The Bucharest of Mircea Eliade

Authors’ Comment

What might a city built of words be? Because Eliade's Bucharest is the city we find scattered over novellas and novels and, beyond that, it is rife in the words, thoughts and states of many fictional characters. Even the Bucharest of journals or memoirs is still a city of words, that is, one of reality filtered by memory, by emotion, by chance, which eventually also becomes a mental construct.

Starting from Andreea Răsuceanu's book, which provides the title for this exhibition, we have undertaken to build a virtual tour of the actual inter-war city, and at the same time of fictional Bucharest as it appears in Mircea Eliade's writings.

A literary geography of Bucharest, viewed on maps from 1914, 1928, 1938, where we have marked real places, houses and streets, which actually existed, and which are largely preserved to this day. On the maps, we have marked not only the actual streets and buildings, but also characters and narrative moments or literary quotes which give significance to the respective street or house.

The exhibition also provides a series of current photographs of the mentioned streets, next to a few vintage photographs. At a first glance, what was left in the built reality of Eliade's city is a consistent collection of Neo-Romanian, eclectic and Modernist architecture. For the current photographs, Andreea Cel Mare has minutely wandered the streets, shooting the frames equally, frontally, descriptively. Only buildings prior to 1945 were selected for the photo shoot. Another choice was that of photographing and presenting mainly the houses which were not rebuilt or re-paired, or the fences and gates which were not covered in tin sheet or polycarbonate.

We have thus attempted to approach the original architecture and decorations, mainly their freedom of being seen, and to look at the street that once belonged to the interwar city’s front yards. The photos were deliberately edited in black and white, to dull the coloured presence of new layers. Inasmuch as possible, we have reduced the impact of wall graffiti and ads, and, implicitly, the colour of cars, to create a balance between the old and the new images.

The exhibition is structured on 7 major themes: City of Eliade, Modernist Bucharest, Violent Bucharest, Tram 14, Houses and Gardens, Mythical Bucharest, Super-sensory network. Beyond the urban archaeology of street names, character and tram routes, of event scenes or house typologies, 7 cinematic installations provide an artistic commentary on some of the selected literary quotes. Inspired by film techniques from the dawn of cinematography, the installations invite you to experiment them in order to trigger an animated sequence, or to recompose your own Eliade’s Bucharest.