Into the Grey Zone, Or: How to Track Fading Multiculturalism in Southeastern Europe : The Exhibition ‘“We Live Word to Word.” Banat – Transylvania – Bukovina. Ethnograffiti of Southeastern Europe’ at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 2018-2020

The exhibition ‘“We Live Word to Word.” Banat – Transylvania – Bukovina. Ethno graffiti of Southeastern Europe’ resulted from an interdisciplinary project seminar at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, based on a team ethnographic journey to Romania and Ukraine. Participants in the seminar, initiated in 2018, investigated how communities and togetherness have been constructed in multiethnic societies. The purpose was to find out what has remained of the region’s multicultural nature after the political changes of 1989. The team made their own observations, recorded interviews, and took notes, the resulting fragments of cultural diversity being later pieced together in the exhibition. Some contributions were colourful—even garish—while others were tender and withdrawn. Combined and linked, the final result seemed like a fleeting picture such as might have been sprayed from the aerosols of a street-artist — a sort of ‘ethnograffiti’. In this article, the authors reflect on how the exhibition was put together.