‘Oscillation of influence’

This chapter, responds to a mission statement issued by The Romani Cultural & Arts Company, a rightfully celebrated charity working in Wales to promote Romani art, and an artwork produced by one of the artists promoted by it. ‘Mirror Mirror’ by Daniel Baker and Paul Ryan is a performance piece and a video essay, a sense of doubleness that is taken up and repeated in multiple ways within the work. Thus, for example, the video sees Baker and Ryan explicitly seeking to define what is specific about Romani art and identity, but in this they find that what is authentic and discrete is bound to its other: giorgio identity cannot be foreclosed in constructions of the Gypsy. This chapter works through Baker and Ryan's rigorous and experimental study to return to its scenes of encounter further divisions and returns, especially in terms of the seemingly non-racialised, philosophical frames that are understood to inform their practice. This chapter is particularly interested in what falls outside of the various encounters staged by the texts read within it. It is the question of such a beyond that results in a detailed analysis of the philosophical and anthropologic frames that Baker and Ryan introduce. The chapter is also concerned with the limits of its own reading, suggesting ways in which Baker and Ryan's work can act as a disruptive frame to its own.