A Flag Large Enough
A Flag Large Enough is a participatory project co-created and delivered with KaskoSan, a community organisation who have been working with Roma people with heritage in Central and Eastern Europe since 2009. KaskoSan, a registered charity founded and run by East European Roma, supports more than a thousand Romani families face to face in the north, and reaches 10 million Romani speakers online.
Over the next two months, members of the Romani communities originally from Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, living in Bradford, Bolton and Oldham will come together for the first time, sharing music, dance, theatre and food, and celebrating Romani culture. Four diverse Romani groups who have never been united before will meet for workshops with a special event on the 7th of April to celebrate International Roma Day held on the 8th of April. With support from The Javaad Alipoor Company, the groups will make a show, shared at Theatre in the Mill in Bradford on the 16th of May, sharing stories, music, dance, and food from the Roma communities.
The 16th of May 2024 marks eighty years since Roma Resistance Day, when the uprising against the Nazi SS by Romani inmates took place in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, which that night saved the lives of more than 6000 inmates. A Flag Large Enough is co-created with the descendants of Holocaust survivors. It’s about commemorating the resistance in 1944, and how Roma people organise and resist today. It’s about contemporary Romani culture, community and solidarity. It’s about an oppressed people carving out their own space. It asks what it means to be “a people”; How that empowers and how that silences; And how we make a flag large enough to enfold everyone.
