Ben Schot’s Krul is a memory in photos and text of an intoxicated night drive on the isle of Schouwen-Duiveland in Kees Krul’s Peugeot 404 in January 1973. Four black and white photo negatives taken from and inside the car that night had been in the possession of the artist without ever having been printed, when they were digitized and converted into photo positives 45 years later. Surprisingly, the photos, unsteady, out-of-focus…
Johannes Baader (1875-1955) grew up in Stuttgart and studied architecture in that town from 1898 to 1899. After having met Raoul Hausmann, Baader moved to Berlin in 1905, where Hausmann introduced him to a circle of artists that would germinate into Berlin Dada some ten years later…
Dreams! Dreams! is a passage from Herman Melville’s novel Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, published in two volumes in 1849. The book, Melville’s third, was his first work of fiction, whereas his earlier Typee and Omoo were for the greater part autobiographical travel stories. Mardi is set in the South Pacific and initially reads as a travelogue but then blends with philosophical musings on the confrontations of its main characters and the imaginary…
Gheorghe Vasiliu was a Romanian poet who named himself George Bacovia after his native town Bacau. Bacovia was born there in 1881 and distinguished himself as a talented draughtsman, violinist and poet while being educated at the Prince Ferdinand Gymnasium, now located at George Bacovia Street in Bacau. After having moved to Bucharest to study Law in 1903, Bacovia made the acquaintance of poet and…
Poète maudit and vagabond Dimitrie Stelaru was born in 1917 as Dumitru Petrescu in Romania’s border region with Bulgaria. He never knew his biological father, who was killed in action during World War I, and developed such a bad relationship with his stepfather that he was sent to a strict Christian boarding school in Transylvania at the age of fourteen…