Gender and Romani descent define Delaine Le Bas’s distinctive practice. Both alone and with her late husband Damian Le Bas, she has been creating DIY costumes, proposing a female shaman-like character or a Roma Passionaria, painting large-scale expressionistic gestures in immersive environments, fabricating or appropriating dolls, rags, flags, graffiti symbols like crosses and hearts—all elements of a syncretic universe that is explosive and ever-expanding. Her Romani Embassy and her Gypsy Couture mock the cultural, political, social, and economic establishments that Romani historically disassociate from. She is the personification of the wandering Roma, the trickster of the settled and the petite bourgeoisie, the nemesis of our comfort and trivial aesthetics. Delaine Le Bas in her Gypsy Couture acts like a contemporary Fury, an anti-Vivienne Westwood, a true counterculture icon, unclassified and elusive, haunting the European conscience.

#roma #gypsy #punk #counterculture #feminism #rebel #gypsycouture #TheHouseOf LeBas #LeBasArchiveAndCollection #RomaniEmbassy

photos: Nysos Vasilopoulos, 6th Athens Biennale 2018 ANTI