Paper short abstract:

While a consistent body of scholarship has analysed the ways in which socialism has been and is (re)presented in exhibitions, museums and memorials, the post-socialist biographies of the objects that populated the socialist propaganda exhibitions constituted a less explored field.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this presentation is to explore the complicated universe of material culture and museum practices circumscribed to objects symbolically disqualified after the collapse of the socialist system in Romania in the 90s and abandoned for a long period of time in an improvised ad-hoc warehouse in a museum in Bucharest (in conditions unsuitable for their optimal conservation but sufficient for maintaining a liminal horizon of in-betweenness). The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest was established in 1990 by restructuring and reorganizing the defunct Romanian Communist Party Museum, itself established through the dislocating of the Museum of Ethnography and National Art (dating from the interwar period). The permanent exhibition of the Romanian Communist Party Museum was violently dismantled at the beginning of 1990 and some of the objects that resisted this cleaning action were subjected to a decontamination and exorcism ritual led by a group from anti-communist intellectuals and artists and a few orthodox priests. One of these objects, a bust of Lenin fished out of a warehouse (closed during the period of anti-Soviet reorientation of the socialist system) was recycled (painted red) in an art installation, The Plague, intended to denounce the effects of the forced collectivization on the peasant universe. Another bust of Lenin is recently proposed by a team of researchers to be part of a European exhibition about garbage and this becomes an ethnographically documented micro-event dedicated to the multiple (mis)understandings that these objects incorporate and release periodically.