After the Jews the Gypsies

“In 1941 the slogan was launched: After the Jews the Gypsies.”
This collage revisits a former artistic motive to reinterpret the experience of persecution. It draws from the testimonies I studied during the Roma and Sinti Community Curators Programme, the pages of The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies by Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, the archives of The Wiener Holocaust Library and the oral histories preserved in the Fortunoff Archive. Each document, each voice, each word is a thread in the fabric of memory—a narrative evolving, a picture appearing from history.
At its centre, a Romani woman moves through the composition. Behind her, war approaches. Burdened with her belongings, she flees the terror. She is not a portrait but an archetype: the embodiment of the universal yearning for freedom, dignity, and continuation. She is a symbolic guardian of memory, a bearer for the collective experience of survival and hope. Fragments of history surrounding her —handwritten letters, eyewitness testimonies, deportation records, torn out sentences pressed against one another but the surface refuses stillness. The restless texture trembles, unable to settle. It wants to escape – desperately.

Ano ćućipe e lavengo: In the Silence of Words

Shawl of life

Shawl of life

The shawl is more than fabric—it is a sanctuary. To wear the shawl is to be held in the arms of God as a manifesto of sacred protection. It surrounds around the body as a symbol of personal space, comfort, and warm hospitality, yet it also carries the weight of survival. When you wear it you display the wealth and prosperity of your heritage and you can feel that you embraced in the arms of the divine.

The symbolism draws parallels to ancient Egyptian iconography. 

In the ancient Egypt the god Aten represented by a sun disc depicted with long rays overflow from it. These rays giving energy of the sun, representing warmth, creation and divine power. Each ending in a small human hand that stretches out to touch the earth. Some of the hands holding the Ankh the symbol of life, vitality and fertility. 

Through symbolic substitution—sun for shawl, hand for thread, Ankh for continuity —Spirituality invites us to weave these ancient gestures into our present. One symbol replaces another, yet each holds equal significance. Together, they remind us that life is both protection and offering, both heritage and renewal.

Image transfer and watercolour on paper

32×42 cm

2025

To persist and remain

This work is part of my ongoing studies on the Roma genocide, created to reflect upon and compare the many definitions of the Holocaust.
The artwork stands in dialogue with the Roma and Sinti genocide during the Second World War. It is dedicated to the memory of those abducted to concentration camps, tortured, and dehumanized—yet who persisted, who remained, and who carried their survival into freedom.
It is both a remembrance and a testament: a tribute to resilience, to endurance against eradication, and to the unbroken spirit that endures beyond suffering.


Image transfer and watercolour on paper

32×42 cm

2024

Relic of provenance

The Roma National Day celebrates its golden jubilee on 8th of April 2021. 
Fifty years ago the1st Romani World Congress marked a prominent moment in the history of Romani, Sinti and Traveller people. It approved the international flag of the Romani people as the national emblem which strengthened their sense of identity.This was the time of the birth of a nation within Heaven and Earth and a force of perpetual movement.
In my allegoric aquarelle the red spoked wheel appears as a chakra in the form of an Ammonite fossil, which symbolises common ancestry that belongs to an earlier time. In ancient Greece it was the most holy stone for holding the ancient knowledge of Earth within it and for realising it as pure life-force energy. This relic offers great clarity, stimulates world survival instincts, and provides insight into one’s importance in the big picture of the universe. Gazing into its everlasting spiral can take you to the place where the oracle sees dreams and reads what the time manifests by prophecy. The primeval shell is shaped like a film reel of the passing time evoking an old movie atmosphere but in colours, hinting at the time when the archive of Roma heritage started. Red-coloured Ammonite is a unique piece in my painting: although it has never been found in real life, here the dominant scarlet is a metaphor of the passion and grief of the Roma, reminding the viewer of the Roma’s resistance and resilience in search for Romani existence. Delicate vitality flows through as pure mauve and alludes to the higher self among the hidden codes of spirituality. The story emerging from the fossil-as-film-reel metaphor encapsulates not only the past but also the future: it is permeated by powerful feminine attitudes, gaining their expression in the statuesque blue-grey figure and the dotted pattern of a flamenco dress, and it predicts the emancipation in our community and presents the revolution that is taking place in our culture.

 

Watercolour on paper

31×41 cm

2021