COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

The main actor in this event is Ildikó Kiss a retired teacher, who comes from Sânmărtin, Cluj county. She used to be a primary-school teacher in the villages of the Transylvanian Plain, and this is how she met Zoltán Kallós and later – as diaspora education is also provided –, she became a frequent guest at the Foundation as well. She proved to be a skilled and active person who had a fondness for singing and dancing and shared an interest in the same activities as those promoted by the Zoltán Kallós Foundation. Kiss sympathised with the Foundation and often visited the collection as well. In the summer of 2016 she brought up the idea of the donation. Her daughter lives in Toronto, Canada, so she spent most of her time there and in summer returned to her family home in Sânmărtin. She spent her time gardening but as time passed she found it more and more difficult to do this work around the house, so and she decided to settle down in Canada for good. For this reason she had to sell the house. Since she could not take her possessions with her and refused to let them go to waste, she entrusted to the Foundation the first room in the house, traditionally called in the peasant culture the “clean room” – the room that nobody uses, but that preserves the most precious belongings of the family.  After inspecting the house and documenting it with photos, the Foundation staff expressed their desire to include her assets in the collection. They disinfected the objects and the donation became part of the collection.

The ”clean room” kept its original state, preserving all that is representative for the period of the 1960s. This room contained the more important inherited objects holding both material and emotional value. The age of the items varies: some of them date back to the nineteenth century. At the same time there is a wide range of objects, each having its own story attached to it. The majority of the textiles were manufactured by the donor’s mother; these have visible dates on them, spanning from 1920 to 1935. However, there are also textiles woven by the maker of the donation herself. There are pieces of furniture that were produced by her father, and some were made as part of her dowry. The nightstand received as a gift from the manor – an item not typically found in a peasant clean room – counts as a curiosity. An ornate bed does not usually require a nightstand. It turned out that the family received a bed and a nightstand from the landlord in exchange for their work. As they were valuable, attractive,and representative, they found a place in the clean room, too. Beside the different wall-hangings, decorative wall plates, and pear-shaped jugs, mention must be made of the photos, which cover a large time span as well. There are drawings showing the great-grandparents as well as plenty of photos alluding to the donor’s childhood, all linked to the clean room. A great part of these became the property of the foundation as well. The museum personnel gathered and duly registered all materials pertaining to the history of the objects displayed in the clean room from Sânmărtin. By creating the exhibition room known as the “clean room” from Sânmărtin, housed in the extended museum building inaugurated in June, 2017, the Zoltán Kallós Ethnographic Collection has fulfilled the donor’s wish and enabled authentic display.

The most important event for the dissemination of the materials relating to this collection was the recent publication of the proceedings of the Third Congress of the MWU in a volume co-edited by the Moldovan researchers Vasile Bahnaru and Gheorghe Cojocaru. This publication, which appeared in 2016, collected a series of valuable texts concerning the Third Congress of the MWU, its broader implications for the local public sphere and the response of the authorities. Specifically, the editors made extensive use of the collections of the Mihail Kogălniceanu Museum of Romanian Literature (including the audio recording of the Congress proceedings) and a wide array of the periodical press from that era (e.g., the literary journals Nistru and Cultura and the official newspapers Moldova Socialistă and Sovetskaia Moldavia) in order to convey a complete picture of the event and its aftermath. They also used Fond 51 of the AOSPRM (The Fond of the Central Committee of the CPM), which holds the minutes of the Party meetings convened in December 1965 to discuss writers’ “subversive attitudes” and the appropriate counter-measures. This volume revived general public interest in the Third Congress of the MWU, serving as a significant complementary material to the documents stored in Fond P-2955 of the AOSPRM. The volume is available to a wide audience of potential readers and will hopefully have an impact on reassessing the role of Moldavian writers under Soviet rule.  

The most significant event in the history of the present collection was the donation of Mihnea Berindei’s personal library to the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași. The library (comprising over two thousand book titles, various excerpts, and over thirty periodicals) was donated by its founder to this institution in 2016. A special donation agreement was concluded between Mihnea Berindei and the A.D. Xenopol Institute, according to which Berindei’s library was to be inventoried, catalogued, and preserved as a separate book collection (fond de carte) at the Institute’s library. At the time of the library’s transportation to Iași, the printed materials fitted into eighty-eight boxes of various formats. Dorin Dobrincu’s role was crucial in this phase, as he personally oversaw the transportation of these papers to their destination in Iași. Although the storage facilities at the Institute’s library are adequate, the materials are currently still in the process of being inventoried and catalogued. Over 80 % of the titles have already been inventoried. However, due to lack of personnel this process is likely to take several more months. The collection should be soon accessible to the interested researchers.

The project ˝Web archive Anti-museum VD Trokuts˝ was the undergraduate thesis of Sanja Kuzmanović submitted for her degree in design from the Faculty of Architecture. Her supervisor was Ivan Doroghy. Darko Schneider, the director of the Anti-museum and general director of the Vladimir Dodig Trokut Anti-museum Foundation chose one hundred characteristic works for the web-archive.

The collection is divided into several sections: The No Art Collections, Ethnomythology, Design and Tourism, Through Everyday Life, Eroticism, Subject Nature, Games, and Toys. The project was attended by Branka Prša and Pavel Posavec.

The provisional selection of one hundred works will be supplemented over time, because it is a museum in the making. In time, a complete chronology of the Anti-Museum’s activities from 1968 to today will be added, with all actions, performances, video films, agitation, proclamations, elaborations, lectures, and seminars, including the wundercammere workshops.

The volume Rock sub seceră și ciocan (Rock under the hammer and sickle), which came out in a first edition in 2016 and was republished in 2017, is the first part of an ample project of mapping the rock music movement in Romanian. As the author himself presents it, Nelu Stratone’s book is an invitation to go on “a journey in time, in search of the roots of the rock spirit in Romania, in which freedom was countless times suppressed or censored in the face of a merciless authoritarian regime, but triumphed through strength and creativity, laying the foundations for one or more generations of people who have made their mark on our culture and our collective memory.” The volume is indeed valuable also because the story of rock in Romania is intimately interwoven with the author’s own story: he confesses that he was impelled to write the book because “I have accumulated quite a rich experience, so I have decided to share with others something of my knowledge.” The period covered in this first volume is the last three decades of Romanian communism, from 1960 to its collapse in 1989. The main chapters of the book are entitled: “Rock and Roll, comrades!” which describes the penetration of rock music into the Romanian space in the period 1960–1971, “The personality cult and rock music,” which follows the evolution of this music after the delivery of the famous anti-Western Theses of July 1971, “The underground movement,” which shows how indigenous Romanian rock flourished after 1977 in spite of the restrictions imposed by the regime, and “The situation as a paraphrase,” which covers the last period of communism in Romania, from 1985 until the Revolution of 1989, during which the song whose verses are quoted in the epilogue was composed: “Azi în Timișoara, mâine-n toată țara” (Today in Timişoara, tomorrow in all the land). Numbering over 470 pages, the book is the most significant and rigorously documented synthetic study of Romanian rock music in the communist period. On top of that, the magazine Dilema Veche included it in their list of the most important books published in Romania in 2016.