An archive thrives on the inquiries we make into it. The better documented it is, the more accurate, nuanced and relevant our inquiries will be.
For the past five years, we have made efforts to turn the Ethnological Archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant into a site of incessant research, facilitated by an interdisciplinary team, and open to researchers outside the museum; into a lab of good archival practices and a training place for volunteers and students.
History of Photography
The collections of the Ethnological Archive cover 160 years of photography and over a century of practicing photography in the museum: a body representative of the history of photography in South-East Europe, with all the gaps, conundrums, and challenges that come with it. We research photography as artifact and social practice, as a tool for recording, creating knowledge and reinterpreting reality, as an integral part of visual culture. We retrace connections and use them to develop joint projects with photography archives, museums and private collections in Romania and abroad. We work oral history into the researching of family collections and recent donations.
The Museum’s Histories
The Ethnological Archive holds together the genealogies of several museums: on the one hand, Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș’s Museum of National Art (1906–1946), which saw its ethnographic approach continued by the Museum of Popular Art (1951–1978) and the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (created in 1990), and on the other hand, the host of successive propaganda museums established during the state socialism era in the same building on Șoseaua Kiseleff, which culminated with the Museum of the Romanian Communist Party (1965–1989). Throughout the twentieth century, the Ethnological Archive has witnessed various ways to redesign a museum, to rebuild it down to its basic material aspects, and to show it to the world. We trace biographies of objects and trajectories into the field, we piece back together exhibitions and exhibition spaces now gone, as part of a long-term research and curatorial effort.
The Archive’s Archive
Mirroring the complicated history of the predecessors of today’s National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, the Archive’s old collections have known their fair share of disruption—wars, moves, splits, and new inventories—which left us with often fragmented and incomplete information. We are the first generation to actually make the Archive an object of research in itself, seeking to understand both the successive systems for archiving and organizing knowledge and the historical circumstances that destabilized it. This is an endeavor of archival archeology that promises to yield the lost continuities and contexts of a body of records of particular importance for the history of ethnography and museology in South-East Europe.
Place, neighborhood, urban history
In 1906, in its first iteration as the Museum of National Art, the location was perceived as peripheral compared to the scale of the city; one hundred years later, it is adjacent to the center of Bucharest. Over its two-hundred-year history, the space currently occupied by the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant bordered from hubs of political power to areas of first poor then rich housing to cultural institutions and charitable organizations. Even as it focused exclusively on the rural, the Museum continued to participate in the life of the city: building and demolishing, reshaping the urban and entering a conversation with it. The Ethnological Archive makes it its task to investigate all these strata of urban history while at the same time accounting for its current neighbors and neighboring areas.
Opening the Archive
The Ethnological Archive is among the first Romanian institutional archives to engage in alternative methods of archival exploration: curatorial research, art projects, and so on.
