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In June, ENS international relations director Dominique Combe joined an international team of researchers, librarians, and computer scientists who met at Cambridge’s Trinity College, under the leadership of Jean Khalfa and Isabelle Chol, for a project on visual and text archives from the 20th century Romanian avant-garde. The critical role played by Romanian writers and artists, most of them French-speaking, from Tristan Tzara and Ghérasim Luca to Victor Brauner and Constantin Brancusi, is well known, but up to now it has not been the subject of a collective study due to difficulty accessing collections that are distributed worldwide.

The purpose of the program, which involves literature and art historians, is to take inventory of, digitize, and index journals, collections by writers and artists, correspondence, and miscellaneous documents in French, Romanian, German, and English in order to make them remotely available to researchers. Its primary objective is to map out the movement of these artists through the European capitals in order to better understand the transnational aesthetic, philosophical, and political aspects of the 20th century avant-garde.