The ‘Cafés & Cizinery – The Roma Origins’ project based on my previous roma integration art project, the ‘Together Through Thick & Thin – Roma is Beautiful’. But that time I dreamed bigger. Thanks for my colleauges we could put my idea to the international platform.
Finally I was a co-proposal writer, financial assistant and a co-project-manageress in this mostly financed by ‘EU Culture Programme’, integration art project. ‘Cafés & Cizinery – The Roma Origins’ leaded by a Hungarian fundation – Mediawave International Visual Art Fundation -, collaborated with a Romanian and an Italian organizations. In that time that was the only led by Hungarians project which is won in the EU Culture Programme, so we were really proud to ourself. Thanks for this news, the current Hungarian Minister of Human Resources became our project Main Patron. It was a really important turn, because EU Culture Programme support ‘only’ 50% of the project budget, wich is caused some headache for our non-profit Foundation.
Roma coffee-house mood, roma and non-roma participants, – teachers and -leaders; music, slam poetry, fine arts and knowledge exchange.
Our plan was 2 Hungarian, 1 Romanian and 1 Italian occasion. The music workshop was the main line. Every organizations chose couple of musicians from their home to represent them in every events. They were the basic group supplemented with other local musicians and with joint-arts in a symbiotic way rather than separatelly. Every stage of the tour closed by a concert which would conclude the project.
The coorperation wasn’t so easy with the partners. Theirs events became less efficient. So we wanted to creat something bigger in the second Hungarian occasion. We already had a really good music workshop leader in the person of Both Miklós and a similarly known slam-poetry workshop leader, Zeek. We invited a third leader, Boka Gábor, who is theather director, actor, craft-artist etc. to help for creat and to direct a complex closing performance like in a theather. Thanks for the host-festival we could integrate a couple of other musicians as well. The most unique was a Nashi folkmusician dou from the Chine and Tibet border.
In the end we closed a project with 4+1 occassions. The Hungarian closing performance was so successful we got an offer right now on the spot. Another festival bought the whole performance to their festival. So a couple days later the whole group hit the road.
You can find lot of videos from the projects here.
Flora O. Hartyandi 