Creative inclusion

There is a sense of change and progress and yet a feeling too of the challenges of keeping pace with the desired speed of change while remaining mindful of how such rapid processes of transformation can also preserve what makes Macedonia different from other European countries.

Amongst cultural practitioners there were really positive ways of working with/in the ‘system’ while retaining autonomy. It seemed that in this space of ‘in-between’, people work with, as well as around formal structures and institutions and give rise to something new.

The people we met demonstrated how politically Macedonia is engaged with the complexity of the challenges of equality amongst its rich ethnography of people, including the Roma. It was this sense of politicisation that felt strong but which also created such potential tension. Macedonia feels like a country moving forward and yet still gripped by its past, and I hope amidst the shifts and change, it is able to find ways to take that into its future.

The many people we met who work with or for Roma communities focus on political rights and education, and there is clearly space for more development with culture as a focus. That is the case here too in Scotland. The differences between both countries and the Roma way of life are vast yet it is those differences that offer potential.

In Macedonia, for the Roma, travel and how life has and is affected by this seems lost as people deal with the challenges of being settled and seek equality on that basis. In Scotland, travel is still key to the Gypsy/Traveller way of life, even when people are ‘settled’ in houses, and the issue in Scotland is how to preserve that culture amidst the changes in ways of living that are in progress. In this state of mobility and settled, there seems greatest capacity for learning from one another.