Restoration of the original form of a mockup with a representation of a folk dance on the basis of an ethnochoreographic analysis – conservation issues. Inv. No. PME 3515/1-5

The object was made in 1937 on the occasion of the exhibition European folk dances as a part of the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris. The collection of mock-ups is particularly valuable for the development of the modern ethnography of European folk dance; currently, it is kept as a deposit in the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. Because of the deformation of the arrangement of the dolls in the conserved mock-up, the representation has become completely illegible. The aim of my conservation and restoration works was mainly to restore the proper arrangement and to stop destructive processes. A separate challenge was the multi-layered construction of the dolls, which made it necessary to elaborate a method of cleaning and protecting their disassembled and non-disassembled individual parts. The interdisciplinarity of work with various materials with an unusual structure allowed me to gain experience in many new aspects requiring an individual approach to each element of the object.