REGGIO EMILIA.- After representing Poland at the 59th Biennale Arte in Venice in 2022 with her majestic project Re-enchanting the World, Polish Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is returning to Italy with The Big Dipper Will Foretell the Future of the Roma: an original exhibition conceived for Collezione Maramotti and based on a collection of images, stories and documents regarding Roma and Sinti history in this country.
Drawing on vintage photographs and family albums, oral accounts and conversations, books and archival sources, Mirga-Tas has intertwined her own complex narrative of the Roma people with stories of figures from the Sinti community in Reggio Emilia, whom she had meaningful opportunities to meet, get to know and collaborate with.
The idea for this exhibition project sprang from the community’s deep ties to travelling entertainment and the management of funfair rides, a trade handed down from generation to generation that the artist identified as a specific characteristic of Romani culture in Italy. Drawing inspiration from the world of fairs, her new exhibition feels full of exuberant vitality. At the same time, it is inevitably imbued with a sense of impermanence and the memory of the persecution and forced displacement of the Roma and Sinti, who throughout history have often been denied the chance to settle in one place.
Mirga-Tas has focused in particular on the image of the chair swing ride, whose circular structure and constant movement round and round takes on a powerful symbolism: the passage of time, the way life seems to return with each new season, the wheeling of planets in cosmic space, the idea of perpetual travel.
The ride is covered in different kinds of fabric onto which a vivid, multicoloured patchwork has been sewn. It depicts figures and scenes from the everyday life of Sinti and Roma communities in Emilia —family relationships, shared activities, moments of rest and leisure— with a particular focus on the role of women.
The central part of the installation is dedicated to portraits of the present and past, in which people and modes of dwelling are fluidly combined to form warm, intimate images. The upper portion contains quotes from Romani texts, including the words of Roma poet and singer Bronisława Wajs (1908–1987), also known as Papusza. One large textile collage and several horses sculpted out of wood round out the exhibition, creating a dynamic space that prompts physical movement as well as a wandering gaze.
Visually overflowing and emotionally engaging, Mirga-Tas’s works reflect the Romani folk aesthetic of colour and composition. Out of the juxtaposition of varied motifs, hues and fragments of different fabrics emerge profiles of individuals – elderly people, adults and children – caravans, carousels, animals, bicycles, courtyards, ladders, chairs, fields, skies: the tangible vision of a world pulsing with life, kaleidoscopic and interconnected, which blurs the boundaries between private and social, ordinary and extraordinary, art and craft.
The textile elements and objects that Mirga-Tas incorporates into her work have been collected from family, friends and people she has met, or have been recovered from second-hand dealers. Imprinted with the bodies and lives of the people who have used them, these materials are transformed into vibrant, active presences within the work, to tell a collective story of the struggle with prejudice and the right to freedom as a universal cause.
The curtains, tablecloths and used garments that form the textile collages are given a new lease on existence through art, and they imbue the subjects they depict with an additional form of energy: the power to represent themselves as they choose through their own experience and with a voice from inside the community, breaking free of the iconography to which they have traditionally been relegated.
The process of cutting and assembling these found materials, which are joined together with stitches that remain visible, suggests both a real and a metaphorical practice of repair, a repositioning of (and within) history, along with an empathetic inclination to care for what is considered marginal.
Romani identity, in all of its many facets, is inextricably woven into Małgorzata Mirga Tas’s investigation. The deeper meaning of her work is rooted in a desire to construct positive new paradigms through art: underscoring her origins, she reshapes the stereotypically negative imagery associated with the Roma people (antiziganism), transforming and developing it into the vision of a transnational, transcultural, multilingual community that is free and non-violent.
In her art, the impetus for this change of perspective is accompanied by a conscious foregrounding of female subjectivity at both the domestic and structural level, in which emancipation, autonomy and intergenerational sisterhood are not just concepts but concrete, embodied practices.
