A lecture as part of the Call the Witness Roma Pavillion.
01.-03.06.2011, Palazzo Zorzi UNESCO Venice Office Castello 4930, Venice.

callthewitness.net/

This lecture considers the question: what is the story of the recent emergence of contemporary Roma visual art? Sociology calls the production of visual art “representation,” but when artists call it “bearing witness” it suddenly becomes more urgent. Bearing witness is an action that requires an active subject. For centuries, visual art bearing witness about the lives of Roma/Gypsies/Travellers has existed, in which they have been only the passive objects of representation. But in the past few years, the emergence of a new Romani art has identified the missing subject and invited it to step forward. When you look into one of artist Daniel Baker’s mirror pieces, you see a human subject: yourself. When you take a photo of one, you create your own unique new work of art, anchored to the memory of your own time and place of contemplation. But Roma/Gypsies/Travellers cannot bear witness without raising the question of why that witnessing was suppressed for 500 years. So the story of how Roma art has suddenly burst upon the international scene, and its presence at the Venice Biennale, is untellable unless we also re-shape the historical narrative of the marginalization, brutalization, intermittent genocide, and exclusion of Roma from European history. (Thomas Acton)

A presentation as part of the Call the Witness Roma Pavillion.
01.-03.06.2011, Palazzo Zorzi UNESCO Venice Office Castello 4930, Venice.

callthewitness.net/

Stalker, an open network of artists and architects, has been involved in the last years in the field of research and activist practice into the issue of the right to housing for the Roma people in Italy. Envisioning their artistic work as a catalyst for the self-empowerment of communities facing discrimination and inequity, Stalker worked with a group of Roma activists in Rome demanding the possibility of dignified habitation for their community. In the Roma Pavilion, Stalker show a film documenting a concrete action titled Once Upon a Time there was Savorengo Ker, the Home of Everyone (2009), directed by Fabrizio Boni and Giorgio de Finis, which follows a collective of people building an experimental dwelling, utilizing the remarkable skills and knowledge accumulated by the Roma over the centuries. In their testimony, Stalker discuss how one might extend the potentials of this action to an extreme by undertaking a new “building” project, this time of a space shuttle. Here the collective effort of Roma people, but equally importantly, migrants and refugees from Peru, Nigeria, Sudan, Morocco, Ukraine, etc. who are occupants of Metropoliz, a squatted abandoned factory in Rome, leads to the construction of an imaginary vehicle that could bring them, if only symbolically, to the moon: a place not yet marked by the divisions of private property, war, or discrimination. The space rocket is thought of as scenography for a movie—inspired by Voyage dans la Lune (Georges Méliès, 1902)—that will be filmed as a part of a documentary about Metropoliz. The project, titled Space Metropoliz, launched in the Roma Pavilion, tells not only personal stories of injustice, but also irrepressible hopes and dreams for a better future. (Maria Hlavajova)

A lecture-presentation as part of the Call the Witness Roma Pavillion.
01.-03.06.2011, Palazzo Zorzi UNESCO Venice Office Castello 4930, Venice.

callthewitness.net/

In his testimony, Žilnik discusses his experience filming the Kenedi Trilogy, which includes the documentary films Kenedi se vraca kuci [Kenedi Goes Back Home] (2003); Gde je dve godine bio Kenedi [Kenedi, Lost and Found] (2005); and Kenedi se ženi [Kenedi is Getting Married] (2007). The films follow Kenedi Hasani, a young Roma from Kosovo, after he is coercively repatriated from Germany to Serbia. With little more than an ethnic link to Serbia, Kenedi starts his struggle for survival in a place where the Roma are forced to live in conditions of deprivation, both socially and economically. This policy of repatriation—the result of agreements between Germany and Serbia as part of the European Union’s integration plans—allows Germany to undertake abrupt and unannounced deportations of refugees, asylum seekers, and “illegal immigrants” originating from Serbia (or those who have entered the EU via Serbia). Through the films, Žilnik points to the paradox of the EU’s often harsh treatment of people living on the social and legal fringes of its territory, particularly given its claims to support democracy and human rights. In this way, the Trilogy functions as a critique of Europe’s neoliberal migration and immigration regime, and by extension the global biopolitical conditions that work to maintain it. At the conclusion of his testimony, Žilnik “leaves behind” the Kenedi Trilogy in the Roma Pavilion, adding the work to the exhibition. (Gwen Parry)

A performance as part of the Call the Witness Roma Pavillion.
01.-03.06.2011, Palazzo Zorzi UNESCO Venice Office Castello 4930, Venice.

callthewitness.net/

Artist Tanja Ostojić’s ongoing interdisciplinary project Naked Life (2004–2011) investigates issues of discrimination of Roma and Sinti, the largest minorities in Europe. The project deals with bare life, social and political exclusion, deportation, racism, state racism, biopolitics, xenophobia, and diverse cultural identities. For Call the Witness, Ostojić develops a new version of her Naked Life video performance (2004/2008), which is based on the proceedings of the "Written Comments of the European Roma Rights Centre Concerning Germany For Consideration by the United Nations Human Rights Committee at its 80th Session, 2004." During the performance, the artist reads out the fates of different Roma families taken from the report’s segment on deportations. While reading, she strips her clothing from her body, remaining naked in the end and symbolically vulnerable as bare life. This new iteration of the performance focuses on the most recent cases of forced migration imposed on Roma in the European Union and south-eastern Europe, as well as cases of violence, discrimination, and racism that they are facing on a daily basis. Ostojić considers how it is possible that in contemporary Europe certain ethnic groups are constantly exposed and stripped of their political, social, and human rights. (Tanja Ostojić)

A lecture as part of the Call the Witness Roma Pavillion.
01.-03.06.2011, Palazzo Zorzi UNESCO Venice Office Castello 4930, Venice.

callthewitness.net/

This lecture considers the question: what is the story of the recent emergence of contemporary Roma visual art? Sociology calls the production of visual art “representation,” but when artists call it “bearing witness” it suddenly becomes more urgent. Bearing witness is an action that requires an active subject. For centuries, visual art bearing witness about the lives of Roma/Gypsies/Travellers has existed, in which they have been only the passive objects of representation. But in the past few years, the emergence of a new Romani art has identified the missing subject and invited it to step forward. When you look into one of artist Daniel Baker’s mirror pieces, you see a human subject: yourself. When you take a photo of one, you create your own unique new work of art, anchored to the memory of your own time and place of contemplation. But Roma/Gypsies/Travellers cannot bear witness without raising the question of why that witnessing was suppressed for 500 years. So the story of how Roma art has suddenly burst upon the international scene, and its presence at the Venice Biennale, is untellable unless we also re-shape the historical narrative of the marginalization, brutalization, intermittent genocide, and exclusion of Roma from European history. (Thomas Acton)

A lecture as part of the Call the Witness Roma Pavillion.
01.-03.06.2011, Palazzo Zorzi UNESCO Venice Office Castello 4930, Venice.

callthewitness.net/

The figure of the “gypsy” has had a long life in the imaginary of western European artists, from the nineteenth-century romantics to the bohemians of the early twentieth century. As McDonough explains in this lecture, the visionary model for a “gypsy camp” by the Dutch painter-turned-architect Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920–2005) both builds upon and departs from this imaginary, informed as it was by the conflict of the Second World War that had seen the attempted extermination of Roma people by the Nazi regime. Spurred by his friend, the Italian painter Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, who offered his land in the Piedmont region of Italy for the use of a Roma community, Constant designed a mobile setting for a nomadic people, foreshadowing his great “New Babylon” project of the coming decades. Caught between a romantic stereotype and critical functionality, this work, Design for a Gypsy Camp (1956–1958), is both an architectural setting and a utopian social model. If it indulges in an increasingly anachronistic myth of the “vagabond gypsy,” it also imagines a society free of the constraints of the nation-state, an egalitarian society whose members could devote themselves to the exercise of freedom. Over a half-century after its conception, its ambivalent address to a refugee population—as both political subjects and fantasized others—remains distinctly resonant. (Tom McDonough)