When we sat at that table we weren’t exactly so sure of what we were going to do…or to be. We tried to tell who we are in three adjectives, but… We didn’t know in the following days we could show them through some camera shoots. It’s in this way that the workshop “Minority through a lens” started.

With some doubts about the Roma’s world that were slowly vanishing talking to people who fights everyday with this topic, like the social worker Koen Geurts, working for the Roma street worker organisation foyer, and Martin Demirovski working for a MEP in Brussels.

Facing the media strict critics we tried to give more than a simple minority portrait. We compared their one with other situations, we went into their houses, into their churches, we wondered ourselves why… and usually their replies were clumsy thanking smiles or determined explanation about their way of living.
We’ve just bored a hole through the always given reality and that kind of closure that Roms use as a defence. And looking through that hole we’ve peeped them.

Thanking to Thomas Alboth and Monica Monté – other than technical devices  (everyone will pay attention to lines and contrasts now!) – we’ve learnt the importance to keep a contact with the subjects: just joking with them, making no randomly pictures, we’ve learnt that they could gave us more then what we’d foreseen.

We got contacts with people who showed us gratitude, who shared their matters with us, usually looking baffled but in each gesture they made aimed to mean they were recognizable as men, women and children with culture and roots.

The day of working on the field is been very dynamic and all the way we’ve walked is been more than instructive, both from a human and producing point of view. In that day we’ve tasted the erratic Brussels weather but above all we’ve learnt from each other of us, understanding how the same subjects can give different views: inescapable demonstration of how you have to put inside a picture a little bit of yourself to make it become unique.

Everyone would like to have mooooore time… But we considered that the time we had was enough to go over the surface. We knew people who has usually gone beyond that surface: taking us into the houses to tell us pieces of life or the little things of everyday, sharing with us a prayer and a hope, but in the most of times looking through a lens.

Author: Emiliana Pistillo