“Bucharest: a Novecento Portrait. The Story of a Century in 555 Anniversaries” is a book and an exhibition that open one another in order to share the story of Bucharest in the 20th century. There are books adapted into films, books adapted into theatre and plays and books adapted into exhibitions. “Bucharest: a Novecento Portrait. The Story of a Century in 555 Anniversaries” is an exhibition based on the same titled book, written by Dr. Adrian Majuru. You can take this book home with you or carry it in a pocket.
The exhibition will be opened from September 17th to October 19th 2014 at the Suțu Palace and will be attended by special guests: academician Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici and Dr. Antoine Heemeryck. Together with the host of the Bucharest Municipality Museum, Dr. Adrian Majuru, Sașa-Liviu Stoianovici and Călin Torsan will recreate the atmosphere of last century Bucharest through music harmonies sometimes carefully crafted sometimes improvised.
“The city lives through many souls. We have a city that introduces itself, a city carrying a message, whose details change with almost every generation. The city speaks through the voices of people of all ages, thus having more voices synchronized with attitudes, deeds, and projections of the future. The current project wishes to map the human geographies of the 20th century. The maps that overlap do not belong exclusively to the past, but rather to an on-going present whose last words wish to define a potential prognosis for a medium term. If the first map is connected to the symbolic geography of a living organism, to the messages continued and multiplied through adds, facades and public spaces – streets and gardens –, the maps that will follow are constantly moving because they are connected to the humanity that evolved here and has been consuming them for over four generations. The people of the streets represent a barometer of human civilization through what they are as attitudes, fashion, life projections and especially what they consume every day and at every age. But the city-man has a home-life very differentiated by a professional and cultural calendar, always enriched and diversified through accumulation and multiplication. His story and Her story, on the axis of a vertical time, from the 1900s to the 2000s, from grandparents to grandchildren, does not have a consistent precedent in Romanian history. The history of habitation, the spaces of the house and its accessories all have their own story. But there is also an axis of the horizontal time, that of ages repeating with every generation: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and senescence. Finding out how the faces of these ages looked like from 1900 to 2000 is an anthropological challenge, and Bucharest can be an interesting case study for Romania’s cultural history. This journey through the 20th century is not about detailing the evolution of urban society, but about showing, generally, changes in behavior, life-style, interests and even type of dwelling and interior design.”
Dr. Adrian Majuru