Roma Cultural ProgramPast Activities and Achievements
Talent Casting
2006/2007
The primary goal was to find untapped talents and to identify generally unknown but creative and talented Roma artists. With mobile units visiting remote villages, towns and settlements in the regions, searching for painters, carpet makers, woodcarvers, metalworkers, poets, writers, filmmakers, dancers, musicians, etc., the RCP started developing an initial database of the untapped Roma art world.
One of the tangible results of the research and collection process was a handbook entitled Meet Your Neighbours: Contemporary Roma Art from Europe, an art catalogue produced by the RCP in 2006. This publication is one of the first comprehensive overviews of Roma contemporary art ever published. The catalogue is part of an effort to increase the presence of Roma artists in the European art scene.
Roma Mentor Project
2006/2007
The Roma Mentorship Program worked in the field of culture in a broader sense, considering culture as a way of life rather than just a way of artistic expression. This Program aimed to connect successful Roma individuals with schools and community clubs, where the majority of the children were Roma. The RCP created a database of Roma volunteers who liked to act as mentors by transmitting children a philosophy of Roma emancipation, Roma pride and Roma self-assertion. The mentors talked about their heritage, past, education, and presented their knowledge/skills to the children.
The Roma Mentorship Program was managed by OSI’s Roma Cultural Program and Pressley Ridge jointly. RCP was responsible for the concept, grant process, working with the mentors and logistics. Pressley Ridge participated in the project development, and was in charge of the mentors and teachers’ training, as well as. The Roma Mentorship Program was a pilot project, thus the main objective for the first year was to test the idea and learn from its implementation.
Roma Music Initiative
2006/2007
The aim of the Roma Music Initiative was to identify outstanding excellence in the field of classical music, and to foster the development and the fruition of Roma musical talents by providing individual support. The initiative focused both on classical and popular Roma music and musicians.
The pilot classical component was launched in cooperation with one of the major music academies of the CEE region with a significant number of Roma students, namely the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy Budapest. The initiative accepted applications from individuals either studying at the above-mentioned music academy or outstanding, talented pupils discovered and recommended by them.
In the realm of popular music, the Roma Music Initiative provided grants for Roma individual musicians and bands for event promotion in the mainstream media, and for developing an image, "brand" (name, logo, photos, stage decoration, flyers, posters, etc.) for professional representation.
A Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Contemporary Art Biennale 2007
In 2005, the Venice Biennale celebrated its 110th anniversary and has been extended to over a hundred cities and countries. This was the first occasion that the Biennale extended its scope to Central Asia—a region instead of a country. However, the Roma community is the largest minority in many of the participating European countries; its artists have never been accorded attention in the Biennale.
In 2007, initiated and supported by the RCP, the First Roma Pavilion was established at the 52nd Venice Contemporary Art Biennale, and consequently the work of Roma artists entered the international “arena” for public recognition for the first time ever. The Roma Pavilion drew on prodigious talent from eight countries, vibrant and contemporary, in order to refute stereotypes and preconceptions. It was the most eloquent affirmation of the resilience of Romani culture in the face of centuries of oppression, exclusion, and attempted annihilation. As a truly European Pavilion, it asserted that the place of Romani culture should be at the center of our understanding of what it is to be European. As such, Paradise Lost was subversive in that the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale seemed anachronistic and somewhat incongruous by comparison.
The pavilion featured the premiere of the Paradise Lost exhibition, a collection of works from 16 contemporary Roma artists representing eight European countries. Its ultimate goal was to challenge the exotic "Gypsy" stereotype that has existed for centuries and to put Roma artists on an equal footing in the international art world. The program also arranged multiple related events during the six months the pavilion was open, including concerts by Roma musicians, roundtable discussions, and a video installation of racist, anti-Roma films and advertisements.
