France museum flips Romani narrative, with exhibition recognising ‘gypsy’ contributions
- Marseilles show is first to draw together work by so many artists and curators within Europe’s Roma minority, who have faced prejudice for centuries
- ‘Perhaps people who are racist, who discriminate, really like comic Charlie Chaplin and didn’t know he was Romani. Perhaps they’ll change point of view’
The faces of the Roma community’s best and brightest beam down at visitors from a multicoloured wall inside one of France’s top museums.
There is world-famous British comic Charlie Chaplin, Belgian jazz great Django Reinhardt and Alfreda Markowska, a Polish woman who saved dozens of Jewish and Roma children from a Nazi death camp during World War II.
“It’s very moving,” said Romani-Romanian academic Cristian Padure, admiring the exhibits inside the MUCEM museum in the city of Marseille.
The show – whose title, Barvalo, means spiritually or materially rich in the Romani language – is the first such exhibition to draw together contributions from so many artists and curators within Europe’s Roma minority of 12 million.
Padure said it was “recognition” of the community’s contributions to European culture and history after centuries of discrimination.
In Romania, where the linguist grew up, Roma were slaves for five centuries until the 19th century.