Maia - A Portrait with Hands 1999 - 1905
My name is Alexandra Gulea, the same was the name of my grandmother (Maia). She dies at the age of 93 in a communist flat located on the « Victory of socialism » avenue in Bucharest. Her life path, as an aromanian woman, unfolds throughout the entire XXth..
Her birth, in 1905, happens under the specter of the violent killing, by the greeks, of her father who was part of a group of militants fighting for the Aromanian cause. (Aromanians are a minority group of semi nomadic herders from the south of the Danube) They were shot in the back, hanged in a forest, or beheaded.
Forced to cross the Balkans in the search for a place to live, the aromanian minority doesn’t find her place. With the extinction of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the nations in the Balkans, they are obliged to flee from Greece, then, after some time from Bulgaria, to finaly settle in Romania where the rise of the communist regime kneels and emprisons them.
In an ever changing world, the aromaninan dialect, the only language that Maia speaks, becomes the core of her identity.
The collective memory recomposes “Maia’s” character wich is living and acting within me.
Her birth, in 1905, happens under the specter of the violent killing, by the greeks, of her father who was part of a group of militants fighting for the Aromanian cause. (Aromanians are a minority group of semi nomadic herders from the south of the Danube) They were shot in the back, hanged in a forest, or beheaded.
Forced to cross the Balkans in the search for a place to live, the aromanian minority doesn’t find her place. With the extinction of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the nations in the Balkans, they are obliged to flee from Greece, then, after some time from Bulgaria, to finaly settle in Romania where the rise of the communist regime kneels and emprisons them.
In an ever changing world, the aromaninan dialect, the only language that Maia speaks, becomes the core of her identity.
The collective memory recomposes “Maia’s” character wich is living and acting within me.