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Shortly after the collapse of communism, many prosperous clan-based Roma communities started a necessary yet ambitious project: the forging of a new Gypsy identity through the building of settlements. Twenty years in the making, these settlements remain enduring construction sites where potential Gypsy imageries are being tested every day. The resulting landscape is one of perpetual change, an ever-amended collage of disparate images.

This paper argues that settlement construction is driven by the production of disconnected architectural elements that mimic the image of actual and fictional environments relevant to the maker. Drawing from a wide array of both directly observed and media fashioned imagery, the new Gypsy architecture aims at visually reproducing environments with little or no concern about constructive, spatial, or functional determinants. The maker relies on a conceptual and procedural dichotomy-one deeply embedded into the Gypsy tradition of making-between structural enclosure (canvas) and adornment (image) to continually refashion the décor of the settlement.

Surprisingly, the goal of the maker is not to produce an architecture specific to Roma culture but to create an image of the settlement that identifies the community as a continually relevant social entity. To this end, the image production is vastly coordinated with the hierarchical structure of the clan, and continuously weighed against how the community is perceived to outsiders and portrayed in media. Continually reimaging itself, Roma architecture speaks simultaneously about a desire for identity and a quest for recognition.

link to full article

 

In Whose Image? Building a Gypsy Identity, One Image at a Time

Article
Published in the International Journal of the Image, Volume 2, Common Ground Publishing, Champaign, IL. 2012

Author: M. Razvan Voroneanu

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© M. Razvan Voroneanu. 2014