces of the area, the statue now bears some cuts on the shoulder and forearm, resembling traces of self-flagellation attempts. 

With its left hand completely severed under circumstances that can only be speculated upon, together with the decayed pedestal and the absence of any trace of authority, the "Woman with Grapes" becomes the ideal subject for a process of repair and restoration, to which a "prosthesis" - a vegetative transplant, as ephemeral as it is alive - is added. 

This series of floral bouquets, created in collaboration with landscape architect Alexandru Ciobotă and with the help of biologist Corina Steiu, brings a kind of poetic justice to this physical amputation, while also provoking a dialogue with a lost urban element - a canal of the Bega River that once flowed through the exact location where the statue stands. 

Over the course of several months, we observed how the spontaneous flora in the Bega floodplain evolves and changes, some signs of these transitions being extracted from their habitat to be periodically inserted into the arm of the handless statue. It is an attempt to symbolically reconnect the (re)constructed environment with the natural one, in a gesture of contemplation and self-contemplation of both nature and ourselves.

Artist: Gabriel Boldiș