My ethno-Point Of View: Ethnographic and Folk Art Museum

duminică, 17 martie 2013

Once upon a time it was a big wedding in the village: The match-making

First sequence of our exhibition Once upon a time it was a big wedding in the village. The magic of inception - Marriage. It is about the symbolism of acts, persons and objects related to the most ceremonial rite of passage. You can follow the red apple in different periods of wedding (match-making, the wedding tree, the great dinner) or you can discover the multiplicity of the cross (pattern, frame, religious object)...

Match-making is a complex, mostly repetitive, act of asking the girl from their parents. On the first and second time of asking, the parents would say something like this:

That's our beautiful and red rose,

Which we’ll take out from the house!

The parents of bride in a traditional room

Then, the match-maker (a relative of the groom) says:

She is beautiful like a blaze[1],

But is not the flower we would to raise.

Third time, the girl take the canteen from the ground and says:

I want to be his bride,

The groom’s wife for life!

The red apple given by the match-maker to the other girls presented by the bride's father

[1] Blaze = star

sâmbătă, 9 februarie 2013

Winter tale

What means winter in children's mentality? Some of the answers could be: holiday, nativity of Christ, Christmas, Santa Claus, snowman, snow, all kind of games involving snow.

The contest organized by Ethnographic and Folk Art Museum of Tulcea in 2012/2013 showed us the perceptions of young generation about this season. Still remain the traditional elements like Christmas masks and action of caroling. But we observe a loss of diversity of masks (in this post you can see an old man mask and a Gypsy mask) and the confusion between Christmas mask and the carnival mask, Venice type.

Also we can observe a "contamination" with Occidental but not necessary new aspects like Santa, gifts, ornaments. In Romanian culture Christmas gifts had a symbolical value, a reciprocal exchange after caroling and consisted in ritual round breads (colaci), nuts, apples and cookies.

In other order of ideas, the ecological trend can be seen in many works, like the snowman made with disposable cups, a Christmas tree made with plastic forks etc

Here you can admire a selection of the most representative works and the entire list on meaptulcea.wordpress.com, including the literary works (in Romanian).