Muzeul Abandonului

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 institutionalization 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 also functions as a prompt reaction to a specific urgency: the historical and memorial retrieval of the Hospital-Home for Unrecoverable Deficiency Juveniles in Sighetu Marmației, a symbolic point of reference for the entire phenomenon of abandonment in Romania. The building of the Hospital Home in Sighet – the origin of worldwide-circulated images in the early 1990s – was itself abandoned twenty years ago. It has been digitally preserved through 3D scanning and thus immortalized with all of its powerful and traumatic history, and is now the symbolic home of the Museum of Abandonment. In the thirty years since the end of dictatorship, the Romanian state has never initiated any official form of public recognition of the trauma of child protection system survivors. For a collective trauma to begin the journey towards healing, it must first be socially validated – an act which requires a public. We are all needed. The Museum of Abandonment strives to become a healing and safe space of dialogue for a huge community whose immense collective trauma has never really been publicly acknowledged and discussed – the hundreds of thousands of abandoned and institutionalised children in Communist and post-Communist Romania. The Museum of Abandonment seeks to document, exhibit, and digitally preserve the material and immaterial remains of the institutionalised abandonment of children in Romania.