TESTIMONY, TESTIMONIES
Ceija Stojka died in 2013, and her legacy includes over a thousand drawings and paintings, more than one hundred and thirty of which have been assembled for the exhibition: ink, gouache and acrylic on paper and canvas. Produced between 1988 and 2012, they have been grouped into themes that plot her life, although they were not made in such chronological order. Some scenes are played out over and over in the different galleries of the museum; motifs reappear, the same yet different. The many works shown enable us to grasp the twists and turns of the memory process, with its constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions. Ceija’s work reflects numerous standpoints; a ten-year-old girl's memories cohabiting with suddenly re-emerging, repressed images and their analysis by the creative adult. Not all her works are based on her own experiences; some refer to places or incidents which she found out about after the event. Dachau, Concentration Camp (Dachau, camp de concentration) and Z.B. [Zyklon B] Gas Chamber, 02.08.1944 in Auschwitz. The final liquidation (Z. B. [Zyklon B]) are two such works. Both are astonishingly abstract. The first refers to the arrest of her father, Wackar, in 1941 and his deportation to Dachau then Mauthausen, before he was killed at Hartheim Castle in Austria, in 1942.
KEY ENCOUNTERS
In 1986, Ceija met the Austrian documentarist Karin Berger. At the time, Berger was attempting to gather testimonies from people of the Roma community for a research about women in concentration camps – not without difficulty, given the symbolic taboos within the communities themselves. She was meant to interview a certain Kathi… but in fact met her sister, Ceija. Ceija’s older brother Karl (1931-2003) had already begun to write and paint, and their cousin Mongo (1929-2014) was a writer and musician. While we do not know exactly when Ceija began to write, then draw and paint, we do know that Karin Berger played a crucial role in encouraging and revealing her work. Ceija Stojka was totally self-taught. Not only did Karin Berger help her to transcribe some of her manuscripts, she also made two documentaries about her (Portrait of a Romni in 1999 and, in 2005, The Green Green Grass Beneath, a 30 minutes excerpt is presented at the end of the show).
Ceija gained a certain recognition for her writings, first in Austria, in the early 1990s, within a tense political climate that demanded acknowledgement of this first female voice to break the silence surrounding the Samudaripen, the Roma genocide that wiped out 90% of the Roma population in the country. The Roma tradition was almost exclusively oral, hence the sparsity of texts at that time. Nonetheless, some writings began to emerge in the 1950s, including by women such as the writer Philomena Franz (b. 1922) or the poet Papoucha (1908-1987).
Ceija Stojka became the voice that took out the twentieth century's vast dislocation, and Austria’s pervasive anti-Roma racism, not just into the media but also into schools and clubs. Her work is still little-known in Europe.
“LIFE ON THE ROAD...”
The first gallery of the exhibition presents depictions of a life ‘before’. The life of a child born one May 23rd in Kraubath, in Styria, a descendant of the Lovara, a long line of horse traders who were originally from Hungary but had been living in Austria for centuries. Many Roma had already become sedentary; the Stojka family was forced to do so by the Nazi laws that came after the annexation of Austria (Anschluss) (1938-1939). And so the horse-drawn caravan became a wood cabin. It features in all the pictures of this section, some of which take us right inside the cosy interior.
We see there an idyllic life in harmony with nature - Country Life - and an entire slice of Roma culture. Ceija celebrates this nomadic, clan-based existence on the back of certain paintings. Signs and words also feature on the drawings and canvases evoking life in the concentration camps - attempts to say what must be said, to point the finger, to name the unnameable, as well as expressions of violence (the shouting of the SS, place names, etc.)