Interview with Carmen Baltzar: “It’s a good time to invest in the human touch, creativity and ambition.”

Carmen Baltzar is a Finnish-Romani writer, artist and filmmaker living between Helsinki and Lisbon. Her work explores intersections of love and power, the experience of a woman’s body, embodied liberation, alternate feminine realities and Roma life and death.

This past summer, she brought those explorations to London, spending time at Acme's Fire Station as part of the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland x Acme residency.

Carmen, could you start by telling me a bit about how your artistic practice first began?

When I was three, a mother from another reality visited me. She sat in the corner of our living room, and I knew her instantly. I brought my other mother to meet her. I’m still there, working in-between, across space and time.

I grew up dancing and writing, but maybe because there’s a lot of artists in my family, I took my own inclinations for granted. I didn’t see making art publicly as an option, because I was caught between a society and art world that erases my existence on one side, and these very strict cultural expectations from the other side. These things were in my body, physically constricting me. I hadn’t seen anyone do what I needed to do to live like this, so it took a vast leap of imagination and a type of self-annihilation to create it. Art chose me through transformations, not decisions. After a degree in Psychology in London, I moved to Documentary Film at UCL, then began publishing texts.

What draws you to working across these different forms - from film to writing and performance?

It’s all life to me. My body works with spirits when I do creative work, and I can connect with other people in that place too. I could be inspired by something in a crow’s eyes, a sad looking stone or a passing scent. I gravitate towards love, taste and effort in life and art, and I don’t really differentiate between those last two. I try to develop my ability to love and my taste and put in the effort. Ideally, an expression takes the form it’s supposed to if I follow those things. Sometimes it doesn’t and that’s ok too.

I try not to confuse my own reality with practicalities of capitalistic work life too much. Different forms of expression, a film or a piece of writing, require different types of admin, communication and collaboration to bring to the world. They’re burdened by different, although related, schools of academic interpretation. It’s interesting to work with different levels of collaboration but other than that, genre boundaries or academic interpretations are not important to me personally. It’s a balancing act - working with boundaries because it’s a part of professional life but not buying into them or believing them as an artist.

How has being a Finnish-Romani artist shaped the stories you choose to tell and the ways in which you tell them?

I went through a period of a few years where I was totally disinterested in stories, I couldn’t read or write any type of narrative work. I’m reading narrative again but I’m personally not a storyteller at the moment. Spirit, embodiment, form and textures are more important to me right now.

That’s me, but I do have to deal with the world. The Western Establishment is very invested in erasing Roma people because our existence comes with too many inconvenient truths going way back to the invention of race. We’ve always been an uncomfortable cultural and spiritual mirror. Erasure and denial of Roma people is so deep that even describing it is exhausting and weird.

There are few classic literary works with Roma protagonist, but they exist. There’s a new ‘Wuthering Heights’ film adaptation coming out next year with a white Heathcliff. A notable UK newspaper wrote about this upcoming film saying something along the lines of there’s been some questions about the casting because the character originally ‘had dark skin’. Even when trying to raise the issue of representation, they could not spell ‘Roma’. White society has never been able to admit that Heathcliff is a Romani character. It’s too inconvenient to have one in a cornerstone literary work. How many times did Emily Brontë need to say Heathcliff is Romani for it to become fact? She said it many times. Erasure is what happens to Romani characters and it’s what happens to living, breathing Romani artists and your work.

Existing as a marketable category is dehumanising as an artist, but not existing as one makes a career in the arts challenging. Personally, it’s not my problem, but I do have to deal with it in my work life. What other ethnic group gets treated as a fiction on such a deep level? We’re not a fiction, whiteness is. I’m always working towards cultivating freedom. Cultivating freedom not to explain, not to be palatable, and to express what I feel instead of reacting and responding to what’s being said and felt about me. It’s a process of expelling violence.

You studied in London between 2012 and 2016, completing an MA in Documentary Film. What did it mean to return nearly a decade later - this time not as a student, but as an artist-in-residence?

I’ve enjoyed my time and the new connections I made this time. It’s been interesting because neither me or nor the city is the same. There are so many beautiful people in London but right now there’s this pressure and depression in the air everywhere I’ve been lately including London. You can feel the isolation and fear and paranoia in the air that fascism creates. UK is attacking citizens opposing its complicity in the Holocaust in Gaza as terrorists among other things.

There are so much beauty and culture here but it’s sad to witness the country attack the people who create that, and it does show on the streets. I feel it as this heavy grey mass in the air. I started working on a greyscale analogue photography/poetry piece called weight here. It plays with the Gregorian wall calendar and the weight of time.

How did your most recent film All the Love in My Body come into being, and what compelled you to tell the story of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic?

All the Love in My Body is a piece of speculative fiction based on what happened to Cristina’s and Violetta Djeordsevic on 19 July 2008. They were two young Roma sisters who drowned on a beach in Torregaveta, Napoli in 2008 after a day of selling wooden objects to beachgoers. After they drowned, their bodies were brought back to the beach and covered with towels. People continued sunbathing around them.

I felt the need to recreate the image of that beach - it wouldn’t leave me alone. It encapsulates the way the belief system of whiteness disembodies you totally. The people on that beach fully believe they are protecting something with their inertia, and that something to be worth protecting. It’s comparable to a religious psychosis.

All the Love in My Body shows a beach workday of two Roma sisters called Samara, played by Konstantina Louka, and Nadia, played by Dimitra Louka. Most of the film is shot from Nadia’s point of view. She sees everything. I adapted some words from Vera Carig - Violetta’s and Cristina’s grandmother - who cursed the beachgoers with all the love in her body in an interview. Curses are a transformative power.

The best part of making the film was spending time with Konstantina, Dimitra, and the Greek Roma community who were involved. I stayed in Athens before the shoot to get to know Konstantina and Dimitra. They had never acted but they were both total naturals. The film involved complex choreography, especially for Dimitra, who had to follow the camera in unusual positions and act from behind it, while Konstantina performed in front. Both girls’ presence on set and in front of the camera was otherworldly.

Alongside your film work, you’re preparing for the Finnish publication of your performative novel ​​carmen - congratulations! Could you tell me more about the novel, the ideas it explores, and how it relates to your work in film and performance?

Thank you! I write with my full body, and I write to be felt, not understood. That’s the space I want to cultivate in the world. Carmen in my novel is a poet who’s terrorised by how the human consciousness is becoming subjugated to machine-life in service of power. The novel inhabits a surreal ghost-scape. The protagonists’ world is haunted by her past selves, her intergenerational past, ghostlike romance, ghosts of institutions and legacies made of lies. The whole thing has the energy of that scream of a moment just before a new reality that’s too vast for your mind and body to grasp, arrives.

There are multiple new realities dawning, a shameless fascist rule, multiple genocides, the passing of that moment where whiteness still has time to self-annihilate as a belief system before its destruction takes on a new height. On a personal level, that new reality could be adulthood, and not in the sense of growing old, but in the sense of taking responsibility for yourself and your self-love which fuels your action in the world. A new reality always feels like a death, so it’s scary as hell and it’s natural to do everything you can to resist it. As long as you’re kicking and screaming, you’re alive. That moment can birth anything.

The act of writing is a performance. I method-wrote this novel, embodying my protagonist and moving through the world as them. Parts of the novel are written within a specific time frame. I have more control over my writing conditions than the content, so I place a lot of emphasis on them and do a lot of pre-planning. The myth of a self-reliant novelist relies on exploitation and unpaid and uncredited creative, administrative and domestic labour. Exploitation is built into the novel structure and relies on invisibility to continue, so my working conditions are part of the actual text.

You also hoped to connect with local Roma artists, curators, and organisers while in London. What kinds of relationships or collaborationsemerged or were strengthened during your residency?

I met people doing really great work and we planted some seeds together. The residency gave us space to listen to each other and imagine new ways of working collaboratively.

Working within a diasporic context often means building across borders, identities, and geographies. How do you think about community-building through art?

Community-building isn’t an abstraction, it’s action in the world: care, listening, showing up and so on.

What's next after your residency? And how can others - artists, curators, publisher institutions - support the continuation of what’s been started here?

I’m currently laying foundations for a new project where I approach the novel as live art. The project combines text, photography and performance. I’m also working on a film project and co-creating a short opera with director Sara Melleri and composer Sid Hille for Finnish National Opera’s Sugar Factory that’ll be premiering August 2026.

I’d hope for more curiosity and open-mindedness around what can be done about declining literacy rates from publishing institutions. If playing it safe was a viable long-term strategy, reading rates wouldn’t have declined the way they have. The form needs to live and breathe to be relevant. AI is set to be able to produce the conventional and mediocre work at some point. It’s a good time to invest in the human touch, creativity and ambition.

Carmen Baltzar

Carmen Baltzar is a Finnish-Romani writer, artist and filmmaker living between Helsinki and Lisbon. Her work explores intersections of love and power, the experience of a woman’s body, embodied liberation, alternate feminine realities and Roma life and death.

Carmen curated and co-edited the anthology Ohi – kirjoituksia kuolemasta ja sen vierestä (Past – Writings on Death and Beyond, WSOY 2022), and her prose and poetry has appeared in publications by WSOY, S&S, Kosmos and Kiasma as well as online on Al Jazeera, Yle, Iso Numero and others. Carmen's literary expression imagines past euro patriarchal forms, and her first novel combining text and photography will be published by Kosmos in spring 2026.

Carmen’s most recent short film All the Love in My Body is a portrait of a touristic beach in Greece from the perspective of two young Romani sisters selling toys to beachgoers. Her previous films have screened at Tampere International Film Festival, Helsinki International Film Festival, Savonlinna Nature Film Festival and URB Festival in Kiasma.

Carmen is a recent resident at the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, and her work has been supported by the Finnish Film Foundation, Hellenic Film Commission, Kone Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland and others

Finnish Institute UK and Ireland  

The Institute supports the internationalisation of Finnish contemporary art and helps artists, researchers and social and cultural actors to create international networks. The Institute was founded in 1991 and it is a non-profit, private foundation funded by The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.   

For more information, please visit fininst.uk