The Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography, a public cultural institution that functions under the authority of the Cluj County Council, in collaboration with the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, invite you on Saturday, June 10, at 5:00 p.m., to the opening of the exhibition “Tokmeala. I’ll give you a daughter-in-law, I’ll give you a fortune”, at the headquarters of the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography - Reduta Palace (21, Memorandum street). The exhibition will be open from June 10 - 18, 2023, from Wednesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., last entry at 5 p.m.
At first glance, the exhibition Tokmeala. I give you daughter-in-law, I give you wealth, made by the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, documents the private events of the “cortorari” Romani, alliance plans, weddings, baptisms; in reality, it’s about their political life.
For the most liberal of us, genders are constructs and love is given - while for the “Cortorari” Roma, genders are given, and love is a construct: attachments are built in time, and families arrange unions based on ethnic criteria. Being public alliances, when “cortorari” say they are doing politics, they don’t discuss about the life of the community, but about bargaining, the marital arrangements for their children, which they make, undo and negotiate endlessly.
Not even the wedding marks the final point of these political alliances, nor the appearance in the young family of a girl, but only the birth of a boy. The boy stays on court and inherits a silver cup, which cannot be bought with all the money in the world, while the girl goes to a foreign family who receives her only with a dowry of thousands of euros, negotiated by parties off stage. Until the boy appears, the only guarantee for the young in-laws that their daughter will be treated well and not sent back is the son-in-law’s cup, which stays their pawn.
These subtleties of alliance policies, but also many others that complete the context, are details that the exhibition illuminates from several perspectives, bringing together a filmmaker (Dana Bunescu), a photographer (Eric Rosset), two curators (Lila Passima and Cosmin Manolache) and, above all, an anthropologist (Cătălina Tesăr), who meticulously documented the life of this Roma group from southern Transylvania for more than a decade.
The exhibition accompanies the documentary-anthropological film The Cup. About sons and daughters (directed by Cătălina Tesăr and Dana Bunescu) present at TIFF Cluj-Napoca.
Screenings schedule:
June 15 - Cinema Victoria, 12.30 p.m. | June 16 - Military Circle, 8:30 p.m