Marginality – point of communication / round table with the inhabitants of the Roma settlement Vrtni put
Participants: Stevo Golubovac (resident of the Garden Road), Nedjatin Kamberovski (Council of the Roma National Minority of the City of Zagreb), Sinisa Senad Music (Roma Education Fund)
Round table moderator and project leader: Bojan Mucko
The goal of the Marginality – Point of Communication project is to develop and implement field-based methods of civic empowerment for the inhabitants of Zagreb’s ghettoized Roma settlements and to link them with relevant city and state structures. The Garden Road is a settlement of about 13 households in which the most vulnerable people live, and there is no strategic plan for their housing, as well as for the future of the settlement itself.
The majority of the population is illiterate, and there is no person in the settlement who would articulate and address the social and infrastructural problems of the settlement with the competent instances, nor is there a necessary official communication channel to the city and state structures.
The aim of the round table is to give visibility to the problems of the Garden Road, but also to foster long-term, continuous cooperation between residents, Roma representative bodies and relevant city and state offices. We will contextualize life in the Roma settlement through discussion in the broader picture of urban spatial “policies”, but we will also address the internal contradictions of the functioning of the “collective” of residents: critically both upwards and downwards, but constructively.
The roundtable was the result of a workshop in which all interested residents of the Garden Road participated. It was carried out in the settlement itself, and through the workshop we tried to jointly articulate the settlement problems and prepare them for presentation at the round table.
In addition, we organized the distribution of humanitarian aid packages in cooperation with social worker Tina Debeljak (City Red Cross Society of Zagreb), purchased and installed a new boiler in a hygienic container that was out of function, organized a consultation of residents on their civil rights with Sinisa Senad Music ( Roma Education Fund) and physical education and exercise workshops for children with drama educators Martin Protulipac and Katarina Vukadin.
The long-term goal of the Marginality – Point of Communication project is to develop a cross-sectoral collaboration model for working in the most vulnerable communities – a cultural project as a platform for connecting, mediating and hybridizing social, educational, artistic and representational levels.
The project is funded by the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture
