The Museum of Abandonment is a digital and participatory forum-museum aiming to map out a culture of abandonment and offer a historical narrative of the abandonment and institutionalisation of children in Romania. The Museum of Abandonment is the meeting place between the wider public and the invisible community of Romania’s abandoned children. The Museum of Abandonment is a safe space where this collective trauma can begin its healing process.
The Museum of Abandonment was established in 2021 with the mission of shedding light on a profound wound that deeply influences how Romania appears today. It is a museum like a candle lit for hundreds of thousands of abandoned and unacknowledged children.
In the 35 years since the change in political regime, there has been no official action from the Romanian State to publicly recognize the trauma of survivors of the child protection system. For a collective trauma to begin its long journey toward healing, it must first be socially acknowledged. And for this, public engagement is essential.
We have committed to becoming a space of dialogue—safe and healing—for the vast community of hundreds of thousands of children abandoned and institutionalized during the communist and post-communist eras in Romania.
We document, display, and digitally preserve the material and immaterial testimonies of institutionalized child abandonment in Romania.
Our collections and archives gather personal and institutional, public and private documents, currently scattered, all related to the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization of children from the communist and post-communist periods in Romania.
As of October 2024, the Museum of Abandonment is the first museum entity in Romania to become a member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a network of over 370 members from more than 65 countries. For more than 25 years, this coalition has confronted violent legacies of the past to find innovative solutions for current social justice.
You shall be able to walk inside my rooms soon. Please do not rush your visit. Take your time. Wander leisurely through my halls, listen to the stories captive within my walls. Allow my staircases to lead you towards different floors, virtual exhibitions, written or video testimonies. I am waiting for you to acknowledge the exhibits of abandonment, to explore their 3D versions, to study the documents in my archives and storerooms.
I am The Museum of Abandonment and I have hundreds of stories to tell about abandonment, hope, spectacular twirls and rebounds of the soul.
To all those who visit me I am bound to tell stories which are neither to be forgotten nor abandoned, stemming from their very own stories.
I shall utter them gently, in the comforting voice that those who inspired my collections, the abandoned, would have needed in their childhood years.
I am a digital museum, made out of clouds of dots, but I have been modelled after a real place, by the digital scanning of the Home-Hospital for Unrecoverable Deficient Minors in Sighetu Marmației.
The SIGHET. HOME-HOSPITAL exhibition aims to offer visitors an immersive experience in a building and a piece of history that has been deliberately silenced. The Sighet Home Hospital for Juveniles operated from 1973 until 2003 and was one of the over 30 home-hospitals in the country. Abandoned in 2003, the building stands as a real time capsule. The Museum of Abandonment gives the building back to the visitor, along with all the stories, objects and unanswered questions it preserves.
The exhibition includes 3D digital items, texts and testimonials from those who had a connection with the home-hospital throughout the years: those who survived the unrecoverable label, their parents, social workers, staff members of the organisations that eventually closed down the home-hospital, members of the Museum of Abandonment team who searched the building in 2021. We use excerpts of documents to tell the story of the children who died and the people who had been hired to protect them.
The narrative we propose is necessarily fragmented. It’s not a search for whoever is at fault – rather, it’s an attempt to understand the dehumanising process that the institution went through. Through the exhibits, the visitor – together with our team – will build up a micro-history of the facility and the people connected to it. We want to show what Hannah Arendt named the banality of evil – from flower-named hospital rooms to extra-small straitjackets.
The aim of the exhibition is not to shock the visitor, as we try to protect the vulnerability of the few survivors. You will not see images of starved, humiliated, immobilised, soiled, sore-covered, dehumanised children. Instead of violent imagery, we will make use of our empathy, reason and imagination in order to listen to all the stories that the home-hospital has kept silent for the past fifty years.
The project TESTIMONIES 21 within the Museum of Abandonment is both a video exhibition and a bridge-type communication campaign aiming to unite two large communities and their affiliated narratives: extreme and everyday abandonment. When referring to abandonment, we usually think of its extreme form, which is, in this given case, children left in state institutions. This subject is approached by the Sighet exhibition of The Museum of Abandonment. But there is also a much more subtle and persistent form of abandonment in Romanian society – that of partial, concealed abandonment, the one we encounter so often that we fail to perceive it as such – everyday abandonment.
Why is it important to connect the two communities through this bridge project? Because through mutual knowledge we can generate the acceptance and acknowledgement of each other‘s wounds. Because those who have survived extreme abandonment, the hundreds of thousands of adults who spent their childhood in state institutions, have been segregated, forgotten, excluded, and their wounds and suffering have never been acknowledged. By simultaneously confessing in this project the highly varied forms through which we have been or have felt abandonment, we become the source of a common narrative. We do not compare the two types of abandonment; instead, we acknowledge the gravity of the wounds they have produced.
The 21 short films to be found in the 21 Testimonies exhibition will attempt a mapping, a perspective made up of 21 different points of view on these puzzle pieces making up the greater portrait of abandonment in Romania.
The videos were based on the testimonies following the public call launched by the team of The Museum of Abandonment and capture different aspects, such as: survivors of institutionalisation, healers of abandonment (social workers, psychologists, social project coordinators), children who have lived with their grandparents, children whose parents work abroad and who have been left in the care of the extended family, children who were abandoned by one of their parents. But we have also done a more in-depth investigation of the phenomenon, by tackling subjects such as abandoned communities, abandoned nations, abandonment through exile etc.
Each video testimony will be a fragment of the vast story of abandonment. The Testimonies 21 Exhibition, financed by ARCUB and The Bucharest Municipality, will be open for visitors at the second floor of The Museum of Abandonment soon.
The project TESTIMONIES 21 within the Museum of Abandonment is both a video exhibition and a bridge type communication campaign aimed to unite two large communities and their affiliated narratives: extreme and every day abandonment. When referring to abandonment, we usually think of its extreme form, which is, in the given case, children abandoned in state institutions. This subject is approached by the Sighet exhibition of The Museum of Abandonment. But there is also a much more subtle and persistent form of abandonment in Romanian society – that of partial, concealed abandonment, the one we encounter so often that we fail to perceive it as such – every day abandonment.
Why is it important to interconnect through this bridge project the two communities? Because by mutual knowledge we can generate the acceptance and acknowledgement of each other‘s wounds. Because those who have survived extreme abandonment, the hundreds of thousands of adults who have spent their childhood in state institutions have been segregated, forgotten, excluded and their wounds and suffering have never been acknowledged. By simultaneously confessing in this project the highly various forms through which we have been or have felt abandonment we become the source of a common narrative. We do not compare the two types of abandonment, but we acknowledge the gravity of the wounds it has produced.
The 21 short films which are to be found in the 21 Testimonies exhibition will attempt a mapping, a perspective made up of 21 different points of view of these pieces of the puzzle making up the great portrait of abandonment in Romania.
The filmings were based on the confessions following the public call launched by the team of The Museum of Abandonment and capture different aspects, such as: survivors of institutionalized lives, healers of abandonment (social workers, psychologists, social project coordinators), children who have lived with their grandparents, children whose parents work abroad and who have been left in the care of the extended family, children who were abandoned by one of their parents. But we also investigated the more in-depth phenomenon by tackling subjects such as abandoned communities, abandoned nations, abandonment through exile etc.
Each video testimony will be a fragment of the vast story of abandonment. The Testimonies 21 Exhibition, financed by ARCUB and The Bucharest City Hall, will be open for visit at the second floor of The Museum of Abandonment soon.
The purpose of the archive of The Museum of Abandonment is to reunite in a single, different archive personal and institutional records referring to the institutionalisation and de-institutionalisation of children in Communist and post-Communist Romania. These archives are currently disjointed.
The archive of the Museum of Abandonment, though necessary, is lacking from the public space. This archive will finally provide a common place for the fragmented personal records it presently consists of.
It is estimated that in the early ’90s ex-Communist countries were caring for over half a million abandoned children. In Romania there was talk of nearly 100.000 children abandoned in the care of the state – this was the number of children officially registered by orphanages. In reality, their number was much bigger.
Approximately 50.000 more children were not even cared for by the state.
These “children of no one” were abandoned everywhere in the medical system. And it was not because they needed medical care, but because both the parents and the state, reluctant to care for them, were using hospitals as a convenient temporary solution for unwanted children. This temporary solution would often last for years.
This is a calt to the adult community who have been through the child protection system, but also to doctors, social workers, psychologists and other professionals involved in reforming the child protection system who have been collecting object-testimonies about what they saw and lived through, testimonies both impossible to leave behind and burdening by their emotional charge.
