The film is a critical analysis of the interrelation of racism (i.e. anti-Romaism) and capitalism in so called New Europe (Europe after 1989) but also an analysis of strategies of resistance to its necropolitical governance.
The starting point for the film was the brutal demolition and fencing of a Roma slum next to “Belville,” a residential area erected to accommodate guests of the international sports event “Universiade Belgrade 2009”. In the same time Serbia was holding the annually rotating presidency of the “Roma Decade,” an international initiative that tends to represent an “unprecedented political commitment by European governments to improve the socio-economic status and social inclusion of Roma.” For that year, one would expect Serbia to make serious efforts towards improving the discriminated position of Roma and decreasing the effects of a policy of anti-Romaism that has lasted for centuries in the region. The opposite was the case: what we witnessed was the total disregard of the Decade’s objectives and even an intensification of discrimination by Belgrade authorities, citizens and media. Seen from the history of racism, this event appears to be a paradigmatic case of anti-Romaism in contemporary Europe.
Eduard Freudmann
Eduard Freudmann is an artist, filmmaker and author, who researches and intervenes in the intersections of art and politics, power relations and social contexts, history-politics and media mechanisms, strategies of exclusion and the commodification of knowledge. He studied art in Vienna and Weimar and currently works on his PhD at the Department for Visual Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Since 2007, he has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he participated in the education protests as a Squatting Teacher. He co-initiated “Plattform Geschichtspolitik,” an open collective that critically reflects and publicly deals with the institution’s participation in colonialism, (Austro-)fascism and Nazism.
Ivana Marjanović
Ivana Marjanović, born in 1979, Belgrade, Serbia. PhD candidate at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Free-lance cultural worker in the field of contemporary arts and theory.
Co-founded Kontekst Gallery in Belgrade (www.kontekstgalerija.org). Published articles in books, exhibition catalogues, international magazines and online artistic and theoretical platforms such as Reartikulacija, Mute, eipcp.net, Kulturisse, Malmoe, etc. Lives and works in Vienna.