Alin Dostofei is working on the presentation of a new, modern identity for the Roma to challenge a long history of ‘public abnormalization’:

The local population was not very keen to accept the existence of the Romani culture, implicitly of a multicultural society. Its focus was on assimilation, coming with “explanations” for the differences, like those medieval descriptions of the Roma as some Europeans who darken their faces and speak gibberish, in order to look different and fool the others. Then, as the time elapsed and it appeared more and more clear that this people still remains different in certain aspects, these differences were not accepted as cultural ones, as belonging to another world view. They were distorted in order to look like the local majority are right and Roma are wrong, all of this despite the non-violence of the Roma, the peaceful arrival, the absence of any attempt to destabilize the local structures. Thus it appeared the Gypsy imagery, as a malevolent caricature of the Roma, taking the public place and perpetuating a cultural rift. The Roma became an invisible population, almost nothing is known in public about our way of life.