Transylvanian student shows family treasures

By Lina Shoumarova

A beautiful two-day exhibit titled My Village in Transylvania was set up by the second-year anthropology student George Paul Meiu on the seventh floor of the Hall Building last week.

From his relatives’ attics and old chests of his great-grandmother, Meiu assembled traditional artifacts from the Romanian village of Vladeni, where he grew up.

The exhibit focused on the period around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It featured colourful wall carpets, traditional Romanian outfits, photos, and tablecloths with intricate patterns, woven by his great-grandmother.

The artifacts were accompanied by short narratives that told stories of Meiu’s family’s past, and portrayed traditional Romanian culture and way of life.

Meiu brought all of these things from Romania last summer. He said these objects are not greatly valued there any longer.

With this exhibit, Meiu wanted to refute the idea that science should always be objective. He intended to prove that subjectivity can be a valuable research tool as well. He approached the exhibit as an insider, not a detached researcher. The result is a deeply self-reflexive exhibition.

Meiu admitted that might be romanticizing the past, but is his way of approaching and understanding his ancestral history. In fact, he encouraged visitors to touch the objects, because “it is through the senses that a person can better experience the past.”

Meiu said his interest in preserving old objects, fabrics and clothes was sparked in 1994. It was then that a group of ethnographers came to study Vladeni, situated at the crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe.

The ethnographers bought and took away with them many of the traditional objects that people kept in their homes. Meiu decided to preserve what was left. The material he gathered he transformed into an exhibit in his own village in 1996, when he was only 12 years old.

The response to the exhibit back then, he remembered, was very personal: while looking at the artifacts, people recalled their past.

During this exhibit at Concordia, however, it is mostly the bright colours and the beautifully woven patterns that attract the visitors’ attention.