Introduction: perspectives from the margins

1In the last decades, an array of studies has underlined that marginalised social actors and groups are part of the social body from which they are formally excluded and that processes of marginalisation, illegalisation, racialisation and dehumanisation are revealing of the social and political order that produces them (e.g. Loftsdóttir, Hipfl, Ponzanesi 2023). As Das and Poole (2004: 4) argued, the margins represent “a necessary entailment of the state, as much as the exception is a necessary component of the rule”. Their emphasis on the ban and the exception as tools of biopolitical work (cf. Agamben 1998, 2005) resonates with research on (il)legalisation and (in)formalisation processes. Studies on (in)formality, indeed, have theorised the existence and sometimes “calculated” production of “grey spaces” where formality and informality and legality and illegality intersect and blur into each other (e.g. Yiftachel 2015). These spaces of indistinction, where – using Agamben’s terminology – the law manifests itself through its suspension, contribute to processes of marginalisation and function as biopolitical traps which bind bare life to the norm through a relation of abandonment. The ban has been object of attention in the so-called Romani studies (e.g. Clough Marinaro 2009; Alunni 2017); it also occupies a central place in recent literature on biopolitics (Minca et al. 2022). Going beyond the biopolitics/necropolitics dichotomy, scholars have focused their analyses on the heterogeneity of biopolitical technologies – or, as Aradau and Tazzioli (2020) call it, “biopolitical multiple”– and on the combination of intervention and non-intervention as tools to exhaust and debilitate racialised life (also Puar 2017; Pallister-Wilkins 2022).

2These approaches, each in their own way, confirm Asseo’s intuition (1989) that social groups which are relegated at and embody the margins make explicit what is latent in the essence and functioning of a social order. Not only because biopolitical frameworks, which materialise with vehemence and transparency in the treatment of marginalised and racialised groups, threaten any citizen exposed to the violence of the exception (Agamben 2005; Minca et al. 2022); but also because marginalised and racialised groups and actors push back and elaborate on the systems that produce them as marginal, illegal, and/or illicit (Ivasiuc 2018; Fotta 2019; Panella, White 2021). Their vision of “how the world goes” (Herzfeld 2019) may thus contribute to a process of decolonisation, move our analysis beyond the centrality of the State and reveal nuances and complexities of the systems that include them through exclusion (and/or exclude them through inclusion).

4In the following pages, I first retrace the governance of Roma in Rome during the last decades and highlight the biopolitical framework behind it. This section will provide context for the discussion that will follow, which gravitates around two separate but connected circumstances. One is the eviction of an informal Roma settlement that occurred in 2007, a moment of exceptionally violent and purposedly staged forms of repression of Roma in Rome. The other is a children’s birthday party celebrated in an authorised Roma camp in 2023 during the “housing transition” policy – a more subtle but no less violent phase in the governance of Roma in the Eternal City. A reflection on these two different circumstances will highlight, through difference, continuities between past and recent governmental discourses targeting Rome’s Romani population. It will also show that the bodies of the Roma were and still are put at the stake to rectify the social, political and moral order that feels threatened by their mere existence (cf. Piasere 2015; Tosi Cambini 2015). The article will thus use the body as a lens to read the political workings of the bureaucratic State and those of racialised actors it relegates to the margins, and to reflect on how power and subversion meet, clash, but also ambiguously blur into one another.

Governing Roma in the Eternal City

5Historically, the governance of Roma in Italy has revolved around municipal ordinances and measures and, starting from the 1980s, regional laws. Even today, after the introduction of a national framework, it is still on the local level that policies addressing the Roma presence are ideated, elaborated and implemented, often mirroring anti-Gypsy and anti-nomadic biases pervading institutional frameworks and the sentiments of local administrators and population (Daniele 2011). I will here hazard a short (and inevitably partial) summary of the governance of the Roma in Rome. Since several works have already scrutinised this matter, my aim is limited to contextualising the ethnographic materials discussed later in this article.

6Only in the 1980s, with the growing arrivals of Yugoslav Roma during Yugoslavia’s dissolution, did Rome’s Romani population start occupying (and preoccupying) regional and city administrations. The two pillars of the institutional response were the 1985 Lazio regional law “in defence of the Roma” and the institution, in 1987 in Rome, of the “Special Office for Nomads” under the city’s security department. Formally in support of Roma identity and livelihoods, the measures brought into being an exoticizing and romanticised imagery that portrayed Roma as a backward ethnic group, incapable and/or unwilling to integrate and thus prone to deviance. Since the very beginning, therefore, the governance of the Roma in Rome revolved around the othering and criminalisation of a diversified population that, because of its alleged legacy with nomadism, potentially threatened the social order and citizens’ security. For these reasons, Roma had to be subjected to a blend of assistance, discipline, and straightforward rejection (Clough Marinaro 2009; Daniele 2011; Alunni 2017).

7Roma-related interventions mainly revolved around employment and housing. However, the support of “traditional” occupations concerned activities that Roma deemed outdated and did not practice; the provision of legal dwellings mainly consisted in the formalisation of already existing informal settlements (or their temporary tolerance). Pallister-Wilkins’s (2022: 7) argument that “practices of care are reliant on and engender practices of control” is evident here: the rationale behind these interventions was to control and civilise the unruly Nomads, who in authorised camps and through projects of integration would be introduced to the rules of civilisation: respect of the law, wage labour, stable residence (Solimene 2018). No less problematic was the fact that interventions addressed only a minority, as they excluded all Roma with past problems with the law (this often being related to lack of documents). Authorities offered these people only straightforward rejection and repression. However, like camps and work projects, police operations, controls, arrests, expulsions, and evictions also cost money, time, and resources, and thus, though systematically announced, they were seldom systematically implemented. Therefore, authorities de facto maintained a “dormant state” (Simoni 2005) interrupted, from time to time, by spectacularized displays of order that responded to the swinging moods of political and public debates (also Daniele 2011). This telling case of what Aradau and Tazzioli (2020: 215) call “biopolitical governing through non-governing” encouraged the proliferation of dwelling and employment informality (for many Roma, the only available venues to cope with structural hindrances). Ironically, informality also hindered the acquisition of rights and, in a vicious circle, confirmed the criminalising rhetoric used to justify straightforward repression (Clough Marinaro 2017; Associazione 21 Luglio 2021).

8The several Nomad Plans launched by different city administrations in the following decades maintained this framework with disastrous results: for decades Roma in Rome were the object of ethnic profiling equating Roma, nomadism, and societal threat; top-down approaches confusing integration with forced assimilation; heavy reliance on the Third Sector to balance the absence of state intervention; neoliberal meritocracy built on the distinction between deserving Roma and non-deserving ones; and ghettoisation in camps (Daniele 2011, 2013; Solimene 2018). Most families, especially vulnerable ones, were trapped in a spectrum of shades of (in)formality ranging from precarious unauthorised shanties in urban interstices with no infrastructure, abandoned by the institutions but under the constant threat of state violence, to state-run settlements situated at the margins of the city, with poor infrastructure and often overcrowded, and functioning as legal wastelands for a humanity “in excess” (also Clough Marinaro 2009, 2017).

9Since the early 2000s, the EU has repeatedly expressed concern about this situation. Under the push of scholars and activists, it also acknowledged the role played by what today is known as the “camps system” in the structural discrimination of Roma and Sinti in Italy. European concerns translated into the 2012 “National Strategy for Roma, Sinti and Caminanti Inclusion” and a call for more inclusive policies. In Rome, attempts in this direction were exemplified by the reconversion of unused structures to (temporarily) relocate Roma evicted from camps. These structures were run by city authorities and/or NGOs and offered evicted families a shelter; nonetheless, they were usually old industrial buildings situated in peripheral areas and lacked proper infrastructure. Therefore, these alternatives to camps often proved to be expensive solutions that reproduced Roma segregation and fuelled anti-Roma sentiments in the districts where they were located (Associazione 21 Luglio 2021). The real push to go beyond camps came with the 2014 scandal known as “Mafia Capitale”, which revealed that the camps system in Rome had served the interests of corrupt administrators and Third Sector actors, members of organised crime and neofascist movements, and some influential families in the Roma/Sinti communities (Dalla Chiesa 2015).

10In recent years, the governance of Roma in Rome has been hegemonised by the concept of “housing transition”, which aims to bring Roma from camps to flats, distributing them according to the principle of equal distribution (to avoid ethnic segregation). The transition, however, is stuck: costs of rent are prohibitive for many Roma; the availability of social housing is scarce in a city where lack of housing is a structural problem; not always does the local population welcome the “Gypsy” families brought into the neighbourhood by social services (ISTAT 2021). Few Roma exited the camps through these costly ad hoc public policies in recent years; many more did so by their own initiative and relying on mainstream mechanisms – joining the long lists for social housing (Associazione 21 Luglio 2021). Meanwhile, the demolition of camps (the first step of the transition) started, paradoxically sparing renowned problematic mega-camps and targeting instead smaller settlements whose inhabitants were fully integrated into the neighbouring districts (e.g. Clough Marinaro 2022). Roma in Rome, therefore, continue to face the spectre of evictions hovering over their settlements, including authorised ones, with little say on when and where they will be relocated. Camps inhabitants indeed are forced to sign a “pact of social responsibility”, where they declare that they will accept whatever the housing solutions that authorities (usually some NGO responsible for projects of housing transition) will identify. Not signing or not accepting the solution implies being cut from the system and losing any rights to be assisted. However, exiting camps often means moving to unfamiliar neighbourhoods where other underprivileged people live, and dwelling in small and shabby flats, far from relatives and acquaintances (Clough Marinaro 2022). Rhetoric and measures have thus changed, but institutional discourses still revolve around a biopolitical multiple, where heterogeneous technologies of care, control and repression combine with an “apparent withdrawal of the will to govern” (Aradau, Tazzioli 2022: 215). Trapped in the “discontinuous hold” (ibid.: 201) of local authorities, Roma are still framed as a problem to tackle through costly but ineffective and arbitrarily implemented measures and abandoned if unwilling or unable to comply.

Banned bodies

12The eviction on the riverbanks was the final act of an escalation of institutional repression in response to what local political and media debate portrayed as a sudden invasion of dangerous Romanian Roma, which eventually led to the “Nomad Emergency” declared by the national government in 2008 (Clough Marinaro 2009; Solimene 2013, 2018). A free haven in the stormy waters of continuous evictions, the riverbanks had attracted an increasing number of Roma families chased from other settlements. Nonetheless, they offered only harsh living conditions. In summer, the temperature often peaked over 40 degrees, vegetation sheltering from the scorching sun was scarce, and the occasional gust of wind lifted clouds of dirt, blinding eyes and burning throats; the humidity of the river made nights chilly even in summer; rains transformed the area into a quagmire (and twice in the previous winter river floods had swept everything away). Water had to be carried from the public fountain situated half a kilometre away, beyond the banks materialising the invisible boundary between the “Gypsy” shantytown and the urban territory. With the growing arrivals of Roma evicted from other settlements, the absence of toilets (the only available ones being self-built out-houses) had transformed the canebrakes into an open-air latrine. The absence of rubbish bins (the closest ones being next to the public fountain) resulted in the accumulation of waste at the margins of the Roma settlements, with the consequent stench and rat infestation. Moreover, the wood used for cooking and heating mainly consisted of pieces of old furniture found while scavenging (thus often lacquered or painted), which filled the area with intoxicating fumes when burned (Solimene 2019, 2024).

13The riverbanks were a space of intersecting urban (in)formalities. Roma occupied public soil without authorisation and practised informal economic activities (begging, scavenging, unauthorised collection of scrap metals, informal labour in building sites, petty theft); many, especially among Bosnian Roma, were undocumented and had collected several expulsion orders. (In)formality was also induced by a mix of institutional negligence, opportunism and lack of resources (Solimene 2019). Many local bureaucrats and officers turned a blind eye to Roma housing and working informality, not only out of compassion or because they were difficult to address and rooted in the district’s informal economy. Roma informal practices were also cheap bottom-up answers to the lack of services and interventions, which the State failed to provide. State abandonment intertwined with active forms of discrimination materialised in random but frequent controls and episodes of police harassment, both on the riverbanks and in the neighbouring district. Roma were thus trapped in a state of exception, their bare lives exposed to state officers’ arbitrary power, who decided when, whether and how to apply the law, look the other way, or abuse their power (Solimene 2024).

14Harsh living conditions, abandonment and unpredictability of State violence were inscribed in the bodies and souls of many inhabitants of the riverbanks. Roma were debilitated by the unhealthy dwelling environment, the days spent in the city scavenging, begging, collecting metal scraps and/or working in building sites. Anger, anxiety, suspicion and resignation to past or potential forced displacements, arrests, harassment and grassroots discrimination transpired from gazes, posture, and the frequent bursting out of fights among individuals, domestic violence, practices of self-injury and consumption of substances. Nonetheless, my Roma friends also exhibited what Fotta, talking about Brazilian Calon, described as an astonishing “prospective momentum, even optimism” (2019: 588) in the face of the fragility of their existence (also Jefferson, Turner, Jensen 2019). They continued to fantasise about a better future with obstinate hope: Valerio dreamed of one day opening a car-wash business in Bosnia; Hamdja continuously looked for a plot of land where he would build a house without being harassed by the police. Meanwhile, they tenaciously continued living their lives, navigating urban (in)formality, taking care of each other, and celebrating with their persistence the capacity to enjoy life and endure adversities, which (they claimed) non-Roma would have found unbearable (Solimene 2013).

16These bodily practices, therefore, reaffirmed that putting the Roma bodies at the stake did not define what being Roma really meant. They expressed and produced defiance to the internalisation of a biopolitical stereotype, either by strategically embodying it while begging in the centre, or by publicly refusing it while frequenting the district of residence. Although symbolically powerful, these acts were also imbued with a fragility that became increasingly apparent with the intensification of institutional repression. The most eloquent example was that of Negib. When the eviction became inevitable, his drinking problems and aggressivity towards the Romanian Roma – whom he blamed for the deterioration of the relations with the local population – became acute; a few days before the eviction, he shaved his head. A shaved head is unusual among the Bosnian Roma I know, who associate it either with skinheads, poverty or children with headlice. Responding to my stupor, Negib told me he was “tired” and “wanted to change”, to be “less recognisable”. “You know, it’s getting harsh here” he explained, referring to the growing violence which many Roma men were suffering at the hands of the police (Solimene 2024). Maybe that was all, another tactical camouflage. But I could not stop noticing the contrast with the optimism behind the care of his body previously described; nor could I stop connecting the act of shaving his head with another act that occurred a few days before, when Negib had dismantled his caravan with resigned rage, retorting to his wife’s comments on this act of silliness (dilipé), that the caravan was doomed to be seized in the upcoming eviction: it was undocumented and the motor was broken. I could not avoid drawing a parallel between his undocumented body and his undocumented home; both were “illegal”, illicitly standing on the riverbank and doomed to be evicted. Shaving the head seemed the final act of a process of dismantling, which was material, bodily, and existential. It expressed the dreaded anticipation of State violence, which Negib (like many Roma) could no longer escape.

The body of resistance

17The October eviction seemed to put a (temporary) end to the ambivalence revolving around the riverbanks: for a moment, order had been formally re-established by erasing the space (material, social, and symbolic) that challenged it with its mere existence (Solimene 2019). But beyond the official rhetoric celebrating the return to legality, the eviction was a moment of radicalisation of ambivalence and paradoxes. To understand this point, let’s turn to Ornella’s case. In spring 2007, Ornella had been convicted for reiterated pickpocketing. I was not aware of the details of her trial, but I guess that her condition as a mother of four young children and a good lawyer made her obtain house arrest. Usually, this alternative to incarceration requires a legitimate residence, and I know of Roma, who, in order to be eligible, registered a temporary residence at a relative’s place (whether a flat or a legal camp). Ornella, instead, paid her debt to society in her caravan on the riverbanks (see also Solimene 2024).

18We might see the magistrate’s decision as a case of “semantic acrobatics” (Herzfeld 2001: 228-231), which legislators and bureaucrats accomplish to foster a person’s well-being: granting Ornella home detention in her caravan was a sensitive and culturally informed approach which countered both the overcrowding of Italian jails and the widespread practice of considering mobile homes improper and illicit places of residence (Gargiulo 2014). Nonetheless, this decision was also consistent with the authorities’ use of the riverbanks as an informal dumping ground: instead of a prison, the “Gypsy thief” could be confined in an alternative container of social waste (the riverbanks) with the rest of the district’s undesirables. This further complicated the tangle of (in)formality and (il)legality enveloping the riverbanks: Ornella’s caravan represented a bubble of formality and legality in a space which the State defined as the realm of informality, illegality and illicitness, and which it nonetheless (temporarily) accepted as the inevitable outcome of the formal but legally borderline (because racially targeted) eviction of the Roma from the Eternal City (Solimene 2019).

19This complicated (in)formal scenario of care and control, governing and non-governing, reflected on Ornella’s existence. Home detention was far better than incarceration. Ornella was not allowed to leave the caravan, but her husband and in-laws helped her, for instance, buying food, diapers, cigarettes, or filling the water tank at the fountain. At home (in the caravan), Ornella took care of her family, ate the food she prepared, maintained everyday interactions with other Roma on the riverbanks, enjoyed the visits her brothers (who lived in another settlement) regularly paid her after the working day. In other words, Ornella maintained the (relative) freedom of choice regarding everyday gestures and rhythms and the conviviality characterising Romani life. Ornella could not completely respect home detention for obvious reasons related to physiological needs (the use of caravans toilet is considered a revolting Gağé habit), but also to find refuge from the heat. She would thus regularly sit for coffee and cigarettes under the shade of a tarpaulin in front of her caravan, in the company of other women in the family, watching the children play outside. With time, Ornella gradually extended her movements: first to the caravans of her in-laws, later to the Romanian settlement nearby, where – once assured no police patrol was arriving, or after the daily patrol – she would buy a fresh drink and chat with the Romanian romní who sold beverages, food and snacks; occasionally, driven by necessity, she even sneaked into the district and bought herself food and diapers. Nonetheless, Ornella often complained that this was “like a prison” (sar panghlipé) and that she felt “dead” (mulí), exhausted by the monotony of life in the camp, from which most of its inhabitants took respite through their daily chores in the city. Her thin body bore the marks of exposure to the weather, her gendered role as a mother (she took care of the children, two of whom she breastfed), the boredom and frustration of her “stuckness” (Jefferson, Turner, Jensen 2019) and the fear of being sanctioned every time her body was outside her caravan (technically an evasion). Her emaciation caused concern among her family members, who commented with worry on her increased bad temper, lack of appetite, or the daily amount of coffee and cigarettes (which Ornella lived as breaks in the monotony of her long days).

20The ambiguity of Ornella’s situation transpired from her interactions with the Carabinieri, who arrived every day to ensure that she respected the terms of her detention. These interactions often revolved around her body. When spotting Ornella outside the caravan, officers jokingly remarked that they could arrest her. They emphatically praised her when finding her inside the caravan or seeing her quickly returning home after spotting the patrol car – “You are getting the point now!” they would comment. The informal register opened with joking comments and remarks, and the flexibility in assessing Ornella’s compliance were ways to come to terms with reality: How could you force a woman with small children to stay all day in a caravan that the summer heat turned into an oven? But they were also displays of power which defined Ornella’s life as bare, at the mercy of the officers’ arbitrariness. They had the power to adjudicate whether she was respecting or not the terms of home detention, their judgement based on arbitrary assessments on her will to comply. On this (in)formal blend of care and control, officers constructed a hierarchical relation that built off the intersection of class, ethnicity, nationality and gender (Solimene 2024).

21Trapped in this biopolitical tangle, Ornella blended compliance with small but meaningful acts of insubordination. Through continuous interactions, she found predictability in the officer’s behaviour. For instance, she started to understand when and how to push the limits of home detention. She also learned that the threat would not easily turn into fact: the officers, she believed, would not send her back to prison as long as she moved within certain acceptable limits: they were using her to get a better glimpse into the local underworld. Lacking formal politico-juridical capital, Ornella had thus developed a relational capital to use in formally unequal encounters with the authorities. This provided her with a glimpse of the mood of the police, changes in attitudes toward informal working activities, or the possibility and timing of an eviction. Ornella also started alternating submissive attitudes with forms of mockery and mimicry of power, proving to herself her ability to manipulate the officers wielding state power, for instance by leveraging their masculine imageries about Gypsies and Gypsy women. These acts did not change the fact that she was under house arrest, but they enabled her to carve spaces of agency and insubordination, which she maintained even at the apex of state violence (cf. Solimene 2013, 2024).

22When the eviction, which many Roma had dreaded for months, eventually materialised, Ornella waited at the entrance of her caravan, worried but also amused by the Gağe and their laws, whose contradictions had come to another deadlock – and she would not miss the chance to underline it with her challenging attitude. Indeed, the police had reached an impasse: Ornella’s caravan could not be moved without the judge’s authorisation, but this matter had to be handled by the Carabinieri, and the chief of the operation refused to contact them. Moreover, someone had to move Ornella’s caravan, but officers would not do it. Ornella did not drive, and her in-laws would not risk being arrested for showing up undocumented on the riverbanks. After being initially sent away because, as officers told me, civilians were not allowed to interfere with a police operation, by midday, I was readmitted and temporarily allowed to intervene informally. Ornella used my cell phone to contact the Carabinieri, and we received instructions after several hours. I thus drove Ornella’s caravan 200 meters, to a small opening in the canebrakes, where she would finish her sentence: just a few days, we were told, and then she would have to disappear into the urban bustle, as all the other Roma had done. When the police finally departed, leaving behind piles of debris from the demolished shacks, the only place where Ornella’s family members felt safe to gather was, paradoxically, Ornella’s caravan. After the stressful day, hungry and tired, the family met and ate a frugal but warm meal prepared by Ornella and her in-laws, cheering up for having lost a dwelling space, a car and a caravan, but not their freedom nor their conviviality. Together, they had lived through an eviction. It was not their first, it would not be their last.

The stakes of the body

23September 2023, 16 years after the eviction. I sit with Berto and Rizvo in front of Berto’s portacabin. Both are members of the same family that included Negib and Ornella and once dwelled on the riverbanks. Berto and Rizvo were 16 and 13, respectively, at the time of the 2007 eviction, which inaugurated years of extreme precarity and continuous movements between informal camps in the city. In our last encounter in Rome in 2012, Negib disclosed his exhaustion in these terms: “This life is no longer bearable. We must leave Rome if we want to feel alive”; indeed they left Italy. Part of the family eventually returned to Rome, spending a few more years in structures that the municipality provided to Roma evicted from camps – and finding most of them “worse than camps”. Berto eventually found a place in the authorised camp inhabited by his wife’s relatives, where we sit now; they first dwelled in a self-built shack, then accessed a portacabin that had become vacant. Rizvo joined Berto later, after the authorised camp where he lived with his parents and sibling was demolished right before Covid. The camp we are in now is a large assemblage of old containers provided by the authorities and self-made constructions and trailers that the inhabitants added to cope with overcrowding and lack of infrastructure; most additions are informal but tolerated by the authorities. Fences surround the camp, and police control the entrance 24/7, checking vehicles driving in and out and ensuring that no material from scrap metal collection is introduced into the settlement (to prevent the accumulation of unauthorised waste and the fires used to extract copper from electric wires). Illegal activities practised by a minority of the camp’s inhabitants and that (for reasons I am unaware of, and that clash with the apparent regimentation of that space) are renowned but not governed, expose all the Roma to regular patrols, raids in search of stolen goods or unauthorised inhabitants, and the risk of accelerating the timing of an eviction which many, after signing the “pact of social responsibility”, see as inevitable.

24Rizvo lives next to his younger brother, and to one of Ornella’s sons (recently arrived from abroad). With us are also Rizvo’s father, who was lucky enough to buy a plot of land with a wrecked house he is restructuring, and Hiljo, Rizvo’s father-in-law, a distant relative of Berto’s wife and inhabitant of the camp since its creation two decades ago. We are celebrating three birthdays (Rizvo’s children were born in the same period of the year), and I find myself sitting and chatting, once again, with my old friends. Rizvo, his hair trimmed for the occasion, wearing a white shirt and jeans, moves continuously helping his wife with the preparation of food and plates; kids run around laughing; the music of Bosnian singers blasts from loudspeakers, the smell of grilled meat blurs with that of cigarettes and of vehicles occasionally driving through the camp.

25Like many of the camp’s inhabitants, my friends went collecting scrap metal during the day. Once an occupation of the Roman underclass, today, this activity is practised mainly by Roma and is my friends’ primary source of income, despite the growing competition in the sector and the hindrances that followed the first steps of a much-needed formalisation of this activity (Santilli 2017). Scrap metal collection exerts a heavy toll on the body. Small injuries are not unusual, but the main problem is the wear produced by the daily combination of sitting in the van for hours and loading and unloading heavy materials, which makes hands, backs, and joints hurt at the end of each day ‒ and aches become chronic with age. This adds to the uneasy conditions in the settlement, whose inhabitants suffer from extreme heat in summer and cold humidity in winter, as portacabins and shacks are badly insulated, poorly ventilated and heated with self-made stoves. Hiljo, in his 60s, did not go to work today; his back is “killing” him. Berto, like Rizvo, came back tired from the working day, their clothes and skin smattered with dirt, grease and rust. Good relations with the local population and authorities are crucial for this activity, and the stout body of the Roma, their hands marked by heavy manual labour and the working clothes contribute to a presentation of the self that builds on the embodiment of a positive stereotype. I refer to the figure of the good Gypsy “ferrivecchi” (as small scrap metal collectors are called in Rome), friendly, hard-working and honest, who owe their incomes to a network of customers (and non-conflictual relations with local authorities), developed through years of proving their worthiness and morality among Gağé (Solimene 2016).

26Now that we sit, the body of the ferrivecchi has been washed to reveal the Rom behind it, in fresh, clean clothes. At home, in the camp, especially on this occasion, one needs to reiterate that being Roma cannot be reduced to the figure of the ferrivecchi. My attention is caught by the quantity of meat and alcohol, the size and decorations of the three cakes, the Armani, Gucci and Philip Plein shirts, and the golden jewellery adorning the necks, ears, wrists, and fingers of adults and the children whose birthday is celebrated. Seen from the outside, I reflect, this form of conspicuous consumption, like the display of wealth, might confirm the widespread assumption that Gypsies dwelling in Nomad camps are rich and live off the benevolent assistance of the majority society. But this would be a typical Gağé way to distort reality to fit prejudice. Scrap metal collection does not make you rich, and the gold, the fancy dresses (not always original), and shiny (used) cars that are often bought and sold are the only property that Roma such as Rizvo or Berto possess. Also, they are forms of wealth that can be materially exhibited and contribute to a careful representation of the self, that is imbued with deep symbolic and existential meanings. The bodily practices I observe now echo those I observed years ago on the riverbanks: both those of begging romnjá who also tactically embodied a Gağé stereotype and gradually undressed from it while heading back to the camp, and those of the Roma men, who cleansed from the dirt and smell of the camp on their way to the city. The circumstances are different and so are the practices: but in all cases the body is vehicle and symbol of a biopolitical statement that, simultaneously, veils and unveils something of the individual and collective self.

27The birthday is a boisterous celebration of Romani life carved in the biopolitical space of an authorised camp; it pivots around family networks but extends beyond: to the Romanian Roma neighbours – who look at the party sitting outside their portacabins, and to whom Bosnian romnjá bring cakes and beer – and even to those wielding state power. Indeed, when a patrol car approaches, Berto recognises familiar faces and greets them. Officers refuse cake but exchange a few friendly words. On their departure, Berto friendly teases one officer for his recently gained weight, the officer carelessly waves his hand to discard the comment; the car leaves, the party continues, while Berto cheerfully comments: “He is a good man, not like those nasty bastards from [another police station], who swagger around. This guy knows me since I was a kid…he knows what we go through! He even introduced me to his family, once I had arrived at his place to clean his garage”.

28If a camp is a vehicle and symbol of heterogeneous biopolitical technologies targeting what the bureaucratic State sees as a threat to social order and morality, and if biopolitical work exerts debilitation and exhaustion on the bodies and souls of racialised persons, then the conviviality and sociability instantiated by the display and sharing of food, alcohol, cigarettes, music, conversations, emotions and laughter are acts of everyday resistance and insubordination. These performances, acted by single individuals who ̶ I paraphrase Gay y Blasco (1999) ̶ metonymically embody the ideal of the group, unhinge the racializing discourse which opposes Roma with non-Roma society and assert that Roma can be fatigued, segregated, oppressed and discriminated against but are far from being debilitated, exhausted, miserable and resigned.

Conclusion

29This article discussed two different circumstances extracted from my fieldwork. The eviction of an informal settlement in a period of harsh institutional repression and a Roma birthday celebrated in an authorised camp in times of housing transition. The former was an intentionally public performance of bureaucratic State power, addressed to the non-Roma inhabitants of the district (who observed the operation from afar), and to the Roma of the riverbanks, whose persistence had challenged the norm, its morality, and its legitimacy in defining “how the world goes” (Herzfeld 2019). Ironically, the eviction through which the norm publicly re-established itself marked a discontinuity with the normal state of things. The riverbanks were an eloquent example that the suspension of the norm is not an exception: it is exactly in the combination of intervention and non-intervention that biopolitical technologies of power work in the debilitation of racialised bodies (Puar 2017; Aradau, Tazzioli 2020; Minca et al. 2022). The birthday party was instead a celebration of Romani life in a space that materialises anti-Roma biopolitical power: an authorised camp which traps its inhabitants between regimentation and abandonment, exposes them to the unpredictability of arbitrary decisions of street bureaucrats, but is also home, a space of intimacy and care. Celebrating the life of Roma children, whose existence defies the stuckness characterising life in camps (Jefferson, Turner, Jensen 2019), challenges present configurations of power between Roma and non-Roma but also expresses hope in the future and in the persistence of Romani ways.

30These two circumstances illuminate each other to reveal the social and political order that produces them and eventually disclose what has changed in the trajectories of the Roma I met and in the governance of the Roma in Rome, and what instead remained unaltered. I refer to the simultaneous use of heterogeneous biopolitical technologies that trap the Roma in a blend of inclusion and exclusion, intervention and non-intervention, care, repression and neglect; I also refer to multiple and diversified forms of Roma resistance, insubordination, and subversion, produced in grey spaces of urban (in)formality and (il)legality.

31Both circumstances are revealing of the centrality of the body in biopolitical governmentality and of the intersecting processes of marginalisation, illegalisation and racialisation which produce and express it, and which are inscribed in the embodied trajectories of my Roma friends. They also show the centrality of the body in the response to power. This response can be fragile as it runs along a blurry line between veiling and unveiling, poverty and conspicuous consumption, compliance and defiance, awareness of stuckness and debilitation and obstinate hope in the future. Nonetheless, it stubbornly reiterates that Gağé power cannot inscribe itself in Roma bodies and subjectivities, and this is what enables the Roma, as individuals and as a community, to push back and remain obstinately alive.