Jaćh opràlë lë làvë miré, 

Performance, as part of the event BAMSM (Black Arts Movement School Modality)

 curated by Romi Crawford and co-curated by Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfaù at the MUDEC, Milan, IT, 2023

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The performance "Jaćh opràlë lë làvë miré" goes to explore the notion of Deep Listening by creating and experimenting with sonic-temporal spaces. Listening is a political act, especially in an age of the omnipresence of images and the monopolization and centralization of the visual.

The question has never been whether one can or who can speak, but rather who can listen.

Jaćh opràlë lë làvë miré explores how stories of the past and present can be conveyed through sonority-including narratives through identifiable or unidentifiable vocal utterances, speech, sound, and music of all genres and subjects. When auditory experiences are shared, stories are also shared, not only from mouth to ear, but are fully perceived by mouth and ear, felt and encoded in the body through the physicality of sound waves, and transmitted from one generation to the next.  The history of brutality against people on the basis of their ethnicity, racial affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, class, migrant status, or simply because of the sheer exercise of sovereignty power over citizens is a long history that has been extensively explored visually and in writing. But how does it sound?

Through poems , manifestos and stories by Romnia, such as Jelena Savic, a writer, activist, queer Roma from Belgrade, whose poems are not even recognized as typical Roma poems, as they present feminist issues, power relations, violence, social justice and even theoretical aspects, playing with language, genders, philosophy, etc.

Or by Mariella Mehr, Romni from Zurich, who was separated from her mother at an early age and placed under guardianship. She grew up with foster parents and in mental institutions. When she became pregnant at the age of 18, she was placed in so-called "administrative care" for 19 months in the Hindelbank women's prison. She belongs to the third generation of her family who were victims of the "relief organization." Her poems are very diverse in both form and content; some of them reveal a tentative search for something, a quest.

The performance also features fragments of poetry by Papusza (1908-1987), a Polish Roma woman who learned to read and write by stealing chickens and exchanging their corpses for books and lessons! In the summer of 1949, Jerzy Ficowski heard Papusza perform her songs and, recognizing her talent, urged her to write them down as poems for publication. The song "Tears of Blood," along with many others, was published by Ficowski in the early 1950s in a book called Pieśni Papuszi (Papusza's Songs). The poems were written in romanés. Most of his works dealt with nostalgia, longing and (especially) feelings of loss. The Romani community soon began to regard Papusza as a traitor, threatening her and calling her names, both for revealing details about Romani language, culture, customs, and common law, her contacts with gadjos (non-Romani people), and her alleged role in the government's anti-Nomani moves.

During the performance, the use of the thread and the gesture of exchanging it by knotting ourselves in this exchange is a metaphor for how society "sews" prejudices and imagined identities, but also how our stories are woven together as a thread of what is a hidden past and an existence of resistance, survival, and resilience.

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