Relations

Bucharest is a city that is difficult to describe, and difficult is a term that tends to suggest the word impossible. Many of us have probably at least once in our lifetime been in the situation of talking about the city that we live in. And, just as probable, among the

I used to play this game when I was a child, I played it so often that, from one day to the next, I always remembered to keep some leaves of grass, small leaves or even an entire plant, root and all, in my pockets, socks or sleeves. Little children played it too, later on.

Just another day in Bucharest, in the year 2006, in summer. My friend, an architect, who accompanies me on my visit to a “bedroom suburb”, feels shivers down his spine. Maybe it is because he doesn’t like “the poetry of concrete”. Or maybe he has a problem with

1st row: National History Museum, Old Court Museum, Archeology Museum (detail), National Museum of Art2nd row: Collections Museum, Zambaccian Museum, Theodor Aman Museum, Gh. Tattarescu Museum 3rd row: Storck Museum, Romanian Peasant Museum, Astronomical Observatory (detail),

Bucharest is a city in search of identity. Its precise moment of birth is unknown, for the Cetatea Dîmboviţei of the 14th and 15th centuries only played host to its rulers when they occasionally came to ward off threats from south of the Danube or Hungarian attacks form

The different man exhibits both what is permanent in the human spirit and the changes occurring throughout History. Tell me who your different man is and I will tell you who you are. I A DESCRIPTION OF THE DIFFERENT MAN A Key Concept: Radical Otherness Man does not move

A Word with Two Meanings We invent words, then let ourselves be subjugated by them. There would be no knowledge without words, but it is words again that grow into independent entities, obstacles that come between us and the real world. They move us closer to and at the

The 1900 Crisis The Break By 1900, no more bets. Pessimism. Denial of progress, return of the cyclic history. Social conflicts. Revolutions. Decline of the West and the yellow peril. Anti-utopia. The Great War. Abstract art. Earthquakes. Halley's comet. The end of the

CHAPTER I Structures and Methods An Ambiguous Condition What if the history of the imaginary did not exist? Beyond all paradox, the question deserves to be raised. Following a hectic and contorted history, this discipline is hindered by theoretical and ideological difficulties.

A Message to the International Surrealist Movement  We address ourselves to our surrealist friends scattered all over the world and, as in great shipwrecks, we indicate to them our exact location, at latitude 44° 5' North and longitude 26° East. The inexhaustible

(excerpt) (…)Utility, beautiful, good, value – what are they good for? We only have to strip the object of all these cretinized uniforms. Sometimes I catch myself providing it with them. Then the object looks crippled, fettered. The force of habit, this idiotic habit

The message addressed to international surrealism. Theoretical contributions and techniques proposed by the Romanian surrealists Between 1938-1940, two young Romanian poets, Gellu Naum and Gherasim Luca, were in Paris – Naum to study philosophy, and Luca as the precarious