The House of the Soul
The House of the Soul

Summary/Abstract: The House of the Soul is the idea for an exhibition. We owe the idea in large part to the “Regions of Romania — The Buzău Region. Cultural and Natural Heritage as a Basis for Sustainable Development” project, initiated by the University of Bucharest — Geomedia Centre and financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund in 2007. During fieldwork carried out in the summer of that year, we were able to do preliminary research on the subject of the alms cottage custom, one of a series of burial and commemoration practices from the north of Buzău county. In 2013 the curatorial idea took shape as a response to the proposal that the Venice Biennale of Architecture made to the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (MȚR) to put forward an exhibition that would enter into dialogue with the theme for 2014, Fundamentals, in a space made available to the MȚR. For various reasons, the exhibition did not come to fruition, remaining at the proposal stage. In the meantime, the project was resumed in a somewhat more complex form and with more substantial funding—“Applied Research for Sustainable Development and Economic Growth following the Principles of Geo-Conservation; Supporting the Buzău Region UNESCO Geo-park initiative”, set underway by the Romanian Academy’s Sabba S. Ștefănescu Institute of Geodynamics and financed by the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism (EEA Grants) and the Romanian Ministry of Education — which made it possible to revisit the locations where we had discovered the alms cottage tradition, mentioned cursorily in the Festivals and Customs volumes published by the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore. The title we have chosen for the exhibition we present below — The House of the Soul — was inspired by Radu Drăgan’s book Inverted Worlds.

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