Afrogreeks, Lithuanian Roma and the first women of Zagreb museums (take 2)

I wanted to write about these exhibitions for some time. These treats museums in different countries offered me in the last months took my mind away from the gruesome reality we are living. They gave me energy and good spirits, not to forget or ignore, but to stubbornly focus on something better in the horizon. 

(Note: All photos on this blogpost by Maria Vlachou)

Africa amongst us | Benaki Museum, Athens, 13/2 to 25/5/2025

Link to exhibition webpage

It was not an introductory panel, but curators Sophia Chandaka and Michael Afolayan that welcomed us to the exhibition, setting a fresh, informal, more personal tone. “Africa Amongst Us” focused on the cultural rights of people of migrant origin and did not avoid “difficult issues”, such as greekness, blackness, justice, representation, racism and discrimination in contemporary Greek society. But the first thing I would like to comment about is something else.

The strongest point of this exhibition is storytelling, through objects and people. Thus, when one enters a room with a selection of objects – a beautiful setting, where each objects is exhibited on its own single stand -  it’s not the typical “history-of-art approach” one gets. The objects are here because there are people – projected in the background, in high quality video - that have powerful stories to say about them. Like the 20^th century mask – helmet, in the shape of a ram, which belongs to the Banso people, from Nigeria or Cameroon. It was chosen, though, by Linda Nyongo, from the Congolese Community of Congo Brazzaville in Greece, who tells us the story of the unfortunate students who would have to hang this mask, full of excrement, from their necks should they get carried away and not speak French at school. It was not only the barbarity of the punishment, it was the strong cognitive clash between the expected “history-of-art approach” and so much more the objects can tells us.

For someone who first heard the term “Afrogreek” only five years ago (in a debate among nine members of the African diaspora organised by the Onassis Foundation), it was touching to see a black person’s Greek ID; to listen to the members of the advisory group discussing the objects; and to know, among others, the incredible story of actress Deborah Odong’s parents. Her father was from Uganda and was studying in Athens in the late 60’s, where he met her Greek mother, Varvara, and they fell in love. When rumours arrived to the ears of Varvara’s father, he reached to the people he knew close to the military junta and the boy was deported. Varvara went to meet him in Cyprus, where they were actually married by no other than Archbishop Makarios. Back to Greece, the family only came together when the first grandchild was born.

Varvara’s and Deborah’s photos stood facing each other in a room full of happy and sad stories. Racism, discrimination, stubbornness, negotiation, celebration, resignation, it was all there. It was a pleasure to see a group of AfroGreek families visiting the exhibition. The museum was theirs too, in a way the outside world is not yet.

 

AMARÈ DŽIIPENÀ. Stories of the Roma of Vilnius | Vilnius City Museum, 24/1 to 29/6/2025

Link to the exhibition webpage (use Google to translate it into English)

I had never seen before an exhibition regarding the Roma population in a city museum. It was curated by Roma people who were born and raised in the settlement of Parubanka (or Bar), which existed in Vilnius for more than 70 years. It was demolished in 2020. A symbol of crime or fear for some, Parubanka was not so for the children who lived and played and sung and read stories there.

In the first room, we see a copy of the 1588 Third Statute of Lithuania (Chapter 14, Article 35, “On Gipsies”). It states: “Gypsies are useless and idle people, who not only do not serve or benefit us or anyone else in the Republic, but on the contrary, do considerable harm be deceiving the common people, as well as by stealing (…) We therefore establish that from now on they shall not be allowed to hide anywhere in this State, The Grand Duchy of Lithuania…”.

We move on to see objects of everyday life in Parubanka (books, toys, the goods sold at Nastia’s kiosk, a house interior, family photos and photos from public gatherings). We hear and read different stories, also of what it means to be a Roma in Lithuania today.

“As I said, discrimination, being seen differently, makes it difficult for you to be around other people. You feel this discrimination every day. For example, you are standing in lineat the check-out in a shop and you see that the cashier is being nice to Lithuanians, but when it’s your turn, she tosses your goods at you as if you were a dog. You feel that she sees that you’re not of Lithuanian nationality, even though we’re all Lithuanian citizens, we´re not from somewhere else, but she’s still angry. Sometimes they think you’re from another country because they say: ‘You don’t wear a headscarf and a long skirt, so where are you from?’ (…) With so many immigrants and dark-skinned people now, maybe it is a bit easier for us. Because people don’t understand who we are. But it’s still obvious that they [immigrants] are not accepted either.”

Stories that will sound familiar to Roma people in many other countries. The feeling that things might be a bit easier because one might be mistaken for a foreign immigrant, and not a local Roma, should trouble us. At the time, I thought that I would like to see city museums in Portugal and Greece including the stories of the Ciganos/Ρομά. So much that is being kept out of what should be our collective memory.

[Today, as I write, I wonder whether Loures Municipal Museum, in Portugal, did any kind of rapid response collecting to tell the stories of the people who saw their shacks being demolished by the municipality at the Talude Militar neighbourhood. Am I dreaming? Probably…]

 

HIDDEN HISTORIA: the First Women of Zagreb Museums | Archeological Museum, Zagreb, 6/3 to 13/7/2025

Link to the exhibition webpage

Four museums came together - the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, the Ethnographic Museum, the Croatian School Museum and the Museum of Arts and Crafts – to tell the stories of the first women in Zagreb’s cultural institutions - curators, scientists, painters, sculptors, poets, designers. There are the stories one would expect – discrimination, disrespect, misogynism, innumerable barriers -, only harder when they come with photos and objects and “proof”. There are also stories of determination and leadership. Klotilda Cvetišić, after being a teacher and a headmistress, she became the first Croatian curator in 1901 (Women’s Handicraft Collection).

Antonija Tkalčić Koščević was the first woman with a higher education to be employed by the Archaeological Museum (as an illustrator). She writes in her memoir: “The professors used to say: ‘What a pity she’s not a man.’ (…) But she was a woman, and in those days, everything was in the hands of men. Schools existed even for the least capable man, but not for a woman. Everyone had the right, if they found any value in a woman, to hinder her, obstruct her, belittle her, refuse to help her, and in the end, to lament that such  value was not found in a man.” Antonija left her husband due to domestic violence and faced social condemnation and severe financial difficulties.

In 1921, Zdenka Sertić (painter, graphic artist and ethnographer) is employed at the Ethnographic Museum, and in 1939 she even served as acting director. The until then director, Ivo Franić, considered that “Prof. Zdenka Sertić is not a scientific researcher at all, but merely an ordinary draftsman, even if with an academic degree.”

These are only three of the many female figures who, despite all the barriers, left a mark in the Croatian museum and artistic field. The exhibition also names the perpetrators of discrimination and misogynism. Apart from the above mentioned Ivo Franić, Ljubo Babić, Viktor Hoffiler and Izidor Kršnjavin were museum curators who used all sorts of medical, moral and intellectual arguments to belittle their female colleagues. Babić said that women “lack the strength for great creative concepts” and are “less original” than men. Kršnjavin criticised their appearance and behaviour, especially their failure to conform to traditional gender norms. Hoffiler (who was the director of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb for 20 years) considered women to be “feebleminded” and “seriously affected by a nervous disorder”. He was particularly brutal in judging his colleague Dora Pfann. He calls her “abnormal”, “hereditarily burdened”, “physically and mentally underdeveloped” and accuses her of “cretinism” and “nervous illness”. And much more…

It was quite shocking to see the level rage and contempt experienced by women in the museum field (and it mustn’t have been only in Croatia). As we move towards the exit of the exhibition, we are informed that, after World War II, greater emphasis was placed on academic preparation in museum functions such as research, cataloguing, conservation and interpretation, and that more women were being employed. Today, in Zagreb, women outnumber men in museum professions and are more frequently appointed directors. The four museums that created this exhibition, though, believe that their predecessors and everything they endured have rather been forgotten. Just like the timeline right before exiting made me aware of names I had never heard before, like that of the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (the Austrian Bertha von Suttner, in 1905) or the Nobel Prize in Literature (the Swedish Selma Lagerlöf, in 1909, entering in 1914 the Swedish Academy).

These three museum exhibitions gave me true pleasure. They also surprised me with their fresh approaches to the subjects they chose to tackle and even with the fact that they actually chose these subjects. A truly feel happy when museums manage to surprise me!