Oana Dragulinescu, the Museum of Abandonment: “You don’t need to place a label for a visitor to understand”

The Museum of Abandonment, an online museum focused on the history of child abandonment and institutionalization in Romania, went offline with an exhibition at Bucharest’s Amzei Square, which is available up until September 7, 2023. Business Review talked with Oana Drăgulinescu, founder of the Museum of Abandonment, about this initiative which delves into the issue of child abandonment in Romania through diverse approaches, including physical and virtual displays, live museum events, and a dedicated video area featuring testimonials from the Sighet Hospital Home.

How did you come up with the idea of a digital Museum of Abandonment? 

This is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I started working in social communication around 2010, and I’ve always had the feeling that the audience is not at all connected to the story of the hundreds of thousands of abandoned children during the years of communism, as well as after 1989. You can find very little information on this topic, just fragments about Decree 770 or about the 100,000 children found in Romanian orphanages around December 1989. But these are just tiny points in an ocean of pain – one of Romania’s heaviest and most difficult stories, an untold, unacknowledged, unassimilated story in social consciousness.

When and how it also become a physical museum?

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The Museum of Abandonment is still a digital museum, the first exclusively digital museum project in Romania. Although it exists “in the cloud,” the museum operates according to all the customs of a physical museum project: we have exhibitions, an impressive archive (approaching 20,000 items), a complex museum team (historians, curators, museum educators, archivists, anthropologists, etc.). We have a research team, documenting this complex phenomenon of our recent history and archiving it. But we also have physical meetings with our audience: from conferences and presentations to this exhibition titled “Unboxing the Museum of Abandonment,” which is the longest period during which our museum has moved from the digital to the tangible. We will be at Amzei 13 until September 7, with the “museum in plain sight,” including internal processes. In recent days, the central table of the Creative Quarter was filled with objects and documents from our newest research project, from Zau de Câmpie, and those entering the exhibition could observe the archiving the objects live.

What inspired you to establish The Museum of Abandonment, and what message do you hope to convey through its exhibits? 

It seems to me that we live in a country where we often tend to be at extremes. Either we define Romania as the cruelest place on Earth and “like no one else,” or we see ourselves as the world’s miracle. The truth is that abandonment and abuse exist all over the world, as well as atrocious treatment of certain social groups. However, societies that have aimed to transcend those primitive stages of development have developed educational and social programs, sought to understand what went wrong, and have taken national responsibility for their mistakes.

We still don’t talk about this issue, and we don’t know what happened in Romania, not only in the 70s or 80s, but even later. One of the documents in our archive shows that even in the 2000s, children in protective institutions were “calmed down” with sedatives and straightjackets.

And we’re not talking about an insignificant number of abandoned children between the appearance of Decree 770/1966, which banned abortion and contraception, and the new Child Protection Law no. 272/2004; we’re talking about over half a million cases of abandonment. It’s an immense trauma for this nation, which has often chosen to turn away, not to witness all these atrocities. But if we want to be a society “like abroad,” if we want to live in a country where the fundamental rights of individuals are respected, we should start with how we treat our children and vulnerable groups. I believe that only by establishing a status quo that shows us who we were yesterday can we understand how we might choose to be different tomorrow: more responsible, more empathetic, less indifferent.

Read also: The Museum of Abandonment welcomes visitors for a month at Amzei Square

Can you provide some insight into the process of curating abandoned objects and spaces for the museum? What criteria do you use when selecting items for display? 

We primarily choose research topics that inherently describe relevant categories for our subject. The Sighet Home for the Irrecoverable speaks quite eloquently about almost all hospital homes in Romania. There were differences among them, but somehow the treatment of children, the functioning of the institution, and especially the disastrous outcomes were similar (high mortality rates, psychological and physical deterioration of children, inhumane treatments). Our next research project is about a different model – institutions where children lived decently and even exceptionally, thanks to individuals who chose to use the system in favor of the children, finding institutional niches through which they could create better conditions for the children and promote humanity among the staff.

Regarding the objects we exhibit, we always choose them based on two fundamental criteria – they should tell an important story about the place they represent and not shock the audience. We have many traumatizing documents, but we don’t want the museum to be an unbearable experience; on the contrary, we aim to mitigate the monstrous aspect as much as possible, so that the information we want to convey remains emotionally accessible.

For example, from Sighet, we’ve selected various types of toys, but a few of them are stories in themselves, almost needing no further explanation. One is a teddy bear caught on a nail at a height of over 3 meters, where no child could reach, meaning a toy that NO child from Sighet ever played with. Additionally, there’s a rubber toy chewed by children to the extent of 80%.

Could you share a particularly compelling or poignant story behind one of the items showcased in the museum? 

I believe the object that continues to deeply move us is the small-sized straitjacket. While setting up the exhibition, I probably held that straitjacket in my hands for about 10 minutes, just to be able to secure it on the display. At one point, I realized I couldn’t breathe anymore. Its impact is overwhelming. You don’t even need to place a museum label for a visitor to understand what that object symbolizes. Just as people tear up while looking at the column of sewn names, the names of the children who most likely did not survive. If out of the 30 years of the institution’s existence, out of the total of 738 children who lived confined in this building, 279 of them died, we can deduce that the sewn names also belong to many souls that perished in the Home for the Irrecoverable.

How do you go about researching and documenting the history of the objects and places featured in the museum? What challenges have you encountered during this process? 

The most challenging aspect is finding comprehensive documents. There are no macro-level research studies covering abandonment. This is why it’s difficult to understand what happened and how we got here. Placement institutions fell under various ministries, so each could report a small piece of the puzzle – some children were under the Ministry of Health’s records, others under Education. Then the state structures kept changing, and it’s very hard to figure out how many there were, how many there still are. What’s happening with the abandonment rate? Officially, it has decreased, but so has Romania’s population, especially the number of births… so it’s not very clear where we stand. And surely, there are interdependencies between the number of underage mothers in Romania (the highest in Europe) and the number of abandoned children.

Are there any future plans to expand the museum’s collection or perhaps collaborate with other institutions to further explore the theme of abandonment? 

Yes, we’re already working on future exhibitions and collaborating with significant institutions. Artifacts from the Museum of Abandonment are found in the collections of the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo and the House of European History in Brussels. Our temporary headquarters at Amzei 13 will serve as the meeting space for the Delegation of the Committee on Social Affairs, Health, and Sustainable Development of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe with survivors of institutionalization in Romania. We maintain ongoing collaborations with other museums and educational institutions, and the volunteers in our archive are a result of Museum of Abandonment’s collaborations with faculties in Bucharest.

The museum’s exhibits might evoke a sense of melancholy or even unease. How do you strike a balance between presenting the beauty in abandonment and acknowledging the potentially negative emotions it can stir? 

I didn’t search for the beauty in abandonment for a single moment. It’s a museum on a social theme. Museums serve not only an aesthetic purpose but also an educational and preservation one. We aim to educate the public about this subject while also preserving this essential part of our history. However, aesthetics does remain an important parameter in any museum display. In our immersive application and VR exhibition, you can appreciate the balance of spaces, unified style, curatorial approach, illuminations that highlight objects, design elements, and the care for an intuitive visitor journey.

Regarding the potential negative emotions, the museum might evoke, the disclaimer is right in the name: the Museum of Abandonment. It’s akin to the War Childhood Museum; there’s no doubt that it’s an exhibition of a trauma, so visitors enter at their own discretion.

How do you see the museum evolving over time?  

The Museum of Abandonment has the mission of facilitating an emotional connection between the previously unseen community of those who have lived through the trauma of abandonment and the Romanian society.

The museum operates on several levels: the visible one consists of public campaigns, exhibitions, and events that generate discussion around this phenomenon. On a secondary level are our research activities because we want to understand how we arrived at over half a million abandoned children, what this map of abandonment looks like, and the depths of this emotional wound within Romanian society. Then, on a less tangible level, the museum attempts to shed symbolic light on these hidden stories that have remained concealed for far too long. It might be too audacious to claim that what we’re doing is a healing of the trauma, but it’s a beginning. Those who enter our physical or virtual exhibitions, those who read the hundreds of testimonies collected on www.muzeulabandonului.ro, or explore the thousands of archival documents will certainly be different at the end of this experience. We hope that this difference will be characterized by more empathy and responsibility towards the vulnerable children of Romania.

Soon, we will be launching a new participatory campaign under the Museum of Abandonment brand, coinciding with the inauguration of a new research phase by our team, dedicated to the Zau de Câmpie Primary School Children’s Home. We eagerly await everyone’s stories about the lights you’ve found in the darkness: generous individuals who improved the lives of institutionalized children, examples of humanity that provided solace amidst the coldness of abandonment, life lessons that helped navigate this trauma.

The Abandonment Museum

The concept of abandonment can extend beyond physical spaces to societal issues and relationships. Does the museum aim to delve into these broader topics, and if so, how? 

We always say that child abandonment is part of a broader phenomenon. We believe that just as we seemingly easily abandon children, we do the same with our elderly, with animals, and with the material values of Romania (consider the abandoned beautiful houses, the natural areas devastated by neglect and abuse). However, we only touch on these themes tangentially for now; our focus remains on this alarming phenomenon of child abandonment, which unfortunately is not just a problem of the past but also of the present.

What role does photography and visual storytelling play in capturing the essence of abandonment within your exhibits? 

Fiecare spațiu cercetat de echipa MA a fost mai întâi documentat foto și video, iar acest tip de conținut este foarte util și în palierul de comunicare a muzeului. Dar mai mult decât atât, noi facem o arhivare digitală a clădirilor studiate, pe care le documentăm și salvăm ca artefacte digitale. Indiferent ce se va întâmpla în viitor cu clădirile de la Sighet sau Zau de Câmpie, noi avem aceste imagini 360 care permit explorarea lor în format digital, oricând în viitor.

Each space researched by the Museum of Abandonment team was first documented through photos and videos, and this type of content is highly valuable for the museum’s communication efforts. However, beyond that, we create a digital archive of the studied buildings, documenting and preserving them as digital artifacts. Regardless of what might happen to the buildings in Sighet or Zau de Câmpie in the future, we have these 360-degree images that enable their exploration in a digital format, at any time in the future.

Lastly, what personal insights or revelations have you gained through your work with The Museum of Abandonment, and how has it shaped your perspective on the concept of abandonment as a whole?

As we delve deeper into this extensive study of abandonment, we increasingly realize its sometimes overwhelming vastness. Yet, we have chosen to take on this role of social sanitation, because without raising awareness about the immense trauma of abandonment in Romania, we cannot embark on any viable efforts towards healing.

Photos courtesy of The Museum of Abandonment /  Andrei Lupu and Andra Aron.