The Ethnological Archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant sketches a fragmented yet detailed portrait of village and city life over the past one and a half centuries. More than 80.000 artefacts make up a remarkably diverse collection—photographs, audiovisual records, field notes and research files, diaries and family albums, architecture plans, decorative patterns, graphic art and sketch books, paintings, peasant naïve art. As diverse as they are, we approach them all as records —witnesses of the facts that they seek to record.
The Ethnological Archive plays several roles in the Museum’s permanent display. It provides a valuable collection of records, offering a critical perspective on how the local discourses on the village, rurality, and the peasant were woven over more than a century. And, not least, it provides context and nuance to the life of the exhibits, to the museographic designs and the Museum itself, both as an institution and a building.
Around the museum
How can we recall what we’ve never experienced?
Records bring us closer to places and times to which we don’t normally have access. In the context of the museum, the Archive mediates the discovery of the secret life of the artefacts on display.
Archival records depict the most prominent objects in the museum before they were exhibits and inevitably divorced from their previous life. Seen in their original context—alongside the people who made and used them and the households and villages they used to be part of—or in other exhibitions or museums, these travelling objects reveal their ability to change course, as they are moved and recontextualized.
As we retrace their journey, the objects and archival records also shed light on the history of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (established in 1990), as well as that of its predecessors. The sequence of institutions reveals to the viewer how different museographic visions and political ideologies generated different curatorial discourses and rewrote the meaning of particular exhibits which were sometimes presented to the public and other times hidden from them.
Around the table
The records show us the world through a lens. Behind their apparent objectivity, they are the products of authors, (research) commissioning, social, political and historical contexts, as well as of technological constraints. The Archive Hall reveals these processes turning them into museum stories. Eight apparently unrelated records tell three different stories that can be explored through an interactive multimedia installation.
Three Curatorial Lenses
The exhibition aims to stir the public’s curiosity and invite them to reflect on how knowledge is produced, transmitted, received, and interpreted.
Representation
Records travel and act upon the world. And even more so on those that they represent—individuals, groups, communities or entire social groups. Who, how, and why “controls” the representation? As it gets distributed, what are the consequences for the represented? What is left of the record after the artificialness of its construction is disclosed?
Reproduction
The record is both the result of the actual recording and basis for possible future reproductions. The time of its creation and the time of its multiplication both provide the opportunity of producing a faithful copy as well as that of transforming the original material. What are the effects of copying and circulating records?
The Background
The record puts into focus, cuts out, and makes hierarchies. It takes people, places, events, and information out of the more complex whole they were part of. It separates the main, major or foreground topics from the secondary, minor or background ones. And still behind the minute detail, whether visible or absent from the record, there can be a whole world of meanings and representations. What is there to see in the farthest background?