From Hungary to Toronto
In 2025 Kate Browne plans to present an exhibition in Brussels about her Cocoon made in Miskolc, in a segregated Roma neighborhood, and the fate of the people interviewed 5 years later.
Miskolc, Hungary, was once a thriving steel town, but the plants began to shut down at the end of the communist era, and by 2010 they were all closed.
In 2014 the city government of Miskolc, Hungary, began demolishing homes in the Numbered Streets working-class neighborhood in order to renovate its nearby soccer stadium.
The Numbered Streets is a small neighborhood where Hungarian Roma have lived for generations.
For politicians, the expansion of the stadium parking lot is a pretext for evicting Roma and razing their homes, pushing them even further away and accentuating their precariousness.
In 2019, when Kate Browne did her Cocoon artwork with the inhabitants, more than half of the homes had been destroyed. Families were forced to move. Since then many have fled to Canada as refugees.
For her new Cocoon exhibition, the testimonies recorded in Miskolc in 2019 will echo the ones recorded 5 years later with the same people in their new homes in Toronto.
By telling this story, the idea is to raise awareness of the situation faced by the Roma in Europe, to point out that European emigration does exist, and that it affects certain communities whose rights are being trampled underfoot. It's also an opportunity to talk about the emigration of European citizens to Canada, in the face of discrimination and institutional violence against the Roma from the various countries they crossed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Cocoon Miskolc soundrack (in Hungarian / English version to come)