Objects Left Behind

What we see: rubbish, banal objects meant irrelevant, piled up or scattered, left behind.

What reside in them: passages, thick life situations, personal stories, the prints of a 21st century fate event.

The Museum of Ethnography finds important the documentation of the social changes and the collection of contemporary material culture. A researcher team from the museum has been to the Serbian-Hungarian border zone, one of the important stations of the intensified migration-wave at the Summer of 2015. The researchers collected objects and did photo-documentation in a short field trip at Röszke and Ásotthalom.

The seemingly rubbish objects, left or lost at the border are very important in this situation. They are findings that organize into layers as on an archaeological excavation, and like this, collected, lay next to each other, and classified, they trace out the invisible process of the migration, the passage, and the relation of the humans and their objects in a special situation.

Although we do not know the owners of the objects found at the border, and we have no information about their further life, still, it is worth to focus on these silent and banal objects and ask ourselves: What message can a half pair of shoe, a SIM card case, a broken toy horse, a toothbrush, or a cup prepared out of a plastic bottle send us?

Participants: Foster Hannah Daisy, Földessy Edina, Joó Emese, Kerék Eszter, Szeljak György, Vörös Gabriella, Wilhelm Gábor; external expert: dr. Balázs Mihálffy

Venue: Sziget Festival, Museum Quarter, Tent Without Bordes

Open:  10 - 16 August,  from 1 to 8 pm.