European artists from Sweden, Hungary and Slovakia are set to exhibit their work at a new exhibition in Berlin.
It is titled “You Are All Our Children in One” and it examines how the logics of racial classification, forced sterilisation, and biological determinism that underpinned the Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti “did not end” with the war but “continued to shape policy, science, and public attitudes even today.”
Against the backdrop of the far-right’s rising power in Europe, it is said to “highlight the persistence of eugenic ideologies.”
Presented on 2 August, the European Holocaust Memorial Day for Roma and Sinti, the exhibition, is seen through the work of artists Lindy Larsson from Sweden, Emília Rigová from Slovakia, and Zsófia Takács from Hungary.
It brings together three distinct artistic practices to confront this history and its contemporary echoes, from institutional memory and testimony to embodied and material responses to violence and erasure.
“Fascism is never simply a chapter in history books. It begins with words, stereotypes, indifference, and the gradual erosion of democratic values,” said Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Executive Director of ERIAC.
“Honoring those who were murdered is not enough. We must also recognize how quickly democratic societies can unravel when prejudice, dehumanization, and political extremism become accepted as ordinary.”
Slovakian artist Emília Rigová said, “My mother was sterilized without her consent, and this violent act left a deep mark on my childhood and emotional world.
“Only much later did I understand the weight of certain sentences my parents used to say, like: ‘You are all our children in one.’ My mother never spoke about it – she carried it in silence and shame. Reading testimonies from other women whose stories echoed hers was both painful and strangely affirming. She underwent a C-section when giving birth to me in 1980 and was (illegally) sterilized afterward.
“That surgical cut – and the silence that followed – became the central symbol of this story for me: a dead, echoing silence.
“My work speaks not only of my mother’s experience, but of all women who, across histories and geographies, were denied their bodily integrity, their joys, and their everyday worries.
“It is both personal and collective – a gesture toward remembering, and toward healing.”
The European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), which is hosting the exhibition, announced the opening of You Are All Our Children in One, which will run at ERIAC’s premises in Berlin.
