On May 5, 2017, the COURAGE project of the Croatian Institute of History, together with the Croatian State Archives and the National and University Library, organised the academic workshop entitled “From Obscurity To Visibility: Croatian Emigrant Communities (1945―1990) in the Collections of Cultural Heritage and Scholarly Institutions.” The primary goal of the workshop was to introduce the scientific community and the broader public to the emigrant collections in the cultural and educational institutions of the Republic of Croatia. The COURAGE project team from Croatia wanted to raise awareness of the importance of this unexplored heritage and to spark the interest of researchers in this issue. Martina Jurčić, a librarian at the Croatian Institute of History Library, also attended the workshop and talked about the Jere Jareb Collection, which is kept in the Institute’s library. She spoke of the history and content of the collection, as well as the storage problems confronted by the Institute’s library. Jurčić also outlined the most important details from the biography of historian Jere Jareb.

In the period from 17 November 2017 to 31 January 2018, BCU Cluj-Napoca held the exhibition “Romania’s Royal Family: Testimonies from the Collections of Lucian Blaga Central University Library.” The exhibition displayed in the reading room of the Special Collections Department at BCU Cluj-Napoca photos, periodicals, brochures, and correspondence related to the Romania’s royal family from the collections that are in the custody of the institution. Among these items there were several documents from the Raţiu–Tilea Archives of the Romanian Exile Collection. Both Ion Raţiu and Viorel V. Tilea collected a large number of items related to the activities of the royal family in exile, including personal correspondence with King Michael of Romania. Due to the latter’s death on 5 December 2017, the exhibition also acquired a commemorative significance.

Movie Thursday (Filmski četvrtak) was launched in 2013 for the popularization and promotion of the film archival materials stored in the Croatian Cinematheque. Film projections are held once a month.

Within the projections from the National Collection of the Croatian Film Archive, four short films of Nikša Fulgosi were presented: Privatni rat građanina iks [The Private War of Citizen X] (1962, 10 min), Drugarstvo na putu [Camaraderie on the road] (1963, 13 min), Ravnodušnost na ulicama [Indifference on the Streets] (1963., 11 min) and Put nije samo vaš [The Road Isn’t Just Yours] (1963, 13 min).

In some of his films, Nikša Fulgosi submitted subversive or explicit political messages that might be related to cultural opposition. Although the main purpose of the films was education of the wider population, Fulgosi made sarcastic observations about social everyday life.

The program was prepared by the film archivist Mladen Burić, and the review after the screening was presented by Željko Luketić, film critic, publicist and screenwriter.

Video and film / Video exercises / Video installation / Video letter / Video muster / Video interview / Video opera  /  Video about art  /  Video documents  /  Video as video

The Latvian Center of Contemporary Art in Riga organized the show “YOU’VE GOT 1243 UNREAD MESSAGES. The Last Generation Before the Internet”. Their Lives in 2017, where materials from the Artpool collection, like documents of the Budapest-Vienna-Berlin telephone concert and the Artpool Radio, were also put on exhibit.

Exhibition Wild Graphics. Half a Century of Visual Diversion in Poland 1967-2017 was the first such wide in terms of subject and chronology presentation of art appearing on the streets of Polish cities from the 1960s to the second decade of the twentieth century.

The exhibition, whose musical setting was created by Robert Brylewski (musician of Kryzys, Brygada Kryzys, Army, Max and Waiter, Falarek Band, Witch's World, 52um and many other experimental projects) was an extremely diverse review in terms of formal and range of cases. There were records of happenings, performances and other artistic activities in the public space, carried out in the sixties and seventies by the entire galaxy of Polish neo-avant-garde artists, photos of graffiti, inscriptions on the walls, stickers, posters and installations, as well as original graffiti templates, stickers leaflets and other materials preserved to this day. The topics discussed in the presented works were even more varied, from political issues and current social affairs, through aesthetic and existential issues, to quarrels between fans of various football clubs or the internal rivalry of street writers.

Curators - Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, and Michał Warda - presented in the form of photos, slideshows, films and showcases with original objects, a total of 1,500 examples of unofficial, self-controlled, uncontrolled creative activity on the streets of Polish cities, regardless of the artistic level or political message. Under these circumstances, Wild Graphics as an exhibition and the publication accompanying it is an excellent summary of spontaneous expression and social dialogue on the streets of Polish cities of the last half-century. Tomasz Sikorski interprets this broad approach in his text, proposing the concept of "art on streets" as more containing and less appraisal than street art or graffiti.

Material from the Museum of the River Daugava was used for the exhibition 'Let the River Daugava Be', which opened on 21 September 2017 at the National History Museum of Latvia. The exhibition was about the struggle by the public to save part of the Daugava valley in 1958-1959, and the campaign against the construction of the Daugavpils hydroelectric station in 1986-1987. 

The volume published by the Tóth couple at the end of 2017 successfully resumes the independent writings, interviews and all details appearing in the course of time which shed light on past events that have meanwhile become history. The texts comprised in the five parts of the book – introduction, interviews about Ellenpontok (Counterpoints), the discussion in Budapest, recollections and writings of others – are ordered according to the time of their publication. The fourth part of the volume, entitled “Recollections” includes the text “How the Romanian State Security found Ellenpontok?” which represents the first attempt at revealing the details of the discovery of the Transylvanian samizdat by the secret police on the basis of the observation-data collection files on Antal Károly Tóth known by the codename “Bastion” in the Ellenpontok Ad-hoc Collection. The text which was also published in the 2013 issues of the Hungarian-language independent cultural and public life magazine Kapu (Gate) offers insight into the world of the Securitate, the staff of which resorted to the complex ways and means inherent in the informant network, operative technique and outdoor street shadowing in the course of the unravelling of the case across several counties. 

The crucial issue of the Hungarian minority ideology prior to 1989 was that every other consideration had to be subordinated to the issue of persistence and survival, and inaction seemed the wisest option. However, in the related term of passive resistance, resistance denotes the essence and the purpose, while passivity only refers to the form. It was the radicalism of their thinking that distinguished the editors of Ellenpontok from real Transylvanian Hungarian politicians and this led in the early 1980s to the creation of the second public sphere in the Partium.

The subject of the exhibition placed in Leipzig was the punk in the countries of the East Bloc from 1977 till 1989. The goal of the event was to celebrate the 40 years of the punk in the East and South-East Europe. Polish punk was represented by videos of the band Moskwa made by director, photographer, and media artist Józef Robakowski, photographs of the 1980s punk scene made by photographer and graphic designer Mirosław Makowski, and, among many others, copies of the fanzine ‘QQRYQ’ published by Piotr ‘Pietia’ Wierzbicki and borrowed from his private collection. It was the last and the largest public exposition of the Wierzbicki’s collection, but it also included a number of posters from the collection of Artpool and the Hungarian Tamás Szőnyei described in the COURAGE Registry. The multimedia installation was to reflect the aesthetics of East European punk music and movement, especially from Poland, the CSSR, and Hungary. It included sounds, films, images, and graphic artefacts, as well as texts and documents which explained historical and political nuances, both similarities and differences among punk scenes in the Soviet Bloc. The exhibition was organized by the Nato, the social and cultural centre located in Leipzig. The event was supported by a cultural program which contained concerts, talks, presentations and film shows.

Curator: Alexander Pehlemann.

This exhibition was presented to the public for the first time between 4 and 10 December 2017, in the Constantin Brâncuşi Exhibition Hall, which is located in the Palace of the Parliament of Romania. The opening coincided with the Annual Conference of the European Network of Official Authorities in Charge of the Secret Police Files, when CNSAS handed the presidency of the network to the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army. The exhibition illustrated the methods of controlling and keeping writers under surveillance, while trying to reassess the meaning of so-called “resistance though culture” in communist Romania. The items selected for the exhibition originated from the Confiscated Manuscripts Collection and from other fonds of the CNSAS Archives: Penal Fonds, Informative Fonds, Network Fonds, and Documentary Fonds. Three different types of materials illustrated the theme of confiscated manuscripts: archival documents, visual images, and extracts from interviews with writers in the Oral History Collection at CNSAS. The topics illustrated by these items were censorship, writers’ trials in which confiscated manuscripts were used as incriminating evidence, and writers’ surveillance by the secret police. The main items of the exhibition were, however, the writers’ confiscated manuscripts: unpublished prose, poems, pieces of poetry, essays, diaries, memoirs, daily notes, and annotated censored publications.  

The content of the Grgo Šore Goli Otok Collection became a part of the "Memories of the 20^th Century" online exhibition. This online exhibition also includes the testimonies of other people, among whom some were victims of totalitarian systems and dictatorships in Croatia during the 20^th century. Their testimonies illustrate the key moments of 20^th century Croatian history. The virtual exhibition contains over 900 items.

The exhibition in Răscruci displays first of all the spiritual and material assets of Hungarian communities living in the Transylvanian Plain. In this region up to the mid-twentieth century every wealthy family usually had a clean room, which, as a general rule, was the place for displaying and storing the family’s material assets, Sunday church outfits and the dowry which was prepared over the years. In less well-to-do households the clean room was decorated mainly before the red-letter holidays, at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and, for the most part, the exhibition displays the items against this festive background. Nevertheless, apart from various wall-hangings, decorative wall plates, and pear-shaped pottery jugs, ornate beds, tables, skilfully carved chairs, benches, storage benches, and cabinets, the clean room also gave a home to everyday objects, kitchen utensils and instruments used for spinning and weaving.

Of the geographical and cultural regions presented within the ethnographic collection, the traditional home furnishing displayed in the room of Răscruci – part of the material culture of the Transylvanian Plain – is among the most interesting. The villages of the Transylvanian Plain, even in the period following the Second World War, were rarely the object of thorough, systematic ethnographic research. As this region is inhabited by a community marked by differences in language, culture, and religion, it was avoided by most researchers. The exploration of the culture of Hungarians living in the Transylvanian Plain began relatively late, in the interwar period. The study of ethnographer Gertrúd Palotay on the embroidery of Sic, published in 1944 (Palotay 1944) captured the interest of Zoltán Kodály as well, who concluded that if the embroideries of the region were so wonderful, their folk music must be similarly rich. Encouraged by Kodály, composer and folk music researcher László Lajtha visited first Sic and then Sânmărtin. Attila T. Szabó conducted toponomastic and linguistic research on a regular basis, and in 1944 he published an article in the Erdélyi Múzeumi Közlemények (Transylvanian Museum Journal) entitled Unknown Embroideries of the Transylvanian Plain. Despite the initial display of interest it was not before the development of the dance-house movement following the events of 1968 that this area re-captured the attention of researchers. Prior to the change of regime the ethnographer and museologist Károly Kósthe younger was preoccupied rather by the culture of objects, whereas, beginning with the 1980s the ethnographer and university professor Vilmos Keszeg conducted significant research into belief in this region.

From the ethnographic point of view there is a distinct characteristic area within the Transylvanian Plain, comprising eight villages: Răscruci, Bonțida, Luna de Jos, Tiocu de Jos, Borșa, Feiurdeni, Câmpenești, and Măcicașu. These settlements are represented in the room of Răscruci. In these localities they generally did not use black for weaving or embroidery, except for wool weaving. They used the same set of motifs as the neighbouring villages, but in the case of embroideries we meet the red-blue colour combination and the pierced part was usually highlighted by grey. This method also dominated in the embroidery of women’s blouses. This area was mainly characterised by ong-waisted garments, whereas the neighbouring villages typically preferred short-waisted dresses. With the exception of Sic, every village used all-white embroidery as a general rule. The practice of wool processing has been preserved in these villages even to this day. Even today we can find fur bedspreads, fur tablecloths, and hand-woven over garments in any traditional rural household. As sheep breeding was quite common in this region, in Lacu, for instance, even sacks were woven from wool. Farmers living here usually had a large number of sheep and at the time of sheep shearing and harvest Romanian women from Maramureș came here to wash the wool. This work was usually remunerated with wool. In the manufacture of woven fabric the “fuzzy technique” was characteristic. The first such piece was collected by Tamás Hofer in Răscruci, and later placed in the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. According to Edit Fél, the first information on this weaving method date back to the fourth century BC: this explains why the fuzzy pillow edges caused a stir in the professional sector, since it was hitherto unknown to experts that this particular weaving technique was also used in Hungarian-inhabited areas.

The physical and spiritual heritage of these rural settlements was considerably richer than that of the neighbouring noble villages, as the maid servants who sewed the garments of noblewomen also recreated their favourite motifs for their own use. The noble villages also imitated and followed the culture of the aristocracy. The textiles known as “written” double chain stitch patterns are a more vigorous, peasant-style version of aristocratic embroidery. In Răscruci red was usually the colour used for needlework, whereas in the neighbouring villages people used black or red, though the red-blue combination was generally preferred in embroidery. The elbow-sewn shirt was a common item in the eight villages represented in the room of Răscruci. The men’s and women’s leather waistcoats and jackets are worth mentioning; these items stand out with their tailoring, embroidery, and decoration. As far as footwear is concerned, villagers usually wore boots that they had bought in the market in Cluj, which they set aside for festive occasions only. On weekdays, during summer people went barefoot for the most part, and in winter they wore sandals.

The inhabitants of the Transylvanian Plain also purchased painted dowry chests at the Cluj market. These were generally manufactured by craftsmen in Cluj. The ceramics on display are mostly the products of major pottery centres of the nineteenth century. The interior walls are decorated with pear-shaped jugs and plates from Turda, Bistrița, and Dej. These were usually purchased at fairs or bought from wandering pottery masters in exchange for wheat. The early 1900s marked the disappearance of rural pottery workshops in Răscruci and Sic. The last one in Cubleșu Someșan ceased to exist approximately a decade ago when the last potter passed away. The room of Răscruci presents the details of peasant society, an almost bygone era. To this day the priceless inherited repository of culture, experience and values passed on to the inhabitants of this region constitutes an integral part of everyday life. This invaluable heritage can only be used meaningfully by locals if they know how to lead a responsible life in the community and society they were born into.