"We aren't racists, but..." actually we are - and pretty disgusting ones

An essential exhibition mapping the racism and xenophobia that persists to this day in Czech society is being ignored by the mainstream media here. This is despite the fact that the state of affairs captured by the exhibition is glaringly obvious.

The chair of the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust in the Czech Republic, Mr Čeněk Růžička, recently announced that the land on which a pig farm continues to desecrate a Romani Holocaust site is in fact still owned by the Schwarzenberg family which, at the end of the 1930s, exploited Romani people in the camp at Lety through slave labor on their estate – and strangely enough, his announcement has also been ignored by the mainstream media. Is this an accident, or yet another proof of a systematic cover-up of the crimes that Czechs have committed against Romani people and are still committing?

The exhibition is being held at the National Technical Library Gallery in Prague. It will be open until 15 January.

Desire for lynching

The name of the exhibition, "Xenophilia", means "a morbid predilection for everything foreign". It ironically refers to its counterpart towards which a segment of contemporary Czech society is now leaning, namely, xenophobia and its closest relatives, antigypsyism and racism.  

The exhibition by 18 antifascist artists and groups is comprised of graphic design, installations and video work, and as its curators say, it simply holds a mirror up to a society where, behind a facade of decency, love of order, and normality, the desire for blood and lynching is now bubbling up. It is also the first-ever exhibition in the Czech Republic to present the antifascist, domestic engagé art scene, which intends to communicate that "many of us are not indifferent to the efforts to transfer responsibility for the plight of our economic situation and Czech society’s lack of ideas to those who suffer from them most of all – people on the outskirts of society."  

"We are not doing an exhibition about Romani people or any other minority. We are doing an exhibition about how active people – from activists, to graphic designers, to visual artists – are intervening in the public space and warning of racism in Czech society," organizer Vladimír Turner told Radio Wave.

A caravan instead of Václav

It must be pointed out that if the exhibition were to be visited by the average Czech "little guy" who is influenced by the omnipresent hatred for and lack of trust in Romani people, the kind of guy who begins his xenophobic arguments with the well-worn alibi of "I’m not a racist, but…", he would risk experiencing a serious psychological shock. The individual pieces and overall context of the exhibition make such an authentic, intense impression that the average practicing xenophobe might run away with a rapidly beating heart to bang his (skin)head against the glass of the gallery wall.  

However, your average cocooned Czech racist is characterized, among other things, by a stubborn lack of interest in listening to other arguments, so concern for any mental shock on their part is probably misplaced. It is, of course, necessary to note that even an averagely tolerant Czech might fall into a state approaching depression and hopelessness under the weight of this exhibition, which presents evidence of Czech ignorance and prejudice, and the brutality flowing from them that has been perpetrated against Romani people basically throughout all of Czech history to today.

Even if such states of mind will be cathartic only in a few cases, it will only be good for everyone involved. Visitors to the exhibition are immediately frozen in place at the entrance to the space by an enormous installation, several cubic meters in extent, by Lexa Peroutka called "Till the Last Drop".  

This is an intentionally simple fortress structure made out of scaffolding and bags full of sand that metaphorically refer to the awareness that aggression, the cause of which is an effort at self-identification and defining oneself against "the others", has always been historically present in human society. In contrast to this horrific projection of our xenophobic ego, the next piece in the exhibit is a cozy little collection of private photographs from the Romani extended families of Rokycany.  

When viewing these photographs, you have the feeling you are paging through a family album and that the lives of the people involved are being presented through their facial expressions, the style of their clothing and their household furnishings. The project was designed by Lukáš Houdek, who used an extensive archive accumulated over the years by Ms Květa Tůmová.  

The viewer is next drawn into a whirlpool of energy pulsing in the space from artwork to artwork:  Photographs of "happenings" by the performer Milan Kohout, who demonstrates his joy every time he meets a Romani citizen by kissing him, or the scathingly ironic silkscreen by Punx23 replacing the statue of St. Václav on Wenceslas Square in Prague with a Romani caravan.

Racism of the "decent" and the deprived

The projects of Tomáš Rafa, Michaela Spružinová, and another "happening" by Milan Kohout called "Defend White Culture" represent efforts on the borders of action art, socially integrating activism and workshops. In the Kohout piece, a football match is staged on the town square in Kroměříž during which the visiting Romani guys kick a ball that has been soaked in black paint at goalkeeper Milan Kohout until his originally white uniform becomes black.

The "happening" ends ingloriously after the performance artist invites the Romani footballers to a café, only to see them refused entry on the basis of racist prejudice. The video pieces, screened in an improvised viewing hall, blatantly reveal what things look like when all efforts at dialogue fail and the going really gets tough.

The screening of the documentary film called "161>88“ maps the development and history of the Czech antifascist movement from the end of the 1980s to 2011 and is an experience for the thick-skinned. Footage from the time, supplemented by commentary from Jakub Polák, Ondřej Slačálek and others, familiarizes the viewer with the racist murders of the first half of the 1990s, with protests against Sládek’s Republican Party,  and with the fight against racist hooligans and National Resistance up to the recent anti-Romani demonstrations.  

The atmosphere thickens and falls to the freezing point when we proceed up the austere concrete stairs to the first floor of the gallery. The monster of xenophobia surrounds us and smothers us, appearing in the broadest possible variety of forms which eventually become the most horrible of all – from the matter-of-fact racism of so-called "decent" people to the street violence of emotionally deprived neo-Nazis.

Barbora Šimková takes aim in her provocative videos at the neo-Nazis’ bizarre preference for brand-name clothing from producers linked to the neo-Nazi scene (Thor Steinar and others) through which they can identify with racism without breaking the law. A video by the Iraqi-Israeli artist Shlomi Yaffe is also shocking, as it shows an ordinary person transforming over the course of several minutes into a horrifying neo-Nazi.

The bitter point of the piece is that all of the props for this horrible transformation, from clothing to accessories and weapons, are purchased completely legally from Vietnamese vendors at Prague’s Holešovice Market. No less disturbing is a screenshot of the antifascist performance artist Tamara Moyzes taken from an unauthorized profile of her on a neo-Nazi website involved in monitoring antifascist activists as well as publicly active gays or left-wing citizens.

In the context of the exhibition, the graphic design of the Czech radical anarchist and antifascist scene makes a very authentic impression, including a collection of the A-Kontra bulletin of the Czech anarchists and a wide range of badges, posters and stickers, for example, with the successful slogan "The Gypsies are not to blame for your shitty lives". Visitors to the exhibition who have been more or less enlightened by it purchased such souvenirs in droves so they could at least symbolically draw a line against the omnipresent xenophobia they witness.

Exhibition as manifesto

"It was the hatred of Romani people which has probably abandoned for good the traditional preserve… as a grateful topic of gossip and which, during the past three years, poured onto the streets of Czech towns with a disturbing obviousness that led us to feel we must respond in a different way than through a direct expression of solidarity with those who are humiliated and insulted, those whom everybody kicks around with gusto," write the exhibition curators Milan Mikuláštík, Barbora Šimková and Vladimír Turner, simultaneously creating an unconventional artistic manifesto. Xenophilia is, in their view, another form of resistance, this time in the field of art.

The curators are aware that this form of activity will hardly change the sensibilities of the mobs chanting "We want your welfare" or "Come here and we’ll kill you", as has been heard with sad regularity in the streets of towns in North Bohemia. However, they say it is a peculiar form of psychotherapy – a way to come to grips with a time when Fascism is once again accelerating.  

"When we follow the Czech media space today, we can directly, tangibly sense a rise in animosity and intolerance. Those who find it difficult to defend themselves most often become the targets of irrational hatred – the impoverished, the socially excluded, and primarily ethnic minorities. Those who have found themselves at the bottom of the barrel, very often through no fault of their own, are also targets for attacks by their frustrated fellow citizens and calculating politicians, in addition to their uneasy personal situations. The Xenophilia exhibition is the testimony of a generation of those who refuse to reconcile themselves to this situation," the curators write.

The death camp at Lety

A very important component of the exhibition is the presentation of documents about the former concentration camp for Romani people at Lety by Písek, put together by Antifascist Action. The documents include requests, orders, death certificates and criminal protocols about the prisoners of the Lety camp and come from the District Archive of the Town of Třeboň and the National Archive in the Chodovec quarter of Prague.

The documents are symbolically accompanied by a video piece by UMPRUM student Eva Jašková who, with the aid of the Google Streetview service, returns to the abandoned area of Přednádraží Street in Ostrava, which once was occupied by impoverished Romani citizens. Despite the solidarity actions of activists, the Roma were forced to leave their homes there against their will.  

This recent "exodus" of Romani people from the locality they had long occupied and where they felt at home gains a new, horrifying dimension in the context of this exhibition. A collection of texts featuring remarks and speeches by Czech monarchs, politicians and public officials throughout history (from Charles IV to Empress Maria Theresa to Čunek, Okamura, Řepková and Sládek) captures with horrifying simplicity the history of centuries of Czech xenophobia toward the Romani minority.

The author of that collection of quotes is the artist and graphic designer who uses the nickname Smyslov. The opening also featured a lecture and presentation of a new book by author Paul Polansky called Death Camp Lety covering the history of the concentration camp, which was followed by a stormy discussion during which several unbelievable facts came to light.

The author of the book said the pig farm at Lety is unfortunately the real memorial to what took place there, not just an historical one, but also a symbol of how the Czechs have thought of the Roma until now. More proof of this has been the alibistic approach taken by all of the Czech Governments toward the issue of the pig farm, including today’s government.

Publication of the book allegedly was prevented for a long time by various influential circles, supposedly because the historical facts in it cast an unflattering light on the father of Prince Karl Schwarzenberg and the forebears of former President Václav Havel. Nevertheless, in his response to the repeated questions from those present, Čeněk Růžička, who sees a certain hope for correcting the situation in the work of the currently-functioning Government commission, of which he is a member, that has been set up to address the matter of the camp at Lety, responded that the basic problem to this day remains a lack of financing with which to buy and close the pig farm on the site of the former concentration camp, as well as the shocking fact that the land on which the camp once stood and where the pig farm continues to stand to this day, still belongs, according to his information, to the Schwarzenberg family.

The fact that the Czech Government, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and Czech civil society to this day have been neither able nor willing to provide a dignified resting place for the Romani victims of mass murder is in and of itself egregious, sufficient testimony to the ongoing xenophobia here. It is at least as deplorable and disgusting as the smell of pig excrement that still hangs over the former concentration camp, which was established and managed at the initiative of the Czechs.