For the Roma, Borders Don’t Exist: An Interview with Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

3_fot_ina_lekiewicz_portret.jpg, default, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, photo: Ina Lekiewicz

For the first time in the over-120-year history of the Venice Biennale, a Roma artist will represent a national pavilion. In an interview with Culture.pl, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas talks about the monumental textile installation that will fill the space of the Polish Pavilion, finding the place of the Roma in art history, and the important role of community.

Piotr Policht: Your installation ‘Re-enchanting the World’ has a complex iconography; you reference, among other things, frescoes from the Renaissance Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara and 17th-century engravings by Jacques Callot. This is quite brave in the context of the Venice Biennale, where individual pavilions compete for attention in the multitude of stimuli. Is your project meant to challenge the viewer to untangle these threads?

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas: Many artists think about how what they do can reach a wider audience and be understood. The level of complexity depends to some extent on who is talking about the project.My starting point was a composition from the Palazzo Schifanoia. A tripartite division with the mythological realm in the upper strip, decans and months in the middle, signifying the cyclical nature of the year, and people's daily lives at the bottom. We create our own palace of images. We have changed it a bit, replacing mythology with the ‘appropriation’ of the image of the Roma from Callot's graphics.

Thumbnail — Hall of the Months, Museo Schifanoia, Ferrara, courtesy of Musei di Arte Antica di Ferrara, photo: Daniel Rumiancew

The middle part is close to Ferrara motifs, tarot cards and zodiac signs appear, but the invented mythological figures have been replaced by Roma women, protagonists of affective herstories. In the context of the other works, which are overloaded with colour, this middle strip, on a blue background, calms and tranquilises, separates the top from the bottom, and at the same time binds them together.

The lower part is filled with images of contemporary Roma life, primarily from the Małopolska region. Although, in the context of modernity, I was also thinking of photographs from the 1980s. An additional element is the tarot card that will open the pavilion – a giant card that speaks of the difference in fate, representing the wheel of fortune.

After months of thinking about this project and working on it, I'm only now really considering how it will be received. Everyone will read the story differently. I haven’t really told my family about it, because I prefer that they tell me what they see. Of course there are many threads here, because I'm talking about the Roma people who are everywhere, crossing all borders. Next to the Polish Pavilion, there’s the Romanian pavilion, as well as the Serbian and Greece pavilions. At the beginning, we were thinking of a way to symbolically connect the Romani, who, after all, live in all these countries. The first idea was so awesome that it would’ve probably taken me two years to complete it. The Roma are everywhere, the specificity of our culture is that for us there are no such thing as borders, we find can find our way in different countries without any problems. Poland is my country, I was born here, but I am curious about other places. The centuries-long wanderings of the Roma, which they were forced into, told through images taken from Callot, are therefore an important piece of the story.

PP: You reached for Callot's graphics earlier, during your exhibition ‘Out of Egypt’ at the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok. How do you process these colonising images?

MMT: First of all, I re-appropriate them, that is, I restore their dignity. I don’t want to negate them. I’m glad that they were perpetuated, or partly invented, by Callot. But I am shocked by the way he portrayed the Roma – I find the captions most painful. They warn against this ‘foreign’ people, advising, for example, to be careful of theft, to keep your purses close to your person. All this suggests to the next generation what they should think of us, because for a long time these were almost the only images of Roma available. By reaching for them, people formed an opinion about us.

These images are colonising – the eye of an outsider sees a ‘strange’ people and imposes its own narrative. When I started working on the images created by Callot, I did nothing but give them dignity. I dressed up these characters, added colour, removed certain elements, and left out things that I found hurtful. Like the image that appears in the original engravings of a boy peeing on a tree, or a woman in labour with a party going on next to her. This depiction of a woman in labour will appear in the pavilion, but her character will be isolated – in a safe place with other women. So while I am repeating these scenes from Callot, I’m also making these changes, telling the story anew, from the inside, as it were.

PP: When were the first images of the Roma – no longer through a colonising lens – created?

MMT: It was only around the 1920s that Romani artists began to tell their own story. The person who is doing the portraying is important regardless of the content of the portrayals. If we want to show ourselves in a certain way, we have the right to do so, because we’re talking about our own culture, about what concerns us. Wojciech Szymański researched when the first images of the Roma by the Roma began to appear – he wrote about it in his article ‘The Roma and European Art’. Even though we hadn’t portrayed ourselves earlier, old prints and photographs depicting the Roma community are also valuable to us – we can see what our ancestors looked like.

Callot himself depicted, among others, military men. A historian from London, when discussing Callot, told me that it was wonderful that they fought, that they were dressed so beautifully, and that they were not portrayed negatively at all. Meanwhile, we know that the Roma were forced into slavery, often forcibly conscripted into armies, and then escaped from them. They were not fugitives by choice, but were forced by war, poverty, and their search for a place of their own.

PP: Previously, your work was mostly dominated by contemporary themes, but now you're turning more and more to history. Why did you start looking back at the past?

MMT: In 2018, for the The Right to Look exhibition at the Szara Kamienica Gallery in Kraków, I looked to the photographs by my uncle Andrzej Mirga, who was the first Roma ethnographer in Poland. Now, having asked my uncle to share his archives, I use scenes from these photographs in my work. In fact, it's all about the people in those photos, people I remember from my childhood, from our family and from the surrounding villages. Some of them are no longer alive, so it was important for me to immortalise them. Often people from the 1980s appear in the same piece as the people of today, I mix and match these figures. Besides the desire to portray specific people, another aspect is important. I decided that at some point these images will no longer be there if I don't capture them in some way – these images, scenes, situations that happened can dissipate and be lost.

PP: I'm curious about the role of collective work in your project, beyond the purely pragmatic fact that given the scale and quantity of the fabrics it would probably be impossible to prepare them in time alone. You worked with a few other people, but it wasn't simply a staff of assistants recruited from among students from the Academy of Fine Arts. How important is it to you who you work with?

MMT: My aunt Stanisława Mirga always sews with me, she also helped me with the exhibition at the Arsenał in Białystok. I also invited Halina Bednarz, who sews costumes for a Roma band and lives near me in Maruszyn Dolna. She is an excellent sewer, embroider and an activist. Just like Małgorzata Brońska, who teaches at the Artistic Weaving Secondary School in Zakopane. It was important to me that these were people from here, living close by, who would become part of this project and live it together with me. This is how it happened, they are all still very much involved and are coming with me to Venice.

This job was not easy – for the first month we spent a lot of time on everything. Before they started sewing, I told them how we work, showed them the ropes, outlined what each element should look like, and chose the colours and materials. So until I figured something out myself, they couldn't get started. But later, when they saw what my way of working was all about, everything started to move faster.

The most enjoyable part is the end, when you build the background and the compositions made up of characters and start stitching them together. The only problem is that I’m not good at jumping from one work to another, so we had to finish the strips one by one and at the end there was a lot of stress, because only the most difficult elements were left to do. We sat until three in the morning and sewed. The very fact that someone gets so involved and stays with you for so long, experiencing the whole process, proves that it was not just a task to be completed, but a joint endeavour resulting in real involvement in the community.

'Stille Rebellen. Polish Symbolism around 1900' – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

PP: In the elements that you make yourself, is the whole thing also planned in advance? Are the places of each piece of material fixed in the sketch? Or do you let yourself be led a little by the matter while working?

MMT: I start my work with the figures: at the beginning I know how I’d like them to look. I often change where they are in relation to the photograph which I use as a starting point, unless, of course, I like the whole scene in the photograph so much that I leave it as it is. Then comes the next step: I still have to build it out of material. I work as if I were sculpting – by the way, I am a sculptor.

Our atelier was arranged in the Imperial Hotel in Zakopane, intended for renovation. I am grateful to my friend Krzysztof Kramarz, who came up with the idea to do it in this particular place. Daniel Rumiancew, who photographed our work, said that he doesn't understand how I find colours in this multitude of materials. And I would just go out on the balcony and see from above which colours and fabrics should go next to each other.

PP: You've mentioned being a sculptor: you've used a variety of materials in your work, from cardboard to wax, but for the past few years you've been working primarily in fabric. Why?

MMT: When I started painting, I had already occasionally used fabrics – clothes that I didn't want to get rid of because they were so beautiful. I treated a piece of fabric like a colour, an extra element in the painting. Later, when I started thinking about bigger fabrics, I also used fabrics from my mother, sister, aunts... This became important – I was thinking about the ecological aspect, giving a second life to materials that had long been used up. My cardboard sculptures also had this aspect in them, I used discarded, unnecessary boxes. Now they have a life of their own, and at the same time they are materials from someone I like and who also finds himself in these works on an additional level.

Nowadays, I’ve been working more and more in wax. I created a piece for the Art Encounters Biennale in Timișoara – four figures, like totems – made of wax mixed with coal. Then I started thinking about the ecological aspect again, this time in the context of coal and mine closures. These figures also relate to our Roma culture. My figures cast a spell on the four corners of the world, protecting Romania and giving it strength in the context of changing energy policy.

PP: Recent years have been intense for you in terms of international projects: the Timișoara Biennale, which you mentioned, the 2020 Berlin Biennale, the 2021 Autostrada Biennale, now Venice...

MMT: I really appreciated the positive reaction that our winning the competition for the Polish Pavilion provoked not only in Poland, but also among Roma activists and artists abroad, my friends, Roma organisations, including the organisers of the Roma Pavilion in Venice. For them, this situation is a total leap: it indicates to others that since a Roma artist has been chosen to represent Poland at the Biennale, my friends from other countries also have a chance. After all, the Roma are Europe's largest minority, numbering 12 million people. If I hadn’t been convinced by the curators Wojtek Szymański and Joanna Warsza, I might not have entered the competition. I had personally thought about running for the Roma Pavilion.

PP: The appearance of the Roma Pavilion at the Biennale in 2007 was also an important breakthrough. But perhaps paradoxically, in the context of thinking about national pavilions, this created a kind of mental trap? It is a completely different situation than the relegation of Roma artists to ethnographic museums, but perhaps the presence of a separate space makes it more difficult for Roma artists to take part in competitions to represent individual countries.

MMT: Perhaps, but on the other hand this is actually a very different situation. The Roma Institute is made up exclusively of Roma people, Timea Junghaus is a very well-known Roma curator in Europe, and the choices made in the Roma Pavilion are in my opinion accurate. There are relatively few Roma artists active in Europe, almost all of us know each other, mostly among the younger generation. Even if this creates limitations in some sense, it’s good that this pavilion exists and nurtures a minority perspective.

PP: In the title ‘Re-enchanting the World’, you refer to Silvia Federici's book ‘Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons’. Where does this reference come from?

MMT: Even the title itself is inspiring to me. Conjuring the world does not necessarily mean changing it completely. You may find that what's right next door to you, which is simple and uncomplicated, could be the better world. These are scenes that show a simple life that depict the – often feminist – world without violence and coercion, which has permeated today's reality. A world where there are no wars.

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