Exhibition on postwar migration of Roma to the Czech Republic
Earlier this month Ostrava’s Mírové náměstí saw the installation of a stylized apartment housing the exhibition "Khatar san?" (Where are you from?) mapping the arrival of Romani people from Slovakia into the Ostrava region for work. The audiovisual exhibition presents the memories and stories of 11 men and women who headed for the Czech Republic from Romani settlements in Slovakia after 1945, according to the project’s curator, Kateřina Sidiropulu Janků.
The collection of their memories involved not only experts, but also grandchildren who asked their grandparents for their oral histories. Visitors to the exhibition view five rooms in the installation, painted in the colors of the Czech and Romani flags – red, white, blue and green.
Each room is dedicated to a certain topic: Work, family, migration, life in Slovakia, and the question Was it/is it/will it be better? In addition to large-format photographs, visitors can read quotes from the oral histories or listen to recordings of them on a radio, by telephone or using a Walkman.
A professional publication on the topic is also available. "The message the exhibition is supposed to send is that there are memories here that not much is known about, and they are of important information as to why Ostrava, Brno, and basically all large Czech cities look the way they do today. The memories that have been forgotten are of the arrival of hundreds of Slovak Romani people in Czech towns after the Second World War, essentially in search of job offers," the curator says.
The exhibition presents the stories of ordinary people, some of whom never accessed a primary school education. "We wanted the exhibition not to be too demanding in terms of attention. It includes a lot of symbolism. One symbol is the exhibition space itself, an apartment, the space where a modern person relaxes before going to work, to school, or out into society. We take a break inside our apartment, gather our strength, and think about what is important to us in life. The interviews themselves were recorded in the people’s own apartments," the curator says.
The exhibition opened on Monday 8 September and is on view in Ostrava until the end of September. It will then move to Brno, where it will present the stories of Romani people from that city before moving on to Prague.
In Ostrava a program has accompanied the exhibition every Tuesday in September. From 13:00 to 15:00 the program is focused mainly on families and includes arts workshops or treasure hunts.
From 17:00 to 18:30 there is a discussion club on topics of sociology, history, pedagogy and on the informants who provided the oral histories themselves. From 19:00 to 20:30 there are guided tours of the exhibition.
