BUHERA - Jerry-Rigging

What could one do during the socialist era if one needed something but couldn't buy it? How did a washing machine motor become a lawnmower, a pram wheel a gas cylinder carrier, and workplace scrap materials an indispensable tool in a rural household?

The Museum of Ethnography’s temporary exhibition, entitled ‘Buhera’, takes visitors back to the distinctive world of the Kádár era, from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. The exhibition illustrates how the unique material culture of an entire era emerged from the economy of scarcity, resourcefulness, and the convergence of traditional peasant knowledge with the technical skills acquired in factories, workshops or agricultural cooperatives.

‘Jerry-rigging is survival – though one cannot say what the cost was,’ wrote Péter Esterházy, highlighting the Janus-faced nature of the phenomenon, as tinkering simultaneously signified skill and resourcefulness, expertise and forced adaptation. It was not simply a matter of tinkering, but a response to a world in which one often had to make do with whatever was at hand rather than choose from ready-made objects.

All this was closely linked to the radical transformation of village life. As a result of collectivisation and industrialisation, some of the knowledge associated with traditional peasant farming lost its former significance, whilst many people encountered new jobs, new materials and new techniques. The men learnt to weld, drill, use a lathe, fit electric motors, and work with steel, aluminium and plastic. They then put the skills they’d acquired in industry to use at home, in their gardens, on building sites and on village farms, without ever completely shedding their old, thrifty peasant mentality. In garages and workshops, pipes, engines, wheels and mysterious bits and bobs lay waiting to be given a new purpose one day. However, these materials could only be turned into functional objects if all the necessary conditions happened to come together. To turn a washing machine motor into a lawnmower or a pram wheel into a gas cylinder carrier, one needed the right parts, tools, technical know-how and a practical problem in need of a solution. At times, however, even this was not enough. One had to know who could get hold of iron or pipe, who was skilled at welding, who would lend a machine, and what kind of work or favour could be offered in return for the help. ‘Buhera’ is therefore also a story of social capital exchange: of collaborations built on trust, reciprocity, personal connections and specialist knowledge.

The exhibition was preceded by several years of nationwide fieldwork carried out by two ethnographers and curators. In the course of their research, they not only collected unusual artefacts, but also uncovered the knowledge, human connections and personal stories associated with them. As a result of their work, a large number of artefact collections have been acquired by the Museum of Ethnography, preserving memories of a rapidly changing world. The temporary exhibition organised from this material thus not only illustrates where the line lay between improvisation and resourcefulness, expertise and danger, adaptation and resilience, but also how people repeatedly made the world around them functional using whatever was at their disposal. 

Curators: Gábor Kőszegi, Tamás Móser