What Others Dream Of

Photographs by Jule Kaiser and Charlotte Menin

Jule Kaiser, Charlotte Menin

Roma in Europe, like Native Americans in North America, are seen as people who have formed their own community on the fringes of society, under the pressure of poverty and criminality. In stories they are portrayed as ‘free nomads’ travelling through the wilderness. But in the present, what is wild are the social circumstances under which these peoples suffer. However, while Americans continue to associate the Roma with travelling showmen, Europeans tend toward a romanticised image of American Indians. We see the ‘others’ near us as a threat, and project our longings on more remote ‘others’. Jule Kaiser travelled to Oklahoma, the state with the largest Native American population in the USA, and Charlotte Menin portrayed a group of Romanian Roma in Milan. The photographs they created are not stories of adversity that aspire to teach us about the reality of Roma and Native Americans. Rather, the two projects function as a mosaic of realities – fragments of subjectively gathered impressions.