What Makes A Home
What Makes A Home?
In my work examine the double sense of belonging that has always structured Romani identity and unity. We are all Roma, and at the same time, we belong to the landscape – the territories and countries we live in.
The piece ‘What Makes A Home’ developed from a residency an earlier sound piece, ‘Patteran’. This was based on the recovery of the lost site of the Belvedere Marsh Encampment which covered 27 acres, and existed from 1895 until final eviction in 1956. The year of the final eviction is significant to me personally as it is the year of my birth. It housed 140 families, 700 individuals in1941 and was the largest such site in Britain.
To focus on this idea I looked for the site of the Belvedere Marshes Encampment via Bexley Archives and evidence of it on the ground. I collected material from where I believe part of the site to be: plant, soil and archeological. I used the material to make ‘Patteran’* signs to show our presence. I also recorded the sound of the making of the signs, the sounds of making and erasure. The sound, film and physical work are metaphor for the camp, recording and linking past, present and future. It is a way to record presence when there is no longer a place and to represent space, lost spaces, particularly in relation to the history of the Romani in Britain.
The focus of non-Roma, in relation to GRT culture is on the nomadic, the freedom to move and to keep on moving. However from my perspective it is the camp, the stopping place which is the important thing. It’s
a place where family and family histories meet. The camp is open to destruction and erasure because it can’t be understood: It is the place of the other, which opens up the possibilities of alternative histories of that place. This is why finding the site of the old encampment and the possibility of it being marked is so important. If look at my practice in another way my art works are encampments, limited by duration and place.
For the second sound work I used software that translated images into sound. The images were family photographs, taken on the site of the Encampment, Romani DNA scans, music and speech. Each was sampled and edited to produce the sound work.
The final sound piece represents the harsh percussive sounds of making and erasure, the sound of the external while the second piece has the soft sounds of home. The playback is manually started. This means the piece has a delay, a gap, a growing out of synch which makes each encounter with sound both familiar and unique.
*Patteran – leaf in Anglo-Romani. Also a sign left for other Travellers to let them know where you have gone – which path you have taken after you’ve been (often forcibly) separated.
The work ‘Patteran’ is a sign to others that we are still here but only moved on.
