RABLA
2011-2013
In 2005 the Romanian government started a program for the renewal of the national automobile fleet. Any car older than 10 years was good to be traded for a voucher ticket, to be later used for the purchase of a new car. The program was named RABLA (rattletrap/wreck), and the REMAT national recycling centers became the host. The first to answer the call were mostly the 70s and 80s Dacia, which in their time were the only available cars for the majority of the population.
Starting from 2011 I visited various REMAT centers. I decided to refer to just one of them, as layout and situational reference. I chose the REMAT center of Chitila, located at 9 km from Bucharest. The moment of my first visit was September 2011. The field in city’s suburb was packed with piles of old Dacia. I revisited the center in March 2013 and found the place looking more burial, as a result of a dramatic decrease in the registered cars.
At first, The RABLA call generated an underground black market, because the voucher tickets were not nominally assigned. Groups of scouts formed, specialized in finding and bargaining old Dacia. Considering that many of these cars were also abandoned wrecks, the business was very profitable. In 2012 the possibility to trade the vouchers was revoked and only individually registered cars were accepted. The funding from the ministry of environment caused an annual reduction of available vouchers: from 190.000 units in 2010, 120.000 units in 2011, to 45.000 in 2012 and 20.000 units in 2013. Authorities end the RABLA program while almost doubling the value of the voucher in 2013.
I have also discovered the REMAT routine when it came to handling RABLA cars. All the cars were received sorted and piled in the daylight and were processed only by the night shift. The processing procedure is the phase in which everything is grinded, then mixed with other scrap coming from dismalting, or rated as garbage. Once the processing phase starts, Dacia loses its visual identity: it is pressed and integrated in monumental cubic structures, later shredded in tiny pieces, which integrates in a scrap mix that defines a last spectral form of the car. I highlighted a transformation process, which presents the molding of the late “state pride” in a monster-like form, in which the former Dacia meshes.
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