The Museum of Childhood

Small Things for Big Needs

The third exhibition, the third room

14 June – 15 July 2012, The Irina Nicolau Room

The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant

The third exhibition dedicated to the Museum of Childhood, Small Things for Big Needs, aims to set foot in the world of the things that children need in their everyday lives: food, clothes, health and hygiene items, furniture, and household objects to match their size.

The same as hitherto, our approach will refer to both traditional phenomena and their contemporary incarnations. In addition, we shall attempt to highlight Romanian (and, insofar as it is possible, regional) specifics, in the context of a shared European model.

In the world of the village, items meant for children, viewed through the lens of the traditional mentality, possess in the majority of cases a metaphysical value in addition to their practical function. This quality confers upon such objects the potential to transform a given space into a protected space, sickness into health, and has an effect on the character of the child and even his or her future. The objects of childhood are distinctly separate from other peasant household items and furniture precisely because of the greater symbolic charge demanded by the infant’s vulnerability.

In the city, the child is helped to develop smoothly and harmoniously thanks to the miniaturisation of the objects intended for it or through colour codes (for example, red and green for the right and left soles of footwear), but the concern with protecting the child in relation to the invisible world has been lost over the course of time.

Nevertheless, it is possible to discover that the icon at the head of the infant’s cot or the red ribbon sewn on a child’s bonnet bears witness to something else...