Nusfalau: grounds of encounter Contact : Maria Ionescu Agentia de dezvoltare comunitara Impreuna Bucuresti Strada Calusei, nr37. sect 2 tel (01) 222.71.95; mobil: 094.75.95.65; fax 00-40-1-252 42 50 email: imaria@dnt.ro photo credit : Agentia de dezvoltare comunitara Impreuna

.		.	Michaela directed me to contact Maria Ionescu, another manager of European implementations, who participated in the colloquium at Sincrai. In fact, transitional practices built specific networks. As in the case of Michaela, they use sometimes, subversively the "language" of the European managing to argue feminine practices in public space. Unusually within a country which still promote quite sexist politics (for example the Romanian Senate include only two women!), the majority of project managers who are implementing European programs in Romania are women. Maria Ionescu works with the Roma people, the Romanian gypsy communities. The Central and Eastern European nomads have operated as a network a long time before the enlargement of Europe, with their music and dance. In spite of the constant discrimination they have been faced with everywhere, they haven't stop to travel from country to country, mapping a Europe without borders stirring it, experiencing it as a whole.They were actually a kind of proto- European citizens, anticipating the potentialities of a cultural and economic unity in Europe several hundred years in advance. Excluded everywhere, and being everywhere, both in the West and the East, they could be seen as a kind "thirding" "othering" (Soja) agents within a still binary conceived Europe. Roma minority in Romania is confronted with poverty and social discrimination. Maria Ionescu is the manager of the NGO - "Impreuna" /"Together", an Agency for Community Development which co-ordinates activities directed towards the reinforcing of individual and communal ethnic identity of the Roma people -the Romanian gypsy communities-- and their recognition as ethnic minority. Starting with 1995, the Impreuna Agency brought innovation through its discrete practices and has in its own way "given a rhythm" to the Roma communities. They have initiated collaborative projects with other local and international NGOs and governmental institutions and have implemented programs of social, education and sanitary assistance, training and initiation of local actors, negotiations for partnerships with local institutions, re-accustom of the Roma traditional skills at the modern market, construction of local infrastructure.
			The project for a brick making workshop implemented in Nusfalau in 1998 consist in job offer, production and education in Roma traditional crafts, and was conceived as a first step in constructucting economic autonomy with the community. Next year, the agency have continued with a project of social dwellings. Ten houses have been built by the community members, using bricks made by themselves in the workshop, and contributing in this way to the self financing of the construction. This project runs on the material realised in the previous project, which is a way to construct continuity and meaning with the community. Each family had to contribute with bricks for construction and selling, supporting in this way the building of their own dwelling. Traditional crafts of Roma communities in Romania consist in a special procedure of making bricks out of earth, without burning them. What is striking is the symbolic power with the project which is a synecdochal representation of the self-constructing of the community as both a socio-economic and spatial unit. It is a self-construction starting with the ground, using ground itself as the very material of construction. A progressive empowerment through an "auto-poietic" process which allows simultaneously internal and external recognition at both real and symbolic level within a non-discursive practice. Not only grounds of construction but of encounter, as well. According to Jacobs, "the politics of identity is undeniably also a politics of place. But this is not the proper place of bounded, pre-given essences, it si an unbound geography of difference and context". The experience with this project helps in thinking "place" and "location" not as a pre-given essence, but as actively constituted, "produced" (in the sense of Lefevbre) by a continual interweaving of interior and exterior conditions working simultaneously with different scales and contexts.
			Impreuna Agency, Billance Netherlands , Soros Foundation, Romanian government and Salaj County, have all been involved in the brick making of Nusfalau and networked with its "location". There are politics of location which are at the same time poetics of location. The Roma association of Nusfalau have chosen to call themselves The Roma from Brasilia, which is a way to represent their location not by reference to the physical but to the symbolic reality, still conserving nomadic logics within a more settled way of doing. In a way, dynamics were not stopped but speed out in the sedentarisation process. They have just been translated from nomadism to socialisation. When the community is one of performed connections, location itself becomes mobility. According to Varella and Maturana in their book Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realisation of the Living , an auto-poietic organisation, which is in a way the model promoted with Nusfalau, is a "self-making, self-referring autonomous unity defined as a network of process of production of components that produces the components which regenerate and realise the network of processes". It is obvious that the auto-poietic functioning of the Nusfalau Roma community supposes the inclusion of all these supportive exterior networks of individuals and institutions which made it possible.What will happen with the community when the exterior components will disappear, this remains a question for the future... The Nusfalau community experiences a kind of "reversible nomadism", when different places, people and institutions come together and get enfolded into one construction and location, building at the same houses and networks.