ALTERNATIVE PAINTING LAB

of Federica ColzanI

Working at the Alternative Museum of Rroma I discovered a colorful, full of energy, and complex culture with its lights and shadows, like every culture, is. It’s inexplicable how people sentenced to years and years of slavery, persecution, and nomadism were in spite of everything able to build traditions and art. But still today these aspects are hidden by prejudices. Since I think that a fundamental thing to start deconstructing these prejudices is to give voice to the people of the community, for my project I chose to celebrate Rroma artists. The works of the students and mine coexist to create a small installation inspired by the installation “Witch Hunt” by the Rroma artist Delain La Bas. The topic of the work is to contrast the gaze of the non-Rroma people that see them as not worthy of their same rights, less human, with the beauty of their art. With the students, I start- ed with theatrical games and exercises whose purpose was to create a safe space for the group, learn how to represent reality and how to express themselves through colors. For the final product, we explored different art fields: poetry, painting, sculpture, fashion, and music. For each one of these, we met some Rroma artists and the students tried to represent with painting or clay their feelings, their version of these works of art. At final we painted two big, weird figures that are representations of how the Rroma people are generally perceived. Also, my canvas will be part of the installation. I painted three people with defined features and one Rroma person with her face unclear: only the dress is visible if you discriminate against another person, you are not seeing them as a fully human being. These charac- ters are all connected between them and the paper airplanes through a rope. The airplanes are symbols of art, imagination, and spirituality: the fact that we all share these elements means that in the deep our souls are similar and human. I think this is so important for us since with this museum we try to celebrate and give a new value to Rroma culture with art.

My workshop had over 25 students. Firstly, I told them about the history of Rroma life and travel combined with different drawing activities. Inspired by the history and these drawings we then painted a mural together. Because my topic was especially Rroma history, I mostly learned about that. For example, I didn’t know that Rroma come from India or that they were slaves in Ro- mania. It surprised me that they weren’t all nomadic but a lot of them actually lived settled. I also learned more about their life now and that being Rroma can still be a big part of one’s identity.

During the work for this project, I faced some challenges. I often felt out of my depth because I didn’t know a lot about Rroma and I didn’t know what to do in thxe beginning. I was