CHANGING VISIONS: GYPSY VISUALITY AND THE ROMANI AESTHETIC. Lecture by Daniel Baker. 11:00 am–12 pm

The artist Daniel Baker explores ways in which Romani visuality and the resulting Romani aesthetic have developed in relation to the circumstances in which many Romani communities continue to exist. These circumstances are characterised by a state of extended emergency, which has necessarily fostered the integration of artistic practice into everyday functioning and rituals. The resulting existential concerns and consequent survival strategies that emerge from these concerns continue to undergird Roma lives.

Using examples from historical and contemporary Romani art, along with his own artworks used as instruments of analysis and interpretation, the artist reflects on the mechanisms and implications of visibility within Romani culture to show how the hierarchies of artistic practice reproduce and impact broader social relations.

When analysing the relationship between marginal artistic practices and those at the centre, we can find new ways of thinking about the relations between marginalised peoples and society in general. When we decide to look at these practices anew, we once again look at the people who have generated them. Thus, the artwork acts as an extension of the artist, who in turn acts as an extension of their community. When revalorising these objects, we feel motivated to reassess their creators and therefore the cultures from which they come.

CLAIMING SUBJECTIVITY: ROMA CONTEMPORARY IDENTITY AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND POLITICS. By dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka.12:00- 13:00h

Historically, arts and culture, alongside of academic discourse and policies, have played a major role in constructing, proliferating and normalizing fetishized, exotified and/or stigmatizing images of Roma which are the foundation of antigypsyism – a specific form of racism against Romani people.

Confronting these stereotypical narratives - shaped by external voices, representing the perspective of mainstream society - has been the driving force behind all Romani political, cultural and academic movements formed in the aftermath of World War II. Since then, Roma have been employing various strategies to claim subjectivity and gain control in cultural discourse, challenging the external (mis)representation of Roma culture through self-representation rooted in subjective and personal experiences. Most visibly this has happened through the arts.

In her lecture, dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka will discuss mechanisms which contributed to the shaping and normalizing different manifestations of antigypsyism as well present different strategies through which Roma have opposed them. She will examine processes of emancipation, consisting in reclaiming the Roma voice and subjectivity in three parallel domains - involving political, artistic and academic spheres. With a particular focus on contemporary arts, Mirga-Kruszelnicka will demonstrate how artists of Romani background have been assertively rejecting imposed discourses which solidify stereotypical representations of Roma identity and culture. By doing so, Roma cultural producers the new Roma iconography of the contemporary Romani identity – an identity liberated from a sense of inferiority, modern, firmly rooted in community and deriving strength and inspiration from Romani cultural heritage.

PARTICIPANTS

Pastora Filigrana. Seville, 1981. Labour lawyer and human rights defender. Feminist and anti-racist activist with a professional and personal commitment to struggle against anti-Gypsyism. She is the author of the book El Pueblo Gitano contra el Sistema-Mundo (Akal, 2020).

Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, 1964) is an artist, curator, researcher and publisher whose work focuses on analysing ‘historical events, life and the circulation of images, sacramental iconography, the iconoclastic gesture of the artist avant-gardes of the twentieth century and modern art, flamenco, concepts and imaginaries about popular culture, the economy, cultural policy, forms of urban speculation, etc.’ His most important works about the image of the Roma and Flamenco are Machines for Living. Flamenco and Architecture in the Occupation and Vacating of Spaces (Centro-Centro, Madrid and La Virreina, Barcelona, 2018) and Days of Ire. Libertarian Communism, Flamenco Romanies and Avant-garde Realism: Helios Gómez (La Virreina, Barcelona, 2021). Between 2018 and 2019, he developed the ‘way-of-life’ project for the Bergen Assembly in Norway and the Kunstvereim in Stuttgart. He is currently displaying his work Lo que el Flamenco nos enseña [What Flamenco Teaches Us] at the Galería Alarcón Criado in Seville. He recently won the 2024 National Fine Arts Award granted by the Ministry of Culture.

Juan Loriente Zamora, ElGitanoRomano, actor (1959). He is currently working with Oscar Gómez Mata and La Ribot, with whom he started partnering in 1993. He has worked with Rodrigo García (1999–2020), Carlos Marquerie (1992–2000), Fernando Rubio, Ana Valles, Ion Munduate, Pablo Fidalgo, Juan Domínguez, Jadranka Andgelic, Isaac Cuende Landa, La Fura dels Baus in 1990 (Suz/oSuz and Tier Mon).He created the Plataforma Encuentro de dos intimidades [Encounter of Two Intimacies Platform] along with Nekane Santamaría and the Plataforma Trapecistas del silencio [Trapezists of Silence Platform] with Lola Jiménez. He has worked with Pedro G. Romero in articulating La Rótula for the exhibition Máquinas de trovar [Versifying Machines] and with background guitar music for the film De caballos y guitarras.

Noelia Cortés (Almería, 1996) is an essayist and poet. In 2021, she was chosen by Mujer Hoy magazine as one of the women who will change the future, and at the end of that same year she published her first poetry collection, Del mar y muerte. In 2022, she published La higuera de las gitanas, an essay in which she reveals the anti-Gypsyism rooted in cultural, educational and feminist spaces, and she was chosen for the exhibition Gitanos de hoy [Roma Today] in the Parliament of Andalusia. In 2023, she wrote a chapter of the essay Flores para Lola, which analysed the racism around the figure of Lola Flores. In 2024, she reissued her poetry and worked on the documentary Farruquito (Grupo Izen) as a creative consultant.

Sandra Carmona. Professional illustrator and educator. She works in both professions using creativity as a cross-cutting tool. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Education at the University of Málaga and in Illustration at the San Telmo Art College.

Her work is associated with her life experiences and her identity as a lesbian, feminist Romani woman and her decision to continue living ensconced in rurality as a political position. She exercises her activism in different struggles for the rights of the Roma and LGBTIQ+ people.

For the past ten years, her professional career has been characterised by integrating a critical and conscious eye in her work as an artist and in creating the Altramuz publishing house, a Romani LGBTIQ+ publisher that showcases the creation of these groups’ own narratives. In its four years of existence, Altramuz has won the Amazing Woman and Hello Woman awards, both of them granted to the creation of innovative, social cultural projects.

Alba Hernández Sánchez. She is a feminist Roma who is an expert in gender equality and anti-racism. With intersectionality as a theoretical and practical principle that permeates her own experience, her main areas of research and work are the production of feminist Romani knowledge and the inclusion of professional Romani women in dominant spaces. Committed to political influence, she and three other Romani women have co-founded two Europe-wide initiatives: the Romanja Feminist Library and the Feminist Collective of Romani Gender Experts.

Isaki Lacuesta (Girona, 1975) is a filmmaker whose real name is Iñaki, but he uses the nickname Isaki to include Isa Campo, his usual scriptwriter. His work encompasses documentaries, fiction and video installations. He combines filmmaking with teaching and writing. He studied Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and graduated in the first edition of the master’s in Creative Documentaries at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra.

His filmography has earned him numerous awards and recognitions both in Spain and abroad, including two Golden Shells from the San Sebastián Film Festival. Critics have said that Isaki’s films display ‘an artistic honesty from another planet’. The Romani image has been part of his films in works like La leyenda del tiempo [The Legend of Time] (2006), Entre dos aguas [Between Two Waters] (2018) and Chaplin: Espíritu gitano [Chaplin: Romani Spirit] (2024). He is currently directing the project Flores para Antonio, a feature-length documentary film that surveys the life and work of the musician and composer Antonio Flores with his daughter, the actress Alba Flores.

Paloma Zapata (Murcia, 1979). She is a filmmaker who studied Fine Arts. She is the founder of the production company La Fábrica Naranja and has had an international career as a director of music video clips since 2005. She directed her first feature-length film, Casamance, in 2016. Filmed in Senegal, it was chosen to be shown in film festivals like the FIGC in Mexico and in Rotterdam. In 2018, her second feature-length film, a documentary that examined the figure of the musician Peret, premiered as the film that closed the In-Edit International Music Documentary Film Festival.

Pablo Vega (Badajoz, 1975). A film director, scriptwriter, producer and editor, he is considered a visual artist who loves working with emotions and feelings through images and believes that his Romani identity gives him a different way to see and feel the emotions he captures in his works. He has a degree in Multimedia Technologies and Design from San Francisco University and has had his own production company since 2003, Dika Audiovisual. In 2010, he premiered his first documentary as the director, scriptwriter and editor: Romnia: Mujeres gitanas de Huesca [Romnya: Romani Women from Huesca] of the Fundación Secretariado Gitano. He has partnered with other filmmakers from all over Europe to curate the film section of Rom Archive. He has received several awards, such as the 8 de Abril Romani Culture Award (2012) and the Enrique Maya Arts Award (2013) of the Community of Madrid. Vega is a member of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC). In 2022, through the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin, he wrote and directed the short film Proud Roma, which is being screened at the workshop.

Daniel Baker. Daniel Baker is an artist whose eclectic methodology of making, writing and curating was developed during his PhD research into Roma aesthetics at the Royal College of Art in London. His work featured in documenta fifteen and Manifesta 14, as well as four editions of the Venice Biennale, both as artist (2007, 2011, 2022) and as curator of FUTUROMA (2019). Baker’s work examines the role of artistic practice in the enactment of social agency via the reconfiguration of aspects of Gypsy visuality. His work is exhibited internationally and can be found in collections worldwide. Publications include WE ROMA: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Ex Libris, FUTUROMA and GRT LGBTQ+ Spoken History Archive . He lives and works in London. 

Dr Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, deputy director of the European Roma Art and Culture Institute (ERIAC). Dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka is an anthropologist and a Roma activist, born in 1985 in Cracow, Poland. She earned her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in 2016. She holds an MA in European Integration from UAB and an MA in Comparative Studies of Civilizations from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (UJ). She is the author of policy evaluations, reports, and articles, co-editor of the “Education for Remembrance of the Roma Genocide: Scholarship, Commemoration and the Role of Youth“ (Libron, 2015) and “Re-thinking Roma Resistance throughout History: Recounting Stories of Strength and Bravery” (ERIAC, 2020) and author of “Mobilizing Romani Ethnicity: Romani Political Activism in Argentina, Colombia, and Spain (CEU Press, 2022).
Formerly, she was a Fellow of the Open Society Foundations Roma Initiatives Office, coordinator and curator of the Roma Civil Rights Movement Section in the RomArchive – Digital Archive of the Roma and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of the Romani Studies Program at the Central European University (CEU). She serves as the deputy director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) since January 2018.

Inés Plasencia. Writer, curator, research and professor. Her main lines of inquiry are the history of photography, the visual arts and the visual culture of colonialism and its continuities applied to debates, questions and ways of critically questioning contemporaneity, as well as the notion of citizenship as a standardising mandate by states. Right now, the exploration of fear via contemporary artistic and cultural practices is at the core of her work. On this topic, she has curated the programmes Los nombres del miedo [The Names of Fear, 2021] and Miedo, amor y revolución [Fear, Love and Revolution, 2022] at Intermediae-Matadero thanks to the Producción 0 residency programme. An invisible detonation at the TEA Espacio de las Artes in Tenerife began the Ficciones para después de una vida [Fictions for After a Life] project, which explores the boundaries between the real and the imagined around death. It is based on artistic creations and counter-hegemonic and anti-colonial knowledge which, beyond the dichotomy of the ‘great beyond’ versus nothingness, inquire into the potentiality of the living to extend the existence of our deaths/dead. She also has a master’s in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture and holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is currently an associate professor at that university and teaches classes at Duke University in Madrid.

Trinidad Reyerta. Speaking about her work, this graphic artist says, ‘an activistic, artistic approach between Romani art and urban poetry, everyday Romani life inspires me to create “pieces of the day-to-day resistance of a people”, personal stories that I first collect and later transcribe into multidisciplinary contemporary works. Collage, watercolour, silkscreen, graffiti, photography, fragments of life assembled to create works of resistance of a nomadic people.’ REYERTA (hubside.es).

Tania Pardo (Madrid, 1976). She is the director of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Community of Madrid. She was the Community of Madrid’s Fine Arts Advisor until July 2019. Prior to that, she was in charge of the Exhibitions Department at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida. She has also been a curator at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, and was in charge of the programming of the Laboratorio 987 space. She has been the project director at the Fundación Santander 2016 (2009–2010) and associate professor in Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She recently curated the Cristina Garrido show The Origin of Forms, as well as Machine Dream Bird by Teresa Solar Abboud along with Claudia Segura, in a co-production with MACBA and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.