Miss Roma

Miss Roma, 2007

Jana Bluchová’s experiences of discrimination were the springboard for Tamara Moyzes’ idea for „Miss Roma“: discrimination which has denied her access to numerous places in the Czech Republic on the basis of her heritage. Before subjecting her protagonist to a so-called „white washing“ (the application of white make-up to the skin), Moyzes begins her two minute stop-animated video by listing the clubs, shops, restaurants etc where she, along with Jana Bluchová, was denied entrance in this self-experiment. With „Miss Roma“, Moyzes places a magnifying glass over the cultural segregation of Roma in Czech society, as well as the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of the dominant beauty ideology. The price of the acceptance and inclusion that is hoped for lies in the necessity to assimilate one’s body to the normative criteria of the white mainstream.

Text by: Lith Bahlmann