Beograd Gazela
This book provides documentation of a Roma slum in Belgrade, packed in the format of a travel guide book. It was published in Serbian, Romani and German language (see details below), received large attention by international media and is sold in the travel guide sections of book stores. The book is based on extensive research carried out between 2005 and 2007 during several longer stays in Belgrade. Politicians, sociologists, representatives of aid organizations, and representatives of Roma associations were interviewed and provided a precise picture of those structures and mechanism by which the Serbian Roma are pushed to the margin of society. However they gave little information about the Belgrade slums or about Gazela itself. Thus the focus was transferred to visiting the settlement itself, in the course of which the extensive interviews with the inhabitants took place that ultimately provided the major foundation for the travel guide.

The book directs the reader’s attention to a place which is paradigmatic for the recent history of Roma in Southeastern Europe. It provides essential information about the social and economic structures of a slum, about the inhabitants and their daily lives and exposes the complex mechanisms of marginalization and discrimination against Roma. In addition, the individual chapters are accompanied by a discussion which the authors led at the end of a presentation of the project. The edited transcriptions of interjections and comments run through the book at the bottom of each page, documenting its origin as well as questions that were still open even after the completion of the typescript, and embed the project in the context out of which it grew – that of contemporary art.