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Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance pp 103–127Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Countering Persecution, Misconceptions, and Nationalism: Roma Identity and Contemporary Activist Art

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Part of the book series: Avant-Gardes in Performance ((AGP))

Abstract

The bodies of Roma are in danger, as are their manifold cultural legacies and futures, which have been violated and erased by political and social mechanisms of systematic oppression, murder, and discrimination. At the same time, these bodies have been and continue to be marginalized within the sphere of art. My contribution to this volume highlights the art and activist works of two artists of Romani descent who point to and inhabit those bodies in danger: Marika Schmiedt from Austria and Lidija Mirković, from Serbia and currently based in Germany. Situating the urgency of these artists’ practices within the contemporary context of the political, cultural, and social discriminatory systems mediated through visual discourses, this essay sketches the background upon which these artists’ interventions take place, presenting examples from popular culture of primitivizing and racist stereotypes of Roma constructed by non-Roma, including the perpetuation of such known derogatory epithets as “Gypsy Witches,” “Global Nomads,” “Bohemians,” “Fortune Tellers,” and “Parasites.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ian Hancock, “A Glossary of Romani Terms,” The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 45, no. 2 (Spring 1997), 334.

  2. 2.

    “Persecution of Roma (Gypsies) in Prewar Germany, 1933–1939,” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005482.

  3. 3.

    European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, Annual Repost Covering the Period From 1 January to 31 December 2011, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2016, 25. https://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/ecri/activities/Annual_Reports/Annual%20report%202011.pdf.

  4. 4.

    Human Rights Watch, World Report 2015: European Union Events of 2014, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/croatia-european-union-france-germany-greece-hungary-italy.

  5. 5.

    In 2012, for example, the Guardian reported that in the small village of Gyöngyöspata, the Hungarian guard and other neo-Nazi organizations and militia marched through the streets and attacked Roma residents. After the militia publicized its plans for a “training camp” in the village, the Hungarian Red Cross and Richard Field (identified as a US business man by the Guardian) supplied six buses to evacuate “267 Roma women and children.” See Helen Pidd, “Poor, Abused, and Second-Class: The Roma Living in Fear in Hungarian Village,” Guardian (Jan. 23, 2012).

    Other more publicized instances of discrimination and violence involved the media scandal around Viktoria Mohacsi, a Roma rights activist and Hungary’s former Member of Parliament in Hungary 2004–2009, who came under public scrutiny and fire for her response to the killing of a Hungarian handball player (Marian Cozma) by the Roma in early February 2009. After Cozma was stabbed to death by the Roma, Mohacsi stated on public television that the handball player “must have provoked them” which lead to death threats and emails calling her a “stinking lousy gypsy” and “dirty animal” who was “soon going to die together with the rest of [her] race.” (See Mirjam Donath, “EU Lawmaker to Canada Asylum Seeker: A Roma’s Long Trek,” Reuters (June 16, 2013)). Mohacsi was already a thorn in the Hungarian authorities eyes in 2008, when she headed the Movement for Desegregation Foundation and traveled across the Hungarian nation to report crimes against the Roma. One case in particular involved the murder of a Roma man and his five-year-old son who were shot dead in their attempt to escape their Molotov-cocktailed, burning home in Tatarszentgyörgy, a village 55 km south of Budapest. Mohacsi’s investigation showed that the police had deliberately falsified evidence and closed the case, blaming their deaths on smoke inhalation instead of reporting it as a hate crime. Mohacsi received several Human Rights awards for this work, including the Human Rights First 2010 Annual Award in New York. But in 2012, the threat to her own life in Hungary became too immense, and Mohacsi filed for asylum in Canada.

  6. 6.

    Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Balkan,” The Journal of the International Institute, Vol. 6, no. 2 (Winter 1999), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0006.202/--spectre-of-balkan?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

  7. 7.

    Marina Gržinić, “Linking Theory, Politics, and Art,” ed. Zoya Kocur, Global Visual Cultures: An Anthology, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, 27.

  8. 8.

    Nelson Graburn quoted in Christopher Balme, “Between Separation and Integration. Intercultural Strategies in Contemporary Maori Theatre,” ed. Patrcie Pavis, The Intercultural Performance Reader, Abingdon: Routledge, 1996, 180. Also, see Nelson Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, 1.

  9. 9.

    Mike Sell, “Bohemianism, the Cultural Turn of the Avant-garde, and Forgetting the Roma,” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 51, no. 2 (2007), 44.

  10. 10.

    Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930, New York: Viking, 1986, 3.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 5.

  12. 12.

    Marilyn R. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985, 22.

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    David Mayall, Gypsy Identities, 1500–2000: From Egyptians and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany, London: Routledge, 2004, 156.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 159.

  16. 16.

    Colin Clark, “‘Severity has Often Enraged but Never Subues a Gypsy’: The History and Making if European Romani Stereotypes,” eds. Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt, The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of “Gypsies”/Romanies in European Cultures, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004, 244.

  17. 17.

    Zoltan Barany, “Protracted Marginality: The East European Roma,” ed. Sam C. Nolutshungu, Margins of Insecurity: Minorities and International Security, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1996, 78.

  18. 18.

    Enric Jardí, Nonell, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafia, 1968, 126.

  19. 19.

    Anthea Callen, The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 140.

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 141.

  22. 22.

    Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470–1780, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 139.

  23. 23.

    Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004, 52.

  24. 24.

    Wim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution, New York: Routledge, 2014.

  25. 25.

    Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy, 52.

  26. 26.

    For more information, see “Greek Mystery Girl’s Identity Confirmed by DNA,” abcNews (Oct. 25, 2013), http://abcnews.go.com/International/mystery-gypsy-girls-identity-confirmed-dna/story?id=20681522.

  27. 27.

    Louise Hogan, “Parents of Roma Boy Offered DNA Swab in Plea to the Gardai,” Irish News (Oct. 10, 2013), http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/parents-of-roma-boy-offered-dna-swab-in-plea-to-the-gardai-29696146.html.

  28. 28.

    Original title: “Die Roma kommen: Raubzüge in die Schweiz. Familienbetriebe des Verbrechens,” Die Weltwoche, no. 14 (April 2012).

  29. 29.

    Original title: “Armutsmigration. Die Zigeuner kommen,” Zur Zeit, no. 5 (Feb. 5 2014).

  30. 30.

    Maria Hlavajova, “Exhibition Architecture (After Constant’s Design for a Gypsy Camp),” Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, http://www.callthewitness.net/Testimonies/ExhibitionArchitecture.

  31. 31.

    Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitive,” eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 170–184.

  32. 32.

    Salman Rushdie, “The Real Crime is Ours,” eds. Daniel Baker and Maria Hlavajova, We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Utrecht: BAK, 2013, 227.

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 25–26.

  35. 35.

    Caterina Pasqualino, “The Gypsies, Poor but Happy,” Third Text, Vol. 22, no. 3 (2008), 345.

  36. 36.

    Ibid.

  37. 37.

    Emir Kusturica quoted in Goran Gocić, Notes from the Underground, London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2001, 110.

  38. 38.

    Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and Media, London: BFI Publishing, 2002, 214.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 216.

  40. 40.

    Žižek, “The Spectre of Balkan.”

  41. 41.

    For more information, please see “Village Humiliated by Borat Satire,” BBC News (Oct. 26, 2008), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7686885.stm.

  42. 42.

    Susanne Schmid, “Taking Embarrassment to its Extremes: Borat and Cultural Anxiety,” eds. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff, Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010, 266.

  43. 43.

    Aleksandar Manić begins the film with this written sentence on the screen.

  44. 44.

    Suzana Milevska, “Not Quite Bare Life: Ruins of Representation,” eipcp: european institute for progressive cultural policies, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1206/milevska/de.

  45. 45.

    Haymatfilm, “Interview with Lidija Mirković,” I Have Dreamt of Working as a Hairdresser Press Kit, Neuss: Haymatfilm, 2008, 10, http://www.haymatfilm.com/en/films/hairdresser/_hairdresser_press_kit_101026.pdf.

  46. 46.

    Michael Martens, “Filmemacherin Lidija Mirković im Gespräch: Ein Leben in Belleville,” Frankfurter Allgemeine (Oct. 3, 2013), http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/europa/filmemacherin-lidija-mirkovic-im-gespraech-ein-leben-in-belleville-12108584.html.

  47. 47.

    Ibid.

  48. 48.

    Lidija Mirković also collaborated with Dragan Vildovic on a photo series entitled Dialogue with Carmen, 2012, which featured images of Belleville residents holding the painting of Carmen in front of their faces.

  49. 49.

    For more information, see http://www.romadecade.org/.

  50. 50.

    Vladan Jeremić and Rena Raedle, “Antiziganism and Class Racism in Europe,” Chto Delat International, no. 1 (2009), http://chtodelat.org/b8-newspapers/12-49/vladan-jeremic-and-rena-raedle-antiziganism-and-class-racism-in-europe/.

    [It is also necessary to expose that in this case though “antiziganism” supposedly opposes Roma discrimination, nevertheless it uses the word “Z” that is a form of everyday racism against Roma. Eds. Note]

  51. 51.

    Participating countries include: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Spain, while Slovenia, the United States , Norway and Moldova have observer status.

  52. 52.

    Jeremić and Raedle, “Antiziganism and Class Racism in Europe.”

  53. 53.

    For more information, see: http://www.akademie-graz.at/cms/cms.php?pageName=2&terminId=362.

  54. 54.

    Marika Schmiedt, What Remains? (2011), available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCgFfhbe86k.

  55. 55.

    Suzana Milevska, “Artistic and Theoretical Strategies Challenging Racism,” Red Thread, no. 3 (2001), http://www.red-thread.org/en/article.asp?a=62.

  56. 56.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Making Visible,” IG Kultur Östereich, Safe European Home? Symposium, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna (May 28, 2011), https://igkultur.at/index.php/artikel/making-visible.

  57. 57.

    Helen Pidd, “Poor, Abused, and Second Class: The Roma Living in Fear in Hungarian Village,” Guardian (Jan. 27, 2012), http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/27/hungary-roma-living-in-fear.

  58. 58.

    Keno Verseck, “Hungary’s Racism Problem: Orban Friend Says Roma ‘Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Exist,” Spiegel Online (Jan. 11, 2013), http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/hungarian-journalist-says-roma-should-not-be-allowed-to-exist-a-876887.html.

  59. 59.

    Marika Schmiedt in conversation with the author, April 14, 2013.

  60. 60.

    For more information, see http://www.romadecade.org/.

  61. 61.

    Schmiedt also points to how the use of the word “gypsy” to connote a certain style of cuisine or food represents a form of everyday racism. Already in 2004, in her installation piece “Why do you want to eat us?” the artist put together a collection of food products that use “gypsy” (or the German “Zigeuner”). Schmiedt’s installation points at the lack of awareness around the term itself, and more broadly, about the history of Roma and Sinti, as it represents a widespread erasures of ethnic differences and also signifies negative stereotypes. For Schmiedt, the epithet signifies the century-long discrimination and reduction of a people to a brand, as well as their position as objects that can be used, and/or be dispensed of.

  62. 62.

    Irene Brickner, “Ungarn-Nationale erwirken Plakatvernichtung in Linz,” derStandard (May 10, 2013), http://derstandard.at/1363710676089/Ungarn-Nationale-erwirkten-Plakatvernichtung-in-Linz.

  63. 63.

    Irene Brickner, “Ungarn-nationaler Proteststurm gegen Roma-Plakatschau in Linz,” Der Standard (Oct. 2, 2013), http://derstandard.at/1379292854465/Ungarnnationaler-Prozeststurm-gegen-Roma-Plakatschau-in-Linz.

  64. 64.

    See Marika Schmiedt’s website for details, https://marikaschmiedt.wordpress.com/knoblauch-projekt-fur-roma-dass-etwas-geschieht/.

  65. 65.

    “Buchmann unterstützt Knoblauch-Projekt für Roma,” Das Land Steiermark, http://www.politik.steiermark.at/cms/beitrag/11525374/58576920/ (translation by the author).

  66. 66.

    http://www.roma6plus6.net/cms/EACEA_Projectreader_2014_web_komplett.pdf.

  67. 67.

    Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004, 59–60.

  68. 68.

    Timea Junghaus, Meet Your Neighbours: Contemporary Roma Art from Europe, Open Society Institute, 2006, 6.

  69. 69.

    Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, 132.

  70. 70.

    Haymatfilm, “Interview with Lidija Mirković,” 10.

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  1. Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Jasmina Tumbas

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Fine Arts (IBK), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Marina Gržinić

  2. Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

    Aneta Stojnić

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Tumbas, J. (2018). Countering Persecution, Misconceptions, and Nationalism: Roma Identity and Contemporary Activist Art. In: Gržinić, M., Stojnić, A. (eds) Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_6

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