1989

I wonder if nature always plays the same game (Einstein) Of course I was coming from sleep, how else is a day supposed to start? However, I didn't know much about the world I was coming from. On the other hand, the world I had landed in should have been very familiar

I certainly am neither the first, nor the only person to notice that the fantastic appears as a distinctive feature of Nordic, non-Latin peoples, rather than of the meridional spirit. The solar, mercantile, skeptical-rationalist South, and the sanguine, outgoing, relativistic

It may be said about some cities that they are theatrical; that – in other words – they look like a stage set. Take, for instance, Venice or Naples. It may be only an illusion, however, given a host of plays by Goldoni or Eduardo de Filippo whose plots revolve around

Paul Neagu's Century Cross was set up at Charles de Gaulle Plaza (the former TelevisionPlaza), Bucharest, in September 1997, as a memento of the 1989 anti-Communist riots. It is a six meter wide lenticular bronze disk with a large cross pattern on both faces made up

Architecture represents a means of interrogating history. Rather ominous, it is to be feared, when the question applies to the Romanian capital. Why so? The way Bucharest has been subjected to transformations in the last century accounts for the living changes affecting

If you read travel notes by simple tourists or people on journalistic, cultural or political assignments, from the 1920s or 30s, if you peruse recurrent images about a Bucharest imprinted with evil or good charms, equally decrypted and encoded, moving and repulsive, you

In the heart of Romania's Capital stands the monumental building of the Romanian Athenaeum, the symbolic edifice of the most significant musical events ever since 1889 and, at the same time, the cradle of the International George Enescu Festival. There is no musical

Bucharest became the capital of Wallachia in the middle of the sixteenth century in preference to the earlier sub‑Carpathian capitals of Câmpulung, Curtea de Argeş and Târgovişte. It became the capital of the united Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia

Almost no one in Vintileasa saw on TV the scene when the revolutionaries broke into the famous Studio 4 in the afternoon of 22 December 1989. The villagers were busy doing other, more important things. Some were killing their Christmas pigs. Others were stealing wood. Most

Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Simplicity is at bottom complexity and one must be nourished on its essence to understand its significance. Catalog of Brâncuşi exhibition, Brummer

The founder of the Theater of the Absurd (with The Bald Soprano, staged in 1950 by Nicolas Bataille at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris, a play he had begun in the 40s while still in Romania under the title English without a Teacher), a member of the French Academy from

In a holographic note drawn up in Romanian in the third person, Brâncuşi speaks about himself as about someone else and makes an important remark in connection with his relationship with materials. Turned down in 1910, he exhibited fully carved stone and marble for the