November 2023 update: We are excited to announce that Historia magazine has named Barvalo as its "2023 Best Exhibition"!
People of Romani origin will soon be the at the center of some long-overdue recognition and new forms of representation in Barvalo, an exhibition that offers an expansive, panoramic, and enlightening perspective on Roma history, culture, language, and society. Conceived of and co-curated by UVM’s Jonah Steinberg, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology and director of global studies, the exhibition will premiere at the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée (Mucem) in Marseille, France, on May 9, 2023.
“While there have been some museum projects focused on Roma people,” Steinberg says, “they have been few and far between and almost never at this scale with a museum of this visibility.” With a permanent collection that charts historical and cultural cross-fertilization in the Mediterranean basin, Mucem ranks among the 50 most visited museums in the world. Its collections include a total of around a million works of art, documents, and objects.
The seed of the idea for Barvalo, which means “rich” and by extension “proud” in the Romani language, came to Steinberg around 2014. “Having worked on questions around Roma people for many years, I knew that I really wanted to do something with and about them,” he says. That formed the context for what would become five years of research funded by the National Science Foundation. During a visit to Mucem, he noticed that content about and mentions of the Roma people were completely missing from the permanent displays. So, he emailed the president of the museum in 2015, proposing that they do something together that would acknowledge and work with the substantial Roma community in Marseille and the surrounding region. To his delight, the president agreed.
According to Steinberg, who would become a commissaire and external curator, it was decided early on that the project would be participatory, collaborative, and community-based. It would be shaped by both an inner core of curators (including the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture and representation from the museum) and a Committee of Experts comprising people of both Romani and non-Romani origin, plus linguists and other specialists.
More than 200 works of art, documents, and other pieces gathered from French and European public and private collections are included in Barvalo. “All the artistic commissions we’ve made are from people within the community,” Steinberg says. “Almost all of the acquisitions are also from Roma people, including the guitar of Django Reinhardt.” Most of the explanatory cards and text in the exhibition and catalogue are in Romani, French, and English.
As visitors move through the exhibition, virtual “guides” appear on screens. These individuals are members of Roma communities around France and the surrounding region who, through videos and material from their lives, illuminate elements of Romani culture and history. Some are descendants of Holocaust survivors, and most have been active in the Romani civil rights movement.
The exhibition begins over a thousand years ago, with existing evidence for ties to India, and continues with the first accounts of the arrival of the Roma people in Europe some three centuries later, in the 1300s. “We have an animated map that shows conjectural elements of the early history of Roma people,” Steinberg says, “and we have a tree of Romani language.” There are also works of art that shed light on the arrival of the Roma people at different courts.
The presentation then moves from the medieval into the modern, where the Roma experience of being initially integrated into, but also rejected by, contemporary states is shown. This part of the exhibition covers “the emergence of some of the forms and structures of racism that we see now,” Steinberg says. This level of racism reached its most horrifying manifestation with the Holocaust, for which there is a special section.
As they exit, visitors are treated to a Roma “hall of fame,” the Galérie Romani. Filled with portraits by Romani artist Emanuel Barica of about 50 Roma people who are actors, entrepreneurs, musicians, political figures, pop stars, soccer stars, and so on, this gallery focuses on excellence in Roma culture.
“I think that an exhibition about Roma people and the anti-gypsyism they are still facing is particularly relevant right now,” says co-curator Julia Ferloni of Mucem. “The Romani population has been badly considered and, sadly, still is. Discussions with our council of experts helped us a lot in counteracting this. We benefited from their experience to avoid reinforcing Romaphobia.” She adds, “Making a true collaborative exhibition is a demanding challenge. It took us a lot of time—seven years—and energy. But it was worth it.”
As part of the outward-facing elements of the exhibition, the museum is working on some projects and workshops with several schools and NGOs, including the Rosa Parks Collège in Marseille, a middle school that boasts an extremely high proportion of Roma children. For his part, Steinberg is contributing to a workshop for Romani kids around the idea of museum work and the curatorial vocation. “Some might think that’s at a ‘lower profile’ than the stars and dignitaries who will be here on opening night,” Steinberg says, “but to me it’s really at the core of what I was thinking about on the day that I wrote that email to the museum president—something that engages the local community in an important conversation that could be largely directed by them.”
Steinberg also has been able to incorporate the exhibition into his classes at UVM and feed the curatorial work, in turn, with ideas from his classes. His Imaginative Ethnography class covers the ways that ethnography can be done beyond straightforward scholarship—from performance art to poetry to museums. “My students have spoken to artists from the exhibition,” he says. He also taught a class called The Roma Holocaust in which students used a lot of materials from the exhibition. “Sometimes they found something that I would then send to the museum,” he says. “So, there’s been a lot of back and forth there.”
According to Ferloni, the co-curators have high hopes that the exhibition will contribute to the erasure of prejudices against Roma people. “We also hope to set a standard for the future of museums and museum practices when it comes to collaborative and participatory methods,” she says, “and to relate to and capitalize on the initiative of the French government to create the Museum of the Holocaust, including the Roma Holocaust.”
Steinberg adds that the number-one thing they’re trying to do with Barvalo is push back against racism. He notes that this project comes at a moment “when new forms of global solidarity among oppressed groups and society’s understanding of racism is evolving and growing, and when careful efforts to rethink institutions of representation are being made.”
According to Steinberg, “there have been problematic museum projects where there has been no participation or direction from Roma people.” With Barvalo, he is looking to change that. One of his main hopes is “to build some lasting collaborations and projects in Marseille and around the world that are directed by and centered around Roma communities” so that their rich, proud history can be shared with a wider audience—and they will never go missing from the conversation again.