COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

The staging of materials from Queer Archives Institute in Sao Paulo was part of the exhibition "Acervo Videobrasil em Contexto #2". Visual materials chosen by Karol Radziszewski to be exposed in Brazil aimed at showing the forgotten and unknown history of Central-Eastern European queer community. Too often region of Central and Eastern Europe was perceived as peripheral in modern queer history and theory. Radziszewski's activities had the purpose of showing ambiguity and struggle of LGBTQ communities in (post)-socialist states.

“Enkel and other Folk - Upheaval in the 70”  (the Enkel is a reference to the group “Karl’s Enkel” - Karl’s Grandsons) is so far the last of the countless exhibitions of the Association Song and Social Movements. Before that only few people addressed the emergence, expressions and general history of cultural opposition in the GDR. But this exhibition explicitly examines this topic. It traces songwriters, song theatres and folk groups that developed in the mid-1970s, “looked for new paths and tried out what you could and couldn’t do”. It portrays, among others, the groups 'Karl’s Enkel', 'Brigade Feuerstein' (with its songwriter Gerhard Gundermann) and the Dresden song theatre group 'Schicht'.

Romii și regimul comunist din România: Marginalizare, integrare și opoziție (Roma and the communist regime in Romania: Marginalisation, integration, and opposition), which Manuela Marin edited and published in 2017, is based on more than two years of research on Roma people in communist Romania. It comprises over 1,000 pages of documents organised in two volumes. The documents were created by the state authorities, especially by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, and approach various aspects of the life of the Roma between 1948 and 1989. Besides general topics relating to their social and economic situation, local structures of leadership, and traditions and customs, they also describe the activity of several Roma leaders, such as Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă.

The selected documents which also form a great part of the Ad-hoc Collection show how Nicolae Gheorghe became preoccupied with the situation of Roma people, what the results of his researches were, and how with the help of his friend, Ion Cioabă, he lobbied the Romanian authorities to grant the Roma the status of a national minority. The volume also captures the way in which the issue of Roma marginalisation and discrimination in communist Romania brought Nicolae Gheorghe into close relations of collaboration with transnational Roma organisations. Consequently, it underlines how the leaders of these international organisations and renowned Roma activists, put additional pressure on the communist regime to cease its campaign of forced assimilation and to grant Roma people equal rights to those enjoyed by other national groups. Another topic that helped Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă to build transnational ties was the compensation that Roma deported during World War II were entitled to receive from West Germany. Thus, Gheorghe, alone or with Cioabă, not only tried to convince the Romanian authorities to officially endorse their actions, but at the same time obtained the invaluable support of some international Roma organisations, which, in their turn, put pressure on West Germany to consider paying compensation to the deported Roma.