From literature to the streets and back

text and photo: Iosif KIRÁLY

Bucharest, Layers and Perspectives. Between Reality and Fiction, between Literature and Architecture is a multidisciplinary project involving students with different specializations (literature, architecture, anthropology and photography) and their teachers. The project aims at discovering and analyzing in the field novel perspectives of knowing and understanding the city. The starting points are the books Bucharest. Arhitectură. An annotated guide and Architect B. Ioanide. Life and Work, which offered participants two different perspectives on the city, points of view that were extended and generated nuanced ideas and experiences translated into debates, creative workshops/guided tours, exhibitions.
The annotated guide analyzes objectively, succinctly, critically and from different points of view several hundred buildings and ensembles significant for the development of the city, offering a reading from an architectural perspective superimposed on numerous historical, memorial and cultural landmarks.
Ioanide's Pseudo-biography is a sophisticated book, somewhat unparalleled in Romanian literature to date, written in two parallel columns (basically, two complementary texts), offering multiple perspectives and layers of reading. The book is, as Augustin Ioan remarked in a review, "a meticulous deconstruction in the Derridean sense of the text and the references to which it refers (Călinescu's bio-bibliography, but also the bio-bibliography of the characters that Călinescu would have had as a background or subtext model, such as Horia Maicu, Doicescu or perhaps Duiliu Marcu himself)".

The first phase of the project aimed to set up mixed working groups with students from different fields and specializations, who familiarized themselves with the two books, but also with the way in which each of them related specifically to urban places and situations that they revisited together, after reading them. Photographs were taken, discussions were held in smaller or larger formats, texts were written, audio recordings were made. Some of the resulting material was presented in an exhibition format at the A5 gallery in Piața Amzei street.

In the second phase, new perspectives were added by reading and analyzing other novels in which Bucharest is an important component. From Nicolae Filimon, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Mateiu Caragiale, Camil Petrescu, Mircea Eliade, Radu Petrescu to Mircea Cartărescu, Ovidiu Verdeș,Constantin Abăluță, Ion Manolescu, Filip and Matei Florian, Radu Aldulescu.

><img src= Several guided tours were organized on the traces of the writings of these authors and some of the participants produced themselves short texts analyzing their own collaborative experience. We all debated quite a lot about the different ways of relating to certain situations characteristic of the urban environment from the perspectives of the professions we have or will/will have after graduation. An interesting colloquium took place at the Bucharest Branch of the Order of Architects, with the participation of specialists in the field of architecture, such as: Șerban Sturdza, Augustin Ioan, Arpad Zachi, Maius Marcu Lapadat, Octavian Carabela; writers and artists: Simona Popescu, Ioan Bogdan Lefter, Mihaela Dedeoglu, Aurora Király, as well as some of the participating students, representatives of the general public. At UNAgaleria's new premises, a former industrial space in the northern part of the city, another exhibition took place in the form of photographic micro-installations, which later served as a venue for other dynamic and intense debates and analysis.
I believe that this project, beyond the familiarization with certain readings, the realization of visual, audio, written materials, created individually or in groups during the course of the project, succeeded in putting the participants in a position to observe and analyze first-hand how others relate to places and situations that, until then, they had only related to strictly personally.
Although administratively terminated, the project has virtually every chance to continue, as the mechanisms of collaboration after they have been put in place have generated and are generating new ideas and all participants are keen to expand, to strengthen communication and research so far.

The cultural project Bucharest, Layers and Perspectives. Between Fact and Fiction, between Literature and Architecture was funded by the Bucharest City Hall - through ARCUB.

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