Today marks 130 years since the birth of Tristan Tzara, the Romanian name behind DADAISM.

Born Samuel Rosenstock, Tzara [meaning country in Romanian language] was a Romanian-born poet, essayist, and performance artist, best known as one of the central figures and effectively a founding force of the DADA movement in the 1910s.

Let us not forget about the 150th anniversary of Constantin Brâncuși, aka The Father of Modernism.

AND The Steph-Brother-In-Law of Bauhaus:

I made the stone sing… for the Human Kind[ness] – says Brâncuși:

2026 also marks 144 years since George Enescu was born [August 19, 1881].

Rare video below showing Tzara, Brâncuși + Enescu altogether:

Al three born of the same Romanian ground.

Friends once, or at least companions in a shared geography of departure, they are not commemorated here so much

as continued each in a distinct language of reduction, echo, and interruption.

They meet in a room that might be blank or might not,
walls breathing a soft limestone fatigue, as if

rememberingcandidisamazingarchitecture.

Tzara arrives first, or last?

It depends on whether you count
the clock that refuses sequence.

He is cutting words out of invisible newspapers,
scattering them like polite accidents across the table.

“Meaning,” he says
“is just a rumor that stayed too long.”

Brâncuși does not sit. He reduces the chair instead:
pare, pare, pare
[auf Romanian das Wort pare meint “it seems like“].

until everything becomes an intention of sitting

a vertical whisper…

He nods at Tzara’s fragments as if they are marble before the refusal of excess.

Enescu is already playing,
though no one remembers him lifting the violin…

The sound is not music yet for everyone’s ears,
more like a corridor searching for its echo.

A village passes briefly through the room.
Then a train.

Then something that could have been childhood,
but isn’t anymore.

Outside [and there is an outside], the sky edits itself…

Tzara assembles a sentence:

“bird / sleep / axis / unfinished”

He smiles, because it doesn’t resolve yet

Brâncuși hears “bird” and removes gravity from it.

The sculpture lifts without moving.

Not a bird NONO, NEVER a Bird –
only the insistence of flight,

polished until it forgets
the hand that made it.

Enescu follows the ascent, translating lift into a trembling line. The melody nearly breaks but decides not to. It carries a small, stubborn warmth, like a memory that refuses abstraction.

They argue without disagreement

“Reveal” says Brancusi.

“Destroy” says Tzara.

“Remember!” says Enescu.

The room adjusts its corners.

At some point, they exchange nothing:
no objects, no conclusions,
no money, no possesions.

just minimalism

Only a slight recalibration of silence.

The kind that stays after meaning leaves
and before something else dares to arrive.

When they depart
[they never ever actually do]
the table remains—covered
in fragments

that refuse to be read,
a shape that refuses
to be named,

and a sound that keeps happening
even after it stops…

somewhere, a clock learns hesitation

…and that is all, or almost 🙂

More about this poem slash story when we will commemorate George Enescu, or some other great Romanian artist born this year or maybe the next ones?

The new generation of Romanian artists is very promising – I’ve met a few of them in Berlin, and it’s now included in my new projects to write as much as humanly possible about them.