Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is the sort of person who hugs a visitor even before she says hello. She welcomes me into her home in the village of Czarna Góra, at the foot of the Tatra mountains in southern Poland, with a high-wattage smile. The artist’s house is right next to her aunt’s and her mother’s. The modern buildings huddle together, facing each other protectively round a flower garden. Mirga-Tas loves being close to so much of her family. “I go out of my house,” she says, “and drink coffee with my mother and my sister before I go to work.”
This morning her husband is making the coffee, there is a plate groaning with cake on the table, and her two teenage boys, it being the school holidays, are slumbering upstairs. Mirga-Tas is a member of Poland’s Bergitka (mountain) Roma community, who have been settled here for centuries. It’s not the easiest thing in the world for her sons to negotiate their identity, she says. “When you decide to say to everyone you are Roma, you need to be strong and you need to work twice as hard.”
