The project DEAR ARCHIVE. LABORATORY FOR MUSEUM INNOVATION included a very wide range of activities, such as building the Archive Hall to complement the permanent exhibition of the Romanian Peasant Museum; guided tours and workshops held in the Archive’s laboratory and in the exhibition under construction (taking the form of museum experiments involving the public to encourage the development of new communities of visitors); museum education workshops; informal meetings and focus groups; an experimental music performance; a performative workshop for experimental analog photography; museum curatorship and marketing workshops; mentorship sessions/workshops; an artists’ residency organized together with the project’s Norwegian partner, PRAKSIS, and many more.
Guided Tours and Archival Exploration Workshops
The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant is one of the few museums in Romania (possibly the only one) to give free access to spaces that visitors otherwise cannot access, its storage facilities. Our visitors have the opportunity to discover the secret life of objects in the Archive’s storage rooms. The interactive tours are adapted thematically and designed to meet the expectations of a wide variety of audiences: from teenagers to grandparents; from persons who never opened an old photograph album to professionals from areas such as the film industry, architecture, history, photography, creative industries, technology, and art. The tours are an educational tool and a leisure option. They are designed as an interactive experience enabling the participants to explore the archival collections firsthand, under the guidance of museum staff. The project was a good opportunity for us to meet the public. The many guided tours and visits to the exhibition under construction were as many opportunities for a public that doesn’t normally interact with the Archive to become familiarized with archival collections and specialized information on the history of photography. Over 150 visitors, from curious teenagers to undergraduates and researchers interested in the archive’s thematic contents, had the chance to access the archival collections, to listen to short histories of the museum, to learn about the history of photography in Romania and the various technologies and recording media, and to explore ethnographical content.
Focus Groups and Workshops for Teens
We wish to understand teenagers’ cultural consumption expectations and patterns. What topics are they interested in? How do they spend their free time? Where do we find them in the city and online? Do they visit museums regularly? Why (not)? What do they want to see or do in a museum? These are just a few questions that we were trying to answer. Hence the invitation we extended to teenagers to come to the museum for open discussions in the form of focus groups. Starting from archival objects and stories, we encouraged them to have meaningful discussions, from which we learnt ourselves. Our project included high school communication campaigns to obtain information to help us calibrate project activities (creative workshops, strategy-making working sessions, promotion events). For this purpose, two focus groups were held with students from Bucharest’s Gheorghe Șincai National College, moderated by the Ethnological Archive team and museum educators. And so we learnt that museums are spaces where teenagers don’t feel they belong. Do not touch! Keep the distance! are statements that keep cropping up in their accounts of their experiences in Romanian museums. Our activities dedicated to teenagers are meant to break this barrier and to transform the museum into a friendly and relevant space for them. Here they are free to ask questions, to explore, to touch the archival objects and to interact with their histories. The topics differ across workshops (old Bucharest; analog photography one hundred years ago; the old village world, etc.), and there is always an interactive component to them, inviting teenagers to participate in the museum’s laboratory. So they can be researchers for one day—using their own knowledge, they identify references, analyze visual content elements, and build hypotheses on the context of archival photographs or records. We constantly seek to create bridges between today’s world and the past in an attempt to stir their curiosity so that they might later explore their own family stories and archives.
Sound performance
fragments. finger prints. rediscovered images. searches. isolated sounds. distilled sounds. unearthed from thirty-year old field recordings. sound landscapes. faces. places. village. city. intersections. reverberation in a room with bad acoustics. good sounds. interwoven voices. low-fi transmission. noise. composition. live performance. sound experiment.
In the 1950s, when the Museum of the History of the Romanian Communist Party had replaced the prewar ethnography museum in the main building, new accessory buildings were constructed to host the museum staff’s offices. Recently, following rehabilitation works on the Museum’s main building, some of these offices were turned into exhibition spaces. The space that was supposed to host the Archive Hall had very bad acoustics (there was 4.6-second interval between sounds) and needed improvement works. Before these were completed, the echo of the room was repurposed in an event—a sound experiment by Teo Rădulescu. An architect with a passion for sound and music sculptures and author of the sound design for a number of short films and theater plays, the artist took the audience on a musical journey inspired by the Archive’s collection, two live performance sessions entitled aud.ascult | sound performance with Teo Rădulescu. aud.ascult | sound performance with Teo Rădulescu..
Old Photography Workshop
We joined forces with Ambrotipescu photo studio and One World Romania to organize an old photography workshop. Paul Aioanei, also known as Ambrotipescu, is one the few European photographers who still creates photographs using the wet plate colodium process on glass (ambrotypes) and on metal (ferotypes). The workshop transported the participants to a nineteenth-century photo studio via the live demonstration of how an ambrotype is made: from preparing the materials (glass and chemical solutions) to the photo cameras and processing equipment. Moreover, the chemicals and solutions used were prepared following original recipes, gleaned from nineteenth-century studies and textbooks.
Creative Workshops
Teacher, we first didn’t want to come to this museum and now we don’t want to leave it.
The project was aimed at elementary school children (ages 6 to 14)—eighty-five children participated in the workshops that offered them the chance to discover through play types of objects useful for reenacting a bit of local history. Atelier de născocit poveşti „de acum” despre oameni „de atunci” [Workshop for making up stories today about people of yesteryear], a shadow play named Cine-a fost stăpân la Gorj [Who was lord over Gorj County?] and Scoarța [The carpet] are the tree workshops specially designed to teach children what is an archive, what role it plays in a museum, how to identify in an exhibition not only heritage objects but also very many images and other elements that form an archive. The participants explored the symbolic elements of peasant art and translated them into their everyday lives.
DISCUSSION GUIDE
how to start an honest conversation about working in museums
How can museums become more accessible, attractive, community-engaged spaces? In 2023, at the Peasant Museum we started a series of conversations seeking to understand what are the expectations and cultural consumption habits of the contemporary public - we organized workshops, focus groups, and informal discussions with various categories of visitors. We met with specialists from other museums and cultural institutions in the country and abroad, to learn from each other.
As we focused on the needs of the public, we discovered an equally important problem: the burnout faced by museum staff. Workload, excessive bureaucracy, lack of resources, constant search for solutions are just some of the recurring themes that can translate into a state of burnout experienced by many museum employees. We realized that in order to take care of the heritage, we must learn to take care of ourselves, the cultural workers.
OPEN ARCHIVES
A Brief Guide to Activating the Economic and Social Potential of Archives
The guide created by the project team provides a step-by-step introduction to the universe and role of documentary archives. It presents both the necessity of conservation and protection, as well as the need to make archival collections accessible to the general public. Thus, archives are seen not only as protectors of documents but also as spaces for (re)discovery and integration into economic and social circuits. Therefore, this publication has been specially designed for both specialists and the general public interested in museums and archives.