The Suitcases of Abandonment

A project by

What do you take with you when you have only 10 minutes until you leave?

The suitcases of Abandonment (Bagajele Abandonului) is a communication and emotional mediation project that delves into life’s most dramatic moments, those where external and uncontrollable forces lead you to abandon everything: friends, home, the place where you live or work, the community, the small habits, existence as you know it… and hastily pack in a suitcase what seems salvageable.

We invited both Ukrainians and Romanians to open the drawers of their family histories. In the shadow of the great histories always lie our little histories, carefully preserved in emotionally fragile packaging and passed on from generation to generation. Now, when so much suitcases of abandonment have passed over the border of Romania, as a sign of solidarity and empathy, we are building a new floor of the Museum of Abandonment with suitcases full of stories of resilience from our own history.

The suitcases of Abandonment, a project financed by CARE through the SERA Romania Foundation, Care France, and FONPC, is an initiative launched by the Museum of Abandonment shortly after the outbreak of the war. The project aimed to archive the stories and emotions of one of the most dramatic events in recent European history – the conflict in Ukraine. We gathered and archived dozens of stories from refugees, mapping emotionally their journey since the beginning of the war.