The Bride: the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and the betwixt and between
The Bride: the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and the betwixt and between

Summary/Abstract: My first visit to Romania happened to be in the week that the Museum opened in 1993. I was fortunate to be taken around the galleries in the last days before they were revealed to the public. Horia [Bernea] was aghast that I should see the Museum in such a state, ‘like a bride in her underwear before her wedding’ he commented. I would like to use Horia’s description of the Museum-in-preparation as a starting point to explore ideas of ‘precariousness’, and processes of becoming, to contrast with the static model of ‘the peasant’, beyond the realities of the everyday, in the Museum’s galleries. A bride is exposed to a period of ‘liminality’, betwixt and between girlhood and marriage. Museums are physical spaces, collections of things and systems of classification. By definition they speak of fixity – a building, the ordering and storage of objects, and the setting down of often singular and definitive interpretations of the objects. My conundrum is how, in the mapping of things and meanings, displays might encompass nuance and slippage, change and compromise, conflict, contradiction and disjunction – the flux of which lived experience is made.

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