GIPSYSTAN

The culture of peoples has always been transmitted through songs, stories. There are peoples whose difficult living conditions have led to the loss of a large part of this part of their own culture – like the Rroms. Even if it seems to us that music is still very much alive in them, we have observed, working for the past 7 years with them, that a large part of this heritage disappears over time. Now, these songs were real teachings among the gypsies. He passed on life lessons, anecdotes leading to a better understanding of the world and a better understanding of it.  

We have also been able to observe that the mastery of their own language – Rromanes – is more and more sketchy … No doubt to seek greater integration. Thus, many Rroms today learn the “gadjé” language of the country in which they live and no longer practice Rromanese. We have been able to observe during our last projects that in Hungarian villages, only Hungarian is spoken, just like in the slums in France, most speak only Romanian or Bulgarian. So even if they still hear certain songs, they no longer understand their meaning. This acculturation leads many of them to lose self-esteem and in their own culture.

Our projects tend to enhance the cultures of populations in the shadow of society, popularize them, make them accessible and then make them available to the populations concerned, as well as to those who do not watch them, for fear of the unknown … And who sometimes come to stigmatize them.

CONCERTS

The Gipsystan group, co-produced with the Tire-Laine company, has its source in the collections carried out by Boris Dymny with Roma from French slums and from Roma in Eastern European villages. The result is a group of musicians ready to criss-cross rock festivals of all kinds, on the roads of Gipsystan, a little-known land with tenacious preconceptions concealing real jewels. His music, gypsy, never reached the ears of the gadjé (non-Rroms), it is born in misery, anger and mud and grows in the blazes and smiles of the patchivs. Our little troop recognizes itself well there through its psych-rock, jazz and Balkan influences. By adapting Rroms songs to their energy, they bring you a shattering repertoire between rock, French song and taraf from Transylvania.

NARRACTIVE WORKSHOPS

For 3 years now, in connection with the InterAgir Solidarity Theater (Science Po Lille), the Social Center of Chats Perches (St Maurice Pellevoisin), the Imaginer Association, Boris Dymny has worked with students of UPE2A classes, and Roma slums in Lille armed with the methodology of Creation NarrActive to help children speak and give it back in the form of a dramatized story. The peculiarity of these groups is that they are groups of allophone children from very different backgrounds. We will find refugees, Roma, like children of ambassadors or diplomats … The bond and the communication developed in the creative approach will allow to change the way children look at each other.

WRITING

As part of the support of the Fondation Abbé Pierre and of Center d’Insertion des Bois Blancs, we are working on the appropriation of the Roma to their history (s) whether they are collected or created by them in the East or in France. For the sake of sustainability, we publish book-support compiling these rewritten stories and put into words which will give us the opportunity to share these experiences with a wider audience, by relying on a media, university or associative network, in order to make their voices heard as far as possible. Boris Dymny also drew on their experiences to write novels and short stories (in the process of being published).