Suzana Milevska

Call the Witness

1.

An essay by the curator of the group exhibition Call the Witness, on view at BAK

from 22 May till 24 July 2011. For more information regarding the exhibition, as well

as the collateral event of the same name, organized within the framework of the 54th

International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2011, see here.

1.

The project Call the Witness puts under pressure the hegemonic regimes of

representation as well as internalized strategies of self-representation that are imposed

upon individuals through biopolitical structures dominant in our contemporary world.

Thus it might be obvious that certain questions such as the following need to be

asked: Who has control over the means of representation and who has the power to

reproduce and distribute certain dominant cultural and moral principles? Or to give a

more concrete example, who has the freedom to erect a platform from which Roma

artists and Roma in general could utter their urgent statements of self-determination

and act as agents of empowering the Roma minority?[1] However, the internalization

of the regimes of representation, identification, self-essentialization, and racism create

a threatening vicious cycle, from which one most urgently needs to seek a way out.

The curatorial concept of Call the Witness attempts to rupture this closed circle. Some

aspects of the project were necessarily incited by the urgency to address recent cases

of individual and collective displacements, evictions, and deportations of Roma

citizens from their homes in many European countries. In light of the current

neoliberal capitalist advance and its thirst for cheap or even free land, these political

maneuvers should come as no surprise.[2] It is also important to point to the severe

breaching of human rights that is occurring, and ultimately to search for new methods

for recognizing and fighting against the constatives and performatives of

contemporary racism that are re-contextualized through an evocation of certain racist

contexts from the past.

The title and the main theme of the project Call the Witness were informed by

Romaniya, the Roma Law that structures community life, and Romani Kris, the

judicial tradition of informal and unwritten justice codex still existing in some

Romani cultures. Within this framework, testimonial performances allow anybody

to be a witness in a proceeding if one feels that there is an urgency for his/her

testimony to be heard for the sake of truth and justice.[3] Thus the starting point for

the exhibition is the figure of the contemporary artist as an instantaneous witness of

his/her time, a figure who through art works and artistic research methods

courageously unravels what social, political, and cultural institutions usually conceal

or overwrite. Obviously the artists presented in this exhibition are not to be seen as

passive viewers or mere conveyors of traditional Roma crafts and art practices. Rather

they act as catalysts of events in solidarity with people who not only inspired their art

works but are also encouraged to become agents of their own self- empowerment

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through producing and positioning their own narratives, as opposed to being labeled

and encoded by rigid political and social structures of identification. These wit- nesses

did not wait to be prepped and called to a witness stand on a raised platform in

order to swear an oath and give their testimonies, as is the practice in formal western

courts of law. They rather understand the role of the witness informally, a conception

that allows for ad hoc testimonies.

Canada Without Shadows / Kanada Bizo Uchalipe (20102011) is a project that

developed as a collaboration between the two members of chirikli collective, Hedina

Tahirovi Sijeri and Lynn Hutchinson Lee. This sound art installation is the result

of a complex research undertaking in which the artists archived and juxtaposed

various found and created sounds in the form of urban and natural soundscapes

consisting of overlaying poetry verses, written and spoken by the artists, and spoken

testimonies of five displaced Hungarian Roma women who fled Europe to seek refuge

in Canada. The whispering voices convey the poetic transpositions of the promised

imaginary land, Canada, starting from different subjective experiences. They partly

re-enact the multilayered community memories, cultural and ethnic displacement,

precariousness, family joys and laments, testimonies of shame, and birds songs as a

metaphor of hope. The sounds of the turning wheels of Lees

family vardo (caravan)mirrors shaking, the sounds of playing with puppets, and her

fathers breath are intertwined with the Sijeris dreams of Romani childrens

laughter and the sound of bombs in the Bosnian Roma ghetto. Canada has no

shadows, no known pre-history of racist outbursts, and thus it attracted many Roma

families to settle there (as did Lees father long ago) but new legal hurdles prevent

many from receiving the desired refugee status.

Milutin Jovanovis semi-staged documentary Migration (2011) addresses the artists

interest in the lives of the dis- placed inhabitants from the former Roma settlement

that used to exist under Belgrades Gazela Bridge. We are invited to follow the story

line as it evolves through the eyes of the artists friend Gagi, one of the residents of

the new Roma set- tlement where some of the evicted Roma families were forced to

move after the Gazela settlements destruction.[4] Gagis genuine aspirations to shoot

a documentary about his neighbors unfulfilled expectations make him an active and

compassionate witness of the everyday struggles of the inhabitants. Trailed by

Jovanovics own camera, Gagi borrows a video camera and starts to shoot his film in

the labyrinth of narrow streets and tinny container-homes. However his search for

witnesses who would testify about the tough living conditions in the new settlement

turns out to be difficult and often futile: the potential witnesses have been silenced by

a warning not to speak publicly about their difficulties coping with the challenges of

daily survival.

Artist Kiba Lumberg (with Kaarina Majander, Free Zone/ Vapaa Vyhyke) created

the comic strip book Crazy Artist Diary (20102011) in direct response to the double

bind and troubled relation of the artist towards the representation of Roma in

contemporary Finnish society but also towards Roma self-representation. In a rough,

ironic, and often sad way her work touches upon the issues that a Roma woman artist

faces when her lifestyle, sexuality, and appearance do not fit into expected rules of

behavior. On the one hand she is not accepted by her own traditional Roma

community for being too liberal, and on the other hand she cannot fulfill the

expectations of the Finnish cultural context because she is perceived to be

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/en/Who/LynnHutchinsonLeehttp://www.bak-utrecht.nl/en/Who/KibaLumberg

overdetermined by her Roma background. In both cases, crazy is the adjective that

is often assigned to her and it sticks all too easily. The artists gender and sexual

orientation, underscored by her profession as an artist and her culture, are interwoven

and create a manifold identity full of inner contradictions. Yet life on the edge of

these two worlds could be exactly the space where a new subjectivity is born, a loudly

speaking subject who testifies about her disenchantments, while simultaneously

constructing her singular destiny with confidence.

Marika Schmiedt devoted her work VERMCHTNIS. LEGACY (20102011) to artist

Ceija Stojka and her offspring. Stojka is a Roma woman painter, musician, and writer

from Austria. She is one of the few living survivors of the Nazi Holocaust who lived

through all horrors of internment in the concentration camps

Auschwitz, Ravensbrck, and Bergen-Belsen, and who experienced the most severe

consequences of racism even after the end of the Second World War.[5] The main

issue that Schmiedt explores in the work is very similar to a question asked by

philosopher Giorgio Agamben: "What is the juridical structure that allowed such

events to take place?[6] In pursuit of an answer to this question, the artist

interviewed different generations of Stojkas female descendents who constantly face

the need to renegotiate the past as they live with her silent testimonials of those who

cannot testify. Such fragmented oral micro-histories may, of course, significantly

differ from macro-historic documents. While fighting historical amnesia, these

testimonials warn us both of racisms eternal return and of the aporia of the proxy

witness: the survivors testimony as a potentiality that becomes actual through an

impotentiality of speech [] an impossibility that gives itself existence through a

possibility of speaking.[7]

Artist Alfred Ullrichs series of photographs are exhibited as documents of an older

performance entitled Pearls before Swine. The original performance took place on 13

May 2000 in the Czech Republic in front of the former Roma concentration camp

Lety, which was run solely by Czechs during WWII; since the 1970s, the site has

housed a swine farm. The artist threw pearls from a necklace belonging to his sister

onto the ground through the farms locked gate and in front of the memorial stone in

homage to his relatives and other Roma who were interned in various concentration

camps.[8] The artists action and the title of the work point to the absurd and

disturbing attempt by the Czech government to overwrite the history and existence of

the Lety site, and to erase any public memory related to the concentration camp and

the horrors that took place there by simply covering it up with a different kind of

dirt, thus desecrating the memory of Roma who suffered there.[9] Another work by

Ullrich, Dachau, Landfahrerplatz kein Gewerbe (2011), consists of a street sign

warning that itinerants are not allowed to trade or peddle in the area, but in the work

the inscription is crossed out. This simple action highlights how seemingly neutral

regulations in fact enforce the segregation of Roma travelers from others. Thus

discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is preserved through language and visual

public memory, something that gives way to reinforcing the already existing

stereotype of Roma people as exotic creatures full of wanderlust.

The photo-novella project Venice Mahala Opus (2011) by Nihad Nino Puija is

imagined as a kind of a personal archive- report on the complexities of the

development of the Call the Witness project. His artistic responses to different stages

of the discussions, varying from intense political and theoretical challenges to

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/en/Who/MarikaSchmiedthttp://www.bak-utrecht.nl/en/Who/AlfredUllrich

humorous and anecdotal observations, are actually digital photo-collages made of

documentary photographs and recorded statements by the participating artists and

other collaborators (researchers, artists, curators, etc.) involved in the projects

development. Through juxtaposition of different sources and strategies of cross-

referencing,Puijas series of fold-out postcards in leporello format addresses many of

the sensitive and complicated questions that were generated during this project

including: what kind of institutional powers are still used by gadje (non-Roma

individuals) to keep the subaltern from speaking?; who owns the copyright to Roma

history?; and who is entitled to make art about the Roma?

The artist and educator-activist Tania Magy was initially invited to present her on-

going project La Caravane-Muse [The Museum Caravan] (2004present), a structure

in which she lives and travels, in the exhibition. The caravan is a kind of alternative

institution whose art collection consists of Magys own art works as well as paintings,

sculptures, photographs, videos, and films by other Roma artists (including Gabi

Jimenez, Grard Gartner, Bruno Morelli, Tony Gatlif, Laura Halilovic) who

contributed their works to this participatory project as an act of solidarity and in

support of its educational, but also cultural, social, and political endeavors. Magy is

committed to organizing different art, educational, and curatorial activities for the

communities hosting her caravan; these include informal classes for Romani children

on the representation of Roma in the arts, a kind of institutional critique of art history.

In the course of the dramatic political actions in France in August 2010, the artist

herself became an immediate eyewitness of the destruction of Roma camps and the

overnight deportations that were undertaken following the French governments

orders, based on a personal memo from the French president Nicolas Sarkozy.[10]

The movements of Magys caravan were subsequently subjected to strict controls and

ultimately forced to suspend its activities. It is no accident, then, that in her newly

proposed project for the exhibition, Les voisins nont rien dit [The neighbors said

nothing] (2011), she addresses the issues of lack of solidarity and empathy with those

different from ourselves, both during the Holocaust deportations and today.

Agambens mythical figure of the homo sacer, who, reduced to bare life, could be

killed but not sacrificed, might not be viable as such in contemporary societies.

However there is still a great population of individuals (citizens and non-citizens

alike) who are made invisible and are silenced by isolation and the violation of their

basic human rights. The expelled, the displaced, the ghettoized, the imprisoned, the

war refugee, or any free but marginalized Roma are the speaking subjects in Call the

Witness: the Roma artists subjectivity is the witness, and he or she speaks for the

ones who cannot speak.[11] One pressing question to be asked is how Europe is to

negotiate the newly formed Roma subjectivities when social and political functions

are always already marked by the split between the referent and symbolic, to quote

philosopher Julia Kristeva, and when speaking subjects are divided between the past

overburdened by annihilation and obliteration and the yet uncertain future.

Agambens right to be sacrificed is not what this amounts to today: it is rather the

right to live on equal ground with the majority regardless of ones ethnic, racial,

gender, sexual, or cultural background.[12] Even if one may not be capable of

transcending racism (as political geographer Arun Saldanha has argued)[13], or of

unraveling all inherited contours and inflexions of representation, one should take on

board the responsibility to utter ones own testimonies against injustice and

discrimination; to decipher and unsettle new instances of racism, in all its disguises;

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/en/Who/TonyGatlif

and to denounce them loudly and use any possibility to call for radical action that

affirms solidarity in difference, cohabitation, and compossibility. The role of the

contemporary artists-witnesses in the exhibition is thus not limited to uttering anti-

racist testimonials and highlighting injustice, but it also suggests how artistic

expression and agency might play a role in affecting change both within the artists

own communities and in political institutions and judicial systems in the struggle to

right the racial bias, social inequalities, and (mis)representations that characterize our

world today.

Endnotes:

[1] Perhaps some clarification of the term Roma and its uses is called for here. It

was accepted in 1971 during the first truly transnational Roma congress, which took

place in Orpington (near London), in order to circumvent the derogatory connotation

of the labels Gypsy or Tzigani. Today it serves as an umbrella term for many

different names that various Roma communities use for self- designation, but is not

accepted by some of them.

[2] Because most of the Roma do not possess legal property documents (even after

having lived for decades on the same piece of land), their land is instead appropriated

legally and becomes available for development and gentrification, urban

regeneration in the neoliberal parlance. Racist outbursts and riots usually facilitate

this process, which resonates with philosopher Hannah Arendts statement from The

Origin of Totalitarianism that racist ideology helped to legitimize the imperialist

conquests of foreign territories and the acts of domination that accompanied them.

[3] See Walter O. Weyrauch, Romaniya An Introduction to Gypsy Law, Gypsy

Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, ed. Walter O. Weyrauch (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2001), pp. 111.

[4] The Gazela settlement was destroyed on 31 August 2009 by the Belgrade City

Assembly; 114 of the families were forced to move to 6 sites on the outskirts of

Belgrade to live in metal containers, while the other 64 families were transported to

parts of southern Serbia. See Serbia must end forced evictions of Roma,Amnesty

International, 10 June 2010, online at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-

updates/report/serbia-must-end-forced-evictions-roma-2010-06-10.

[5] Some Roma activists use the term Poramos instead of Holocaust, but others

contest its use for its offensive meaning in Romani language: rape.

[6] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel

Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 166.

[7] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.

Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 146.

[8] Alan Levy, The World Has to Know, Prague Post, 1723 May 2000.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/serbia-must-end-forced-evictions-roma-2010-06-10http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/serbia-must-end-forced-evictions-roma-2010-06-10

[9] See Huub van Baar,The Way Out of Amnesia? Europeanisation and the

Recognition of the Romas Past and Present, Third Text, vol. 22, no. 3 (May 2008),

pp. 373385.

[10] The controversial expulsions from France of nearly 1000 Roma to Romania and

Bulgaria provoked significant international criticism and were seen by many as a

severe breach of international human rights laws on discrimination. See Kim

Willsher, Orders to police on Roma expulsions from France leaked,guardian.co.uk,

13 September 2010, online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/13/sarkozy-

roma-expulsion-human-rights.

[11] Agamben, Remnants, p. 146.

[12] Suzana Milevska, The Eternal Recurrence of Racism Some reflections on the

return of racism in European culture, springerin, vol. XV, no. 4 (Autumn 2009), pp.

25 29.

[13] See Arun Saldanha, Reontologising race: the machinic geography of

phenotype, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, no. 1 (2006),

pp. 9 24.

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl/en/Who/HuubVanBaarhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/13/sarkozy-roma-expulsion-human-rightshttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/13/sarkozy-roma-expulsion-human-rights