Interview with György Jovánovics on His 1974 “Plans for a Roma Holocaust Memorial”

For a long time, Roma victims of the Holocaust had not attracted the attention of historians, and even the term Porajmos was only coined in the 1990s to denote the Roma Holocaust. Nevertheless, the first plans for a memorial to the Roma victims of the Holocaust were drawn up as early as 1974 in Hungary, very soon even by international standards, by György Jovánovics, a prominent figure of the Neo-Avant-Garde generation of artists. The sculptor was interviewed by Daniel Véri, curator of Blinken OSA Archivum’s current exhibition, Commissioned Memory.
Interviewer: Daniel Véri
Camera: Péter Szalay
Graphic Design: Sarolta Ágnes Erdélyi
Editing: Darius Krolikowski
Photo (portrait): Deim Balázs
Photo (artworks): Sulyok Miklós
Budapest, 2019
The memorial designs of György Jovánovics are on view at the exhibition Commissioned Memory: Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965 until December 3, 2023, at the Blinken OSA Archivum’s Galeria Centralis in Budapest (Arany János u. 32, 1051): archivum.org/e...
The video includes most of the interview; a complete English translation of the full transcript is available on Artmagazin Online: www.artmagazin...