Autor: wojtek

The author of the logo is Andrzej Budek (Kotbury.pl). The artist provided it to us free of charge.

---

’Art Schools and prisons’ is the second edition of the project, which is about engaging artistic academia with socially and culturally excluded people who are isolated in prison. With this aim, we have created an interesting programme of art workshops and cultural education classes that we will organise in various prisons in Poland. We have invited Justyna Żarczyńska (National Museum in Poznań) and Honza Zamoyski (School of Form) to conduct workshops in the Detention Centre in Poznań. Workshops in the Detention Centres in Warsaw – Grochów, Służewiec and Białołęka were led by dr Małgorzata Gurowska, Joanna Ruszczyk and dr Sebastian Krok from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and in the Detention Centre and External Ward in Wrocław by dr Małgorzata Jabłońska and dr Piotr Szewczyk from the Department of Graphics at SWPS University.

The programme included cultural and artistic education, including creative activities conducted according to the artists’ original concepts. We conducted them in 6 prisons for more than 120 inmates, male and female. In addition, organised so-called “KO outings”, cultural and educational activities for groups of men and women serving sentences in semi-open wards. They took part in artistic and cultural activities outside prison.

We believe that the cooperation between the academy and the prisons established thanks to the project will continue after its completion and will contribute to lasting changes in the methods of creative social readaptation of excluded people, who often already at the start have fewer opportunities than most of us people from freedom.

Project implementation: June – December 2024.

---

Detention Centre in Poznań, workshops by Justyna Żarczyńska

Activities conducted by Justyna Żarczyńska from the National Museum in Poznań were devoted to self-portrait in art, presentation and self-presentation. Participants listened to a lecture, watched a multimedia presentation and, as part of the workshop, made artworks entitled “Self-portrait. Looking ‘in’ and ‘at’ yourself”.

---

Detention Centre in Poznań, Honza Zamoyski’s workshops

Honza Zamoyski, artist, book designer and publisher, art curator and lecturer at the School of Form in Warsaw, led a collage workshop, supported by a lecture on this “most democratic art form” – it does not require special skills from the creators.

---

Detention Centre and Closed Ward in Wrocław, workshops by Małgorzata Jabłońska and Piotr Szewczyk

The workshops entitled “State of Concentration” were led by artists Dr Małgorzata Jabłońska and Dr Piotr Szewczyk and academics Dr hab. Mariusz Wszołek, Prof. SWPS oraz MA Paulina Woźniak-Dębińska from the Department of Graphics at Wrocław’s SWPS University, , and

The workshop consisted of two meetings. They used idea generation tools, the creation of a mind map for a keyword: states of focus (from general associations to more precise ones), followed by the categorisation of associations and free artistic activities relating to the theme of the workshop, using water mats and Chinese calligraphy brushes.

The theme is open-ended enough to give those attending the workshop many interpretive possibilities.

---

Detention centres in Warsaw – Białołęka, Warsaw – Grochów and Warsaw – Służewiec, Sebastian Krok’s workshops

Sebastian Krok conducted painting workshops in three Warsaw prisons: in Grochów for women, in Służewiec and Białołęka for men. He began the classes by reading a fragment of Wiesław Myśliwski prose (“Pałac”):

„Beauty, my dear friends, must hurt to be true. It must be imperfect, flawed, suffering in order to be beautiful. It must hide, so to speak, some self-embarrassment, self-doubt, maybe even helplessness, maybe fear. You will know it especially by the fact that it, as it were, is at your mercy, at your forbearance, even at your forgiveness, and therefore at your covenant with it”.

Myśliwski’s reading of the text was to inspire the participants to create paintings. And the theme of the works was, of course, “Beauty”. During the activities, the artist talked about painting techniques, interesting facts from the history of art, colourful anecdotes and stories related to the world of art.

While listening to the colourful stories, the participants painted pictures.

---

Detention centres in Warsaw – Białołęka, Warsaw – Grochów and Warsaw – Służewiec, workshops by Małgorzata Gurowska and Joanna Ruszczyk

Małgorzata Gurowska and Joanna Ruszczyk conducted “Tree of Life” workshops in Warsaw prisons, for women and men. They talked to participants about nature, about trees as allies of humans in times of climate catastrophe, which absorb carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, cool the air; “about specific trees that we like, observe, perhaps remember from childhood, but also about symbolic, imagined, dreamt-of trees”. During the workshop, participants “discovered” these trees within themselves, drew them and talked about them. And at the end of the activities, they planted shrubs in each prison, which will be looked after by the people imprisoned.

The project coordinator was Małgorzata Brus.

Co-financed by funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture – a state purpose fund.

---

Kłodzko, Łódź, Wrocław and now Warsaw – Bareforytka Roma

---

Wandering Festival “Romani Culture”: Warsaw 2024 – Bareforytka Roma

The “Romani Culture” Festival travels across Poland every year to present to a wide audience the most interesting cultural achievements of the Roma ethnic minority living and creating in a selected region of the country. In 2024, its purpose is to present the cultural achievements of Roma living in Warsaw for generations. It aims to strengthen the creative activities undertaken as part of this local culture and to document its most interesting phenomena.

Bareforytka Roma – Warsaw’s Roma

Traditional Roma culture is part of Poland’s cultural heritage. There is one Romani culture, but it has many faces. The multiplicity of its expressions, its diversity depending on the place of residence and the history of a given community, influenced our decision to create the formula of a travelling festival – wandering around Poland, documenting and presenting the achievements of the Roma from different groups and in different places of residence. “Romani Culture” is a travelling festival of Roma culture. In 2024, the festival will be hosted by Roma activists, artists, cultural creators from Warsaw and the Mazovian Voivodeship, i.e. Bareforytka Roma, which in Romani means Roma from the big city, i.e. the Roma of Warsaw.

The presentation of the most interesting cultural achievements of Warsaw’s Roma took place during festival events organised in a thriving cultural facility, the Multicultural Centre, located in a busy location in Praga Północ.

We invited Roma artists and activists from Warsaw, as well as prominent Roma scholars, to participate in the project. With them we jointly organised the Festival, which was attended by the Roma community living in the region, invited guests, as well as random passers-by and tourists.

The 4th edition of the Wandering Festival “Romani Culture” took place on Saturday 8 June 2024 at the Multicultural Centre in Warsaw. It lasted all day. In front of the Centre, we were welcomed by a model of a tabor wagon created by artists Józek Gałązka (design) and Róża Łakatosz. It was a special combination of modern art and traditional Roma art used to take souvenir photos. In the rooms of the Multicultural Centre, we organised an exhibition and ethnographic corner presenting the collections of the Museum of Roma Culture in Warsaw and visually narrating their history, from the oldest to the present day. Andrzej Grzymała-Kazłowski, curator and founder of the Museum, talked about history and his collections in a richly illustrated lecture. Artistic activities took off from the beginning of the Festival – under the guidance of the artist Noemi Łakatosz, we painted a picture entitled Manusza, or People. Once again, this was an opportunity to make individual graphic statements about the participants’ identities, which formed one collective statement on the subject. No special skills were needed for these intuition-based activities, anyone could take part and join in the collective work at any time.

Immediately after the painting workshop, the “Miro Iło” art workshop took place, during which Rajmund Siwak told Roma fairy tales of his own creation and talked to the participants about Roma culture. At the same time, the audience created graphic signs inspired by Roma culture on canvas bags. The art workshops were led by Noemi and Róża Łakatosz.

After midday, we began a panel discussion entitled ”Bareforytka Roma – the Warsaw Roma community – past, present, future challenges”. The panel discussion on the current situation of Roma culture in Warsaw was moderated by Agnieszka Caban from the “Home on the Borderland” Foundation. Participants included Ewa Pawłowska, Roksana Mroczek Wajs and Patrycja Jenny Mroczek Wajs from the Warsaw Roma community and Andrzej Grzymała-Kazłowski from the Museum of Roma Culture in Warsaw. The panellists raised very important issues concerning the Roma community in Poland, in Warsaw, the discussion was substantive and emotional, but we had to cut it short due to the fact that there were new guests waiting for the musical feast, i.e. a concert by Jędrek Pawłowski and his band. We closed the 4th edition of the Festival “Romani Culture”, dedicated to the culture of Warsaw’s Roma – Bareforytka Roma – in a cheerful and dancing mood.

This year, Warsaw’s Roma communities were less represented in the Festival audience, most of the participants were from outside. Our guests took part in the festival events with great interest and asked questions about the Roma community, sometimes bold and profound, receiving factual answers from experts – Roma from Warsaw, as well as the Łakatosz family from Poznań, our friends.

Photo documentation from the Wandering Festival “Romani Culture”: Warsaw 2024 (Bareforytka Roma) was made by Ada Szulc and video by Delfin Łakatosz.

The coordinator of the 4th edition of the Wandering Festival “Romani Culture” was Małgorzata Brus, supported by the team of the Dom Kultury Foundation. We were hosted by the Multicultural Centre in Warsaw.

---

---

---

Co-financed with funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the programme of the National Centre of Culture: EtnoPolska. Edition 2024

Działania nasze realizowane są w siedzibie CENTRUM Wielokulturowego w Warszawie w ramach bezpłatnego użyczenia przestrzeni.

Photo Małgorzata Brus

eWkratke.pl – a blog written from prison

Lead
eWkratke.pl is a project unique on a global scale: a blog whose posts are written by people serving prison sentences.

“My name is Zołza. I have been in prison for over five years; I ended up here for credit fraud. I like silence.
I have been attending the Foundation’s workshops for several years, although I didn’t start writing for the blog right away. I needed time to break through.
The classes give me a lot – a break from this place, a glimpse of freedom. You can always talk things through and feel like a human being.
I try to function as normally as possible. The biggest plus is that I can work in the prison radio station – the day passes much faster there.”
Zołza, blogger at eWkratke.pl

The blog eWkratke.pl has been running since 2014. It is created by the Fundacja Dom Kultury (House of Culture Foundation) together with women serving sentences at the Warsaw-Grochów Remand Prison and at the External Unit in Warsaw-Bemowo. For many years the blog was developed entirely through voluntary work. Today its continuation is also possible thanks to funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage within the Cultural Education programme.

At the heart of the blog are regular cultural education workshops organised by the Foundation in selected prisons. It is during these meetings that the texts, drawings and ideas for new posts are created. The blog is not an addition to the project – it is its natural outcome.

A blog without internet access

Prisoners do not have access to the internet. For this reason, the entire process of creating the blog happens offline.

Texts are written in prison cells or during workshops. They are then sent to volunteers outside prison who transcribe them and publish them online. At the next workshop, facilitators bring printed copies of the published posts together with readers’ comments. The bloggers write their replies by hand on paper. These responses are then typed up and published online.

In this way, a real dialogue develops between the world behind prison walls and the world outside.

Workshops and the project’s aim

The project “Blog eWkratke – Cultural Education for People in Prison” aims to develop the cultural, linguistic and social competencies of women living in prison through regular participation in cultural education and creative workshops.

The workshops take place four times a month:
– twice in Warsaw-Grochów Remand Prison (closed units),
– twice in the External Unit in Warsaw-Bemowo (semi-open units).

The new phase of the project will run from March 2026 to December 2027. During this time participants will write texts, discuss literature and culture, meet invited guests and publish new posts on the blog.

The experience of the House of Culture Foundation shows that long-term, regular educational activities are the only ones that bring real results. Regular meetings help develop self-discipline, cooperation and a sense of agency. In the conditions of prison isolation they also have a therapeutic dimension, creating relationships based on trust and continuity.

Who creates the blog

The blog is created thanks to the work of many people.

The texts are transcribed and edited by volunteers from the Maria Grzegorzewska University (Academy of Special Education) in Warsaw, working under the supervision of Dr Katarzyna Nawrocka.

The visual design of the blog was created by Małgorzata Brus.
The editorial concept is developed by Justyna Domasłowska-Szulc.
Promotion on social media is coordinated by Ada Szulc.

Since 2025, the editor-in-chief of the blog has been Agata Maczkowska – a trainer, educator and actor who regularly leads writing and editorial workshops in the prisons in Grochów and Bemowo.

A new visual identity for the blog is currently being developed by Klaudia Borawiak, a student at SWPS University in Wrocław.

Artists, writers and specialists from different fields are also invited to lead guest workshops in writing and cultural education.

A voice that remains

Some stories on the blog unfold over many years. One of the authors, Anna, wrote the following during her time in prison:

Visit the blog

We invite you to explore eWkratke.pl and follow the project on social media:

facebook.com/ewkratke
instagram.com/fundacjadomkultury

There you will find current and archived posts, photos from the workshops and graphics created by the participants.

You will see what our blog lives with every day.

„2016
My name is Anna.
I am 39 years old.

2017
I am Anna – prisoner Anna.
I am 40 years old.
I am serving a prison sentence for the sin of omission.
I live within the prison routine – a difficult routine.
Thank you for visiting our blog.
Well… we are “devils, souls in purgatory, and divine all at once.”

2018
I am Anna.
I am 41 years old.
Perhaps already free…”
– Aniucha, blogger at eWkratke.pl

Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund – a state special-purpose fund.

---

---

231214_PL_romano bers

231214_ENG_romano bers

Kalendarzo cover design by Krzysztof Gil

„Roma culture is one of the Polish traditional cultures most at risk of disappearing. The Roma culture varies in different corners of Poland, because of the fact that groups with a different history, with a different route of wandering before settlement, live there. Its common feature, on the other hand, is that it’s passed down orally from generation to generation. Oral transmission is forgotten or transformed in the next generation, so it is important to save it, to document both tradition and modernity.”

Perła Krystyna Markowska, Center for Advice and Information for Roma in Poland.

„Romano kalendarzo” is a record of Roma culture and provides education about this traditional culture in a modern and accessible way – through an online calendar based on the most popular calendar in the world, the Gregorian calendar. In practice, the calendar is the first ever calendar for Polish Roma: a record of important dates. At the same time, it describes and explains issues related to Roma traditions of interest to both Roma and non-Roma.

The Calendar, which is in the process of being created, includes all Christian holidays and anniversaries of events, mostly tragic, related to the Holocaust. There are also joyful holidays, such as International Roma Language Day and International Roma Day.

The goal of „Kalendarzo Romano” is to collect and document information about important events and holidays celebrated by Polish Roma, also in a worldwide context, documenting them and describing them in a way that is clear to the average audience, Roma and non-Roma. A one-of-a-kind document will be created, an artefact and source of reliable information about the Roma and their contemporary culture and heritage, told by the Roma themselves.

Written and edited by Roma, it will be published already in the fall of 2023 in a beautiful layout, with illustrations by one of the most interesting artists of the younger generation, Krzysztof Gil. It will be a unique documentation of Roma tradition, so far unrecorded. Thanks to its digital form, the calendar will be able to accommodate an almost infinite number of links and be developed from year to year.

The editor-in-chief of „Romano kalendarzo” was until 2023 Agnieszka Caban, a cultural studies scholar, a doctoral student at the University of Warsaw’s Doctoral School of Cultural and Religious Studies, a researcher of the culture of national and ethnic minorities, a specialist in multiculturalism, a long-time activist for the Roma community. Lecturer and trainer in the field of national and ethnic minorities, especially history, Roma culture, intercultural communication, anti-discrimination, Self-Advocacy and others. Winner of the Helena Radlinska award for social animators (special award in 2014). Author of numerous articles, reports, editor of books and magazines. Vice president of the Radom Roma Association „Romano Waśt” (2009 – 2020).

Head of the branch of the Museum of Dialogue of Cultures at the National Museum in Kielce (2017 – 2019). Currently associated with the “Dom Kultury” Foundation (member of the Program Council) and head of Bluebell Lab. Education and Development.

The project was co-financed by funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage’s Cultural Promotion Fund.

WKratke_ENG_podglad_2

„We talk about ourselves, not someone else who just sees us from the sidelines. That is the re-enchanting of the world”. On the exhibition „Re-enchanting the World” by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.

“Travelling Images”¹ – This is the title of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s works, which are being shown all over Europe in a 'wandering’ way. After her participation in the Venice Biennale, the artist is not slowing down, her works are still being shown in prestigious galleries in Ferrara, Berlin, Gothenburg, Marseille, Seville and elsewhere. It is a tradition that the exhibition shown in the Polish Pavilion in Venice the following year is presented in the most famous art gallery in Poland – Zachęta – the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition “Re-enchanting the World” was open to visitors from 29 April to 23 July 2023. Art connoisseurs, as well as ordinary Varsovians and visitors, had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the artistic vision of the Roma world created by the artist. A world very different from the one known in traditional messages contained in publications, newspaper reports or other works of art, where the Roma personify the exotic 'other’, the 'stranger’, someone arousing anxiety and fear, someone we fear and therefore reflexively exclude. This essay is an attempt to outline the impact of artistic practices on socio-political mobilisation, and on changing the image of the Roma in Poland and internationally.

Roma artistic activity is increasingly seen and read through the prism of decolonisation – that is, in general, a reversal of the so far unequal power relations, and an attempt to speak for themselves with their own voice and thus construct political demands regarding the social, political and cultural situation and position of Roma in the countries of which they are citizens. Roma artists and their artistic practices are slowly but steadily rising in the public consciousness above the previous and stereotypical images of Roma created by non-Roma. However, their presence in the art world and this position was the result of many years of struggle. The relentless reproduction in art of the image of Roma as inferior and subordinate is also widely normalised, and the change in narrative is not infrequently met with opposition. Timea Junghaus (2014, 2015), among others, writes about the difficulty Roma artists had in building their position, especially in the second half of the 20th century, also emphasising the importance of the changes taking place in e.g. Central and Eastern Europe, and the role of the new Roma intelligentsia in this process. Her analysis was critical of the way in which knowledge about Roma is produced, both in the social sciences and in culture and art. But in this perception, it is art that is the field where symbolic violence of a particular kind takes place. The epistemological and, at the same time, physical colonisation of the Roma by majority societies consisted in creating images, images of Roma bodies in a specific way, in a spirit of subordination and inferiority, which ultimately meant dehumanisation, slavery and extermination. It took decades of work and efforts by various actors before we could speak of a positive paradigm shift in this field. It has been a difficult road.

This transformation, contestation of established power relations and mobility are the foundations of Roma mobilisation, taking various forms: political, ethnic, national, as well as artistic. Together they shape a process that Nicolae Gheorghe (1997), a Roma activist and intellectual, calls ethnogenesis. This means the empowerment of Roma communities and their taking a respected place in the social space. Art has accompanied this process from the very beginning. During the First Roma Congress, held more than 50 years ago in 1971, one of the important topics of discussion was the introduction of Roma symbols, such as the flag and the anthem. Issues related to Roma art also seem to be central to the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture², which was recently established.

The 2007 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art saw the inauguration of the First Roma Pavilion, also known as the first conscious rebellion of the subaltern (Junghaus 2014, 34), which gained unquestionable publicity and provoked serious discussion on the subject. For this reason, it is worth noting that, despite appearances to the contrary, Roma art and politics have much in common. In both cases, one can see the minority’s desire for self-expression and representation through a medium controlled by the social majority. This medium, however, has previously reproduced discriminatory and harmful images of Roma, spreading a false, stereotypical image of this community. Both the Roma political and artistic movements are thus not only a sign of social change among the Roma, but also an expression of their desire to leave the place assigned to them by the majority and to enter into dialogue with it on an equal footing, while challenging its exclusive powers to control the minority and to shape the discourse on the minority.

For many years, however, there was no institution that cared about the cultural heritage of the Roma and its development, about the political and cultural recognition of the contribution of Roma communities to cultural development, either at national or pan-European level. The Roma themselves were deprived of the protection of this cultural resource, which would not be processed by non-Roma. There was no space for both cultural production, the stimulation of creativity and the interpretation of their culture. And this is not just about politics in the cultural arena, but about the status of minorities and the protection of cultural diversity as the foundation of democratic societies. Cultural and political recognition of minorities is an essential process for building cohesive societies built on multiculturalism, especially in the context of Central and Eastern Europe (cf. Junghaus 2014).

Recent years have seen a great acceleration in this respect in the field of art. Not only has an institution been set up to provide support and patronage for Roma art, but a Roma artist has also represented the Polish National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The institution in question is the aforementioned European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), a supranational European organisation based in Berlin. As a joint initiative of the Council of Europe, the Open Society Foundations and an initiative of Roma leaders (Alliance for a European Roma Institute of Arts and Culture), ERIAC is intended to educate and inform non-Roma about Roma art and culture, and to help foster understanding, tolerance and mutual respect between Roma and non-Roma communities. Above all, ERIAC aims to be a space for Roma artists and an institution that cares for Roma cultural heritage. The aim is to raise awareness among European institutions, policy makers and stakeholders about the role of Roma arts and culture, and to build broad partnerships across Europe (and beyond) in support of Roma communities.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s art carries a powerful charge of demythologising and deconstructing the previous treatment of Roma culture and communities. It combines ancient history but also a contemporary message. In the 127-year history of the Venice Art Biennale, this is the first time that a representative of the Roma community has represented the national pavilion. The very title of the exhibition, „Re-enchanting the World”, made direct reference to the history of the Roma in Europe and Poland. History was not only reconstructed here, but reformulated, redefined and re-read.

„Re-enchanting the World” is the artist’s contemporary manifesto on Roma history, identity and art, drawing inspiration from Renaissance astrological frescoes from the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. The Polish Pavilion in Venice was transformed into a 'palace of paintings’, with an installation of twelve large-format fabrics, corresponding to the twelve months of the calendar. „We are talking about ourselves, not someone else who just sees us from the sidelines. This is the re-echanting of the world,” says Małgorzata Mirga-Tas in a video that prepares viewers for what the viewer will encounter at the exhibition (Zakrzewska, 2023). The title of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s exhibition, “Re-enchanting the World”, was inspired by and comes from Silvia Federici’s book “Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons” (2018). The artist, together with the curators of the exhibition (Joanna Warsza and Wojciech Szymański), performs a re-appropriation, proposing a re-enchantment of the world as a way of reclaiming proactivity and community, as well as reviving and rebuilding relationships with the 'other’ in the broadest sense. The exhibition is based on the idea of transnationality, cyclicality and shows the interpenetration of mutual influences between Roma, Polish and European culture.

The exhibition is an ambitious attempt to expand the narrative and history of art to include representations of the culture of the Roma, Europe’s largest transnational minority and community. The exhibition consists of twelve large-format textiles, corresponding to the twelve months of the calendar. Each panel consists of three horizontal strips:

• The upper strip depicts the story of the mythical migration and arrival of Roma communities in Europe, based on a series of 17th-century prints by the Lorraine engraver Jacques Callot. These representations, full of anti-Roma stereotypes, are decolonised by the artist through their reinterpretation in a colourful setting. The large-scale collages she has created reveal the rich world of Roma past and mythology.
• The central strip is an affective archive of herstory, in which portraits of Roma women and men important to Małgorzata Mirga-Tas are intertwined with astrology. We find important figures from the world of politics, the arts, the Roma movement, but also members of Małgorzata’s family and friends. This non-violent emancipatory process, in which women from the past and contemporary icons play an important role, as well as everyday heroines, ordinary mothers, wives, aunts, workers or activists, changes and gives meaning to a new image of the Roma through the eyes of their representative.
• The lower strip illustrates everyday life in her hometown Czarna Góra and other Roma settlements in Podhale and Spisz, previously collected in photographic frames and transformed by Małgorzata into fabric. These fragments of the exhibition are particularly close to me, for me it is a kind of family album.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s work responds to centuries of violence against the Roma in art, but also in science, where symbolic violence is particularly prominent. The Roma have been an object in art, a subject of study, but rarely an entity. The examples of the slavery of the Roma in what is now Romania or the Roma Holocaust clearly show that their predetermined negative image and perception placed them on the margins of societies, in the role of scapegoats. Stereotypes and prejudices perpetuated in art and science, and thus in popular knowledge, served to legitimise exclusionary, colonising and violent policies towards the Roma, which, as history has shown, resulted in extermination and genocide. Małgorzata’s work is about conscious resistance, active action, and changing the narrative through the means of expression that are closest to her. In Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s works, the reappropriation of colonial images of Roma, produced by non-Roma, is a very literal gesture of becoming anew, of producing an image that is authentic, not processed by an external gaze. Here, too, the power and truly revolutionary potential of art is clearly visible, but this time in the creation of a different image of the Roma.

As I was writing this, a very special event took place, namely, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas was selected as the winner of the prestigious Tajsa Roma Cultural Heritage Prize 2023. The Tajsa Prize embodies the exceptional talent and creativity of Roma artists from around the world by honouring those who have distinguished themselves in various fields of art and culture. The Tajsa Prize 2023 ceremony took place at the esteemed Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin on 30 November 2023, where Małgorzata Mirga-Tas was recognised for her exceptional contribution to Roma cultural heritage, in recognition of her outstanding achievements in promoting Roma cultural expression and challenging social norms. Importantly, the award is funded entirely by the membership fees of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin.³

Elżbieta Mirga-Wójtowicz

---

Bibliography:

– Junghaus, Tímea (2015) Opposition is Not Enough. The Role of Roma Art in the contemporary constellation, in Romológia, III/8., Spring.

– Junghaus, Tímea (2014) Roma art: Theory and practice. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 59, no. 1. 25-42.

– Hasdeu, I. (2008). Imagining the Gypsy woman: Representations of Roma in Romanian museums. Third Text, 22(3), 347-357.

– Gheorghe, Nicolae (1997) The Social Construction of Romani Identity. In: Thomas Acton (ed.), Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 157-158.

Worth reading:

– “Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Re-enchanting the World” ed. W. Szymański, J. Warsza. National Gallery of Art, Archive Books, ERIAC, Warsaw and Berlin, 2022.

– Travelling Images. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, ed. W. Szymański, N. Żak. Exhibition Catalogue, International Cultural Centre, Cracow 2022.

– European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, ERIAC: http://eriac.org/

– Timea Junghaus (ed. 2006). Meet Your Neighbours – Contemporary Roma Art from Europe. Open Society Institute.

Video:

Re-enchanting. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, directed by Anna Zakrzewska. Production: Kijora Film, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2022.

W_Kratke_ENG_podglad_01

Erasmus +

Adult education

Educators from our Dom Kultury Foundation will take part in an intensive English language course at the Maltalingua School in St. Julians, Malta, funded by the Erasmus+ Short-term projects for mobility of learners and staff in adult education (KA122-ADU).

Developing the communication skills in English of educators from Dom Kultury Foundation aims to prepare effective tools that will be useful for partnership activities with organizations in Europe. We aim to set up new programmes of non-formal education for people serving prison sentences in cooperation with partners from abroad.

The recipients of our prison education programmes are primarily adult women, aged between 21 and 70, serving prison sentences in the closed wards of the Warsaw Grochów Detention Ward and other prisons in Poland.

Our biggest challenge is to gain partners from abroad and to implement international projects in cooperation with organisations from other countries, especially those with more experience in the education of convicted persons. We want to gain knowledge from organisations that are forerunners in the field of rehabilitation with education and culture, exchange experiences and develop new methods of working with convicted persons, which will translate into new educational programmes conducted by us in prisons.

These programmes, oriented towards the human being, their rights, their all-round development, the strengthening of social competences, including self-advocacy, are expected to contribute to an increase in the social readaptation of inmates and prepare them for release so that they can function efficiently in society, within the limits of the law. Proficient English language skills are required to gain partners, exchange experiences and implement joint projects. So here we go!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the National Agency Programme Erasmus + and European Solidarity Corps. Neither the European Union nor the grantors can be held responsible for them.