Impossible Home
Work in progress, New York 2026
In the series Impossible Home I draw a fictional album that never existed. It is my own trace of childhood—an act of resistance against amnesia. I sink bitterly into a dream, where there is a home that was, in reality, impossible. We were children who grew up in an institutionalized and artificial experiment. Assuming that the Roma are incapable of raising their own children, the system had to save us from bad. The same system that promised, above all, to educate and raise Roma children, offering equal chances for a life in a better world, imposed on us the fear of growing up in our own family in a Roma settlement.
Gayatri Spivak argues that archives are not neutral collections of the past; rather, they are systems that categorize and represent people in particular ways. When there is no adequate vocabulary or framework through which subaltern groups can be represented, they remain effectively voiceless. If someone speaks from the margins in their own language, the dominant system may simply lack the conceptual and linguistic tools necessary to translate, record, or recognize them. Consequently, their voice may be treated as noise rather than as meaningful knowledge, rendering the system effectively unable to hear them. Spivak suggests that we must pay attention to these silences by actively examining the gaps, absences, and untold stories within historical records. These silences may provide important insights into the voices of those who have been excluded from dominant forms of representation. We must therefore recognize our own systemic blind spots and work towards dismantling the structures that force certain people into silence. Respecting history means acknowledging these absences rather than attempting to fill them immediately with our own assumptions and interpretations. This series articulates my profound subjective experience, which I have developed into my own language—tracing and sharing memory through drawing.
There was always this particular idea in us - we looked all the same, we stood neatly lined up, and we all had the same chances of making it to the end. We were overlooked by the outside world, so we didn't know how to perceive the world around us. It took me 20 years to get out of there. There are so many prejudices and disinformation about us, Roma people and the orphanages caused by voyeuristic and racist assumptions, often portraying us in need of urgent help and salvation. This system had been perfected, kept untouchable to this day as a technique of re-education and re-socialization of Roma children who will later, out of gratitude, make an important contribution to economic growth in the society. I argue that this very system fails the moment children become adults and have to leave this institution. Reports of insufficient conditions of European orphanages circulated in which children lived in misery. Care and love were out of the question; that was a privilege we couldn't afford. We ended up on the streets, in our own families, whom we had never seen before, or in prisons. Only a few of us could enter a normative trajectory that one would call success – I am one of them, and that is also why I tell this story.
Like many other children, I myself had almost no images from our own past to take with me; there was nothing one can take with them except their own memories. I possess a single photograph and a few letters from my early childhood. There is no one we could ask later to recall our memories with. We were separated, and much of it has been lost. Generations of children were denied the right to trace the past, and if it is true that identity has no fixed core, but is fluid and can be changed through education and socialization, then we, children from orphanages, are the ghosts of this society. Ghosts without a fixed identity, but with their own excellent monstrosity, and sometimes an invisibility that helps us move through many different imaginary worlds.
I drew 120 children and several compositions – I grouped them: children whom I remember, those who disappeared, were lost or adopted, and those who came after us and are still coming. In the exhibition, the small-format drawings of the children are projected onto the walls with several slide projectors – their size changes – their appearance resembles ghostly silhouettes staring at the audience. Through this act of enlargement, children from orphanages will no longer remain overlooked or excluded from the attention and support of civil society.
The First Memory Of My Orphanage, two drawings, 73x41cm each, black pen on paper, New York 2026
