We from Piscu

A village in the plain, detached from the road, stretched between a string of marshes and the Ialomie riverbed, immersed in the dusty torpor of an ambiguous expectation. It is a monotonous, gentle landscape, well settled in its own banality. At first glance nothing comes forward, nothing is strongly announced, everything is predictable. The silhouette of the church flanked by fir trees, old houses with graceful porches fallen into oblivion, new houses with voluptuous silhouettes, the old modernized school, a few village shops with terraces, motels and fridges in the street. Until the mid-1960s, for more than a century, dozens, hundreds of pottery kilns burned continuously here, producing Pisc pots. A utilitarian pottery, used in the home, in everyday life, for celebrations, feasts and funerals. Useful wares molded in the clay of the pisc, fired in its kilns, then traveled all over the country, down to the Danube, entering homes. Cooper cooperativization, progress, consumer society came upon them all, and the ovens of Pisc died out and collapsed through the ogrăzi.

Virgil

The Piscu Museum-Workshop School is the place where this history is researched, told, carried forward. Adriana - art historian and Virgil Scripcariu - sculptor, are the ones who, settling here, revealed the place, learned its story and, by telling it, revealed its face. They made the village a home, a workshop, a kiln, a school. They merged with the being of this village and rebuilt its clay body through the collection of pots recovered from the households. They wanted to create in the middle of the village, on a large piece of land, a place of learning and inspiration for people from here and abroad, a house of music - a MUSEUM. This ingenious idea was first joined by the enthusiastic, committed efforts of a team of third-year architecture students. Thus the museum-school, school-museum, school-museum, in its essential, pragmatic and radically archetypal corporeality, was born. Fashioned on the model of centered space, wrapped in diaphanous layers, it opens uniformly, evenly, through high porticoes to the surroundings. Invoking again a certain purity, ingenuity of the idea and the desire to make, the building rather intuitively brings together the beginner's model - arché - and craftsmanship - tékhnē -, the practical knowledge of how to put materials to work, being in fact erected by a small nucleus of three men, led by the sculptor Virgil Scripcariu, who were joined at intervals by woodworkers, volunteers, students, architects.

It's a simple state of mind

The Piscu School is a place, a state of mind and a challenge for anyone who wants to experience the beauty of Romania's cultural heritage and familiarize themselves with its values. It was born from the projects of the Association Gaspar, Baltasar & Melchior, an NGO with a cultural and educational mission that has been working since 2006 in the village of Piscu/Ilfov, a former potters' hearth.

Our goal: to contribute to the formation of generations more aware of our cultural heritage and more attached to this beautiful witness of history.

How: workshops, creative camps, summer schools, meetings, cultural heritage books for everyone, a heritage-specific primary school, anthropological research, online cultural platform. Cultural heritage needs love to survive!

Potters old and new

Piscu is an old potters' hearth, mentioned in all the compendiums dedicated to pottery in Romania. It was the village most rooted in this craft in the Bucharest area; it was practically a specialized community, in which pottery was the pride of life. It remains the only village around the capital where peasant pottery is still occasionally produced. In spite of its proximity to the capital, the village has been little researched, thus offering an almost untouched terrain for our ethnological, ethnographic and oral history concerns. What is more, the older generation of the village has had a full taste of life with its crafts and the twilight times of the patriarchal village, being able to share memories that come from the beginning of the last century, from the grandparents of today's octogenarians. From here, our questions and concerns extended to all that means the traditional use of a natural resource since the dawn of time, the earth, with all that it can bring back to our contemporary civilization.

Why a museum at Piscu?

The spirit of the place at the meeting with the founders' thought demanded it. Adriana and Virgil Scripcariu founded the School of Piscu in 2006 and since then have continuously developed projects of research and promotion of cultural heritage, local and national. In the years 2017-2020, the Piscu School Museum-Workshop was established. It was also requested by the many visitors who have crossed the threshold of the village over the last 16 years in search of cultural recreation and who have confirmed the initial intuition that Piscu has beneficial experiences to offer.

On Easter day, he would bring us pascha in the morning, wash us, dress us clean and put us at table. He would have us say the Lord's Prayer and give us the Passover. Then we'd eat eggs, cheese, whatever mom put there. We ate, because if we hadn't eaten the whole fast... Dad told us "don't eat too much", you'd get a bellyache after all that fasting. Then we shared. People came with eggs, pretzels, biscuits. We were sharing till about 11. Then we'd have lunch, and then the parents, godparents, godfathers, went out to the pub. There were these old-fashioned pubs... there were about four in the village. They'd go to church, have a glass of wine and talk. That we'd go to Gheorghe Coman, that we'd go to Nea Iene, that we'd go to Tidei. They'd go there and they'd shut up. And us kids, damn kids, we couldn't wait for our parents to leave home and we'd go to the Ialomița's edge, we used to say, to the prundu gârlei. At the footbridge, there was a big piece of sand there, not really cultivated, and we used to play ball, play tic, play țâc, play țurcă, make all sorts of toys in that sand. And that's how Easter came. Then, the next day, we would go to church again, have lunch again and they would all get together and go to another pub.

Steliana Draghici, born 1947 in Piscu

It's new because it's different. It's cultural as long as it will be fed by the minds of many people, and they will work in a well-run orchestra. I say it's the flagship because that's what it is. If you go in there and you think about how it was made and what the result is... the moment you feel all the elements that make it up you'll marvel that it's something tangible and you almost can't believe it was born. On the one hand, it's an exception, but on the other hand, if that's all it is, I don't think it's right. Its most important purpose is to be a node in a network. (...) I think we should think about what are the resources of Bucharest in the immediate neighborhood and what are the resources of the neighborhood in relation to Bucharest. Things need to be thought more organically.

arh. Șerban Sturdza

The spirit of the place at the meeting with the founders' thinking demanded it. Adriana and Virgil Scripcariu founded the Piscu School in 2006 and since then have continuously developed projects to research and promote local and national cultural heritage. In the years 2017-2020, the Piscu School Museum-Workshop was established. It was also requested by the many visitors who have crossed the threshold of the village over the last 16 years in search of cultural recreation and who have confirmed the initial intuition that Piscu has beneficial experiences to offer.

Adriana Scripcariu, art historian

A museum, any museum, must be a place of inspiration, a transfiguring place through the lesson that, in the guise of a condensing memory device, it shelters, giving it to those who pass through its halls. As a preserver and developer of consumed, revolved time, the museum refers to the archetype, to a primary model, as that-what-is-now-at-the-beginning. Therefore, the museum not only proposes a space of memory, but also a time that is actualized through access to the logos of the artifact that bears witness.