As a minority group, the Sinti and Roma still have a lot to lose in terms of human rights, the right to social security and cultural participation. It is therefore necessary for social and religious institutions to take a clear stance on the grievances and actively campaign for improvements.
Cultural producer and theologian Sabine Böhlau and theologian Fabian Brüder spent many months interviewing various people who consider themselves to be Sinti and Roma. Many of them are also concerned with seeing and being seen, with conversations and encounters, which gave rise to the idea of an exhibition that ultimately unfolded into a series of subjective sketches of encounters and personal snapshots.
With poems by Fabian Brüder and photographs by Andreas Tobias, the traveling exhibition GERN GESEHEN aims to improve the cultural and social participation of Sinti and Roma and to provide information about the minority, whose members themselves helped to design the exhibition content.
The vernissage of this remarkable exhibition will take place on December 5 from 7 p.m. and will be enriched with words of welcome from project initiator Sabine Böhlau and social pedagogue Alexander Diepold . The latter actively puts his conviction that education is essential for social participation into practice as founder of the social institution Madhouse and, since 2019, also as Managing Director of the Hildegard Lagrennestiftung für Bildung, Inklusion und Teilhabe von Sinti und Roma in Deutschland.
The evening will be rounded off with music by guitarists Kevin Petermann, Nino Franz and Sandro Meinhard.
Project participants:
The photographer of the exhibition, Andreas Tobias, was an actor for a long time and only decided to mainly stand behind the camera after 2011. For him, the quality of his work is based on communication, naturalness and entering into a connection with his counterpart and his surroundings, which for the photographer is similar to meditation.
For him, creative self-expression and spiritual development are synonymous.
As a cultural producer and Protestant theologian, Sabine Böhlau was the initiator, producer and bearer of overall responsibility for the exhibition GERN GESEHEN.
Together with Alexandra Caterbow, she founded kairosis in 2012, a non-profit organization that plans and implements cultural and socio-cultural projects with a wide range of cooperation partners(www.kairosis.de).
The graphic designer Wolfram Saathoff was responsible for the conception and realization of the graphic design of the exhibition GERN GESEHEN.
Fabian Brüder, a reformed theologian and pastor of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Dresden, initiated and conducted the conversations with Sinti and Roma together with Sabine Böhlau. This resulted in poems, three of which are presented in the exhibition.
The Evangelische Presseverband für Bayern e.V. (EPV) is the cooperation partner for distribution and public relations.
This content has been machine translated.