Gulnoza | Chasing a ghost

My uncertainties persisted, and my question marks were still there. Since my first entry I’ve had other new classes. Some of them were exciting, some were irrelevant. I’ve struggled. The idea was out there, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt frustration building up inside. I was desperately looking for any hints, any signs, just like I do when I run astray somewhere in the midst of a foreign neighborhood and look for familiar buildings and cafes, or fall back upon the google map help for that matter. But the “Mind Palace” doesn’t work that way. I think I realized it after having received Joseph’s email saying that we could go beyond the sites we’d visited for putting our academic essay together. That being said, I could look elsewhere, I could have the liberty of choosing research sources myself. So I said to myself, “Come down, Gulnoza, you’re on a familiar turf now, just break free and go with the flow”. Then I asked myself where I feel most comfortable and at peace. The answer was MUSEUMS! Wherever I’ve traveled, New York, Moscow, Washington, London, Istanbul, Bangkok to name a few, museums had always been in my must-see list. Why didn’t I think about it earlier? Maybe I figured going to museums would be part of our program anyway. I don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter now.

I was going to attend the World Press Photo exhibition which is now ongoing in the Néprajzi Múzeum (Museum of Ethnography). So I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. First, I would attend the photo exhibition, and thereafter see what the museum had in store. I made the right decision, obviously. Some photographs left me speechless for a while, I caught myself staring at them and felt a lump in my throat. So powerful and fascinating they are. I mean, I’d seen many of them on internet, but the effect they exercise as big, high quality printed posters is ineffable. But this is a topic for another blog, in another space I suppose.

After the photo exhibition, I proceeded to the museum’s temporary and permanent expositions. There was a temporary one where the stunning works of a Hungarian wildlife photographer Bence Mate were displayed. Like in any museums in the world I just followed the signs to find myself at a permanent exhibition of Hungarian traditional culture. One might wonder, what exactly I may pick up from an exhibition depicting the life of peasants who had lived in late 18^th and early 20^th centuries for a topic dealing with digitizing cultural heritage and promoting media art. At the time, I didn’t have a clear answer to that. However, as I strolled down the expositions I came across two pieces that practically threw the idea on my face. The first one was dedicated to the section of pottery guilds, where plain yet exquisite pieces of domestic life were displayed. And in there was a small TV screening the process of making a pottery jar. It was in Hungarian, of course, but it didn’t matter. The visual imagery did its part. Spinning clay, skillful hands and the birth of a crockery – it’s a mesmerizing image. Another section was about a life milestone – old age, where my attention was drawn to headphones. I put them on and heard a Hungarian folk song performed obviously by an old woman. The description said those were the vernacular sacred songs, that were scrupulously collected by ethnomusicologists, and the project is still ongoing with the support of the Museum. It dawned on me then, that’s it, here is my idea. This plexus of history and culture can be related to Tajikistan, where so many crafts and customs will soon be forgotten, written off by at times ridiculous decisions and laws. And I realized that our museums, albeit having some very fascinating pieces, are stagnating. We’ve built recently a mighty National Museum, and filled it with showpieces from across the country, oftentimes at the expense of the collections of other museums. But it has no evidence of being in tune with the time. There is so much space, literally and figuratively, for filling it up…

Here I’ll stop myself and start thinking about the Museum’s project and experience of digitizing historical and cultural evidences. I only pray the information is available in English as well, otherwise Isten segítsen nekem...