Meeting the Musicians

Belgrade, Serbia, November 22nd 2025

On Saturday, November 22, 2025, in the hall of the Composers’ Association of Serbia, we held a creative meeting with the musicians who will participate in the Roma Soul Food project.
The music team consists of members of the women’s hip-hop group Pretty Loud (Silvia Sinani Ibraimović, Elma Dalipi, Selma Dalipi, Zlatica Ristić), as well as solo performers Jovan Živadinović Džipsi and Ivan Kurtić. The project’s music supervisor and producer is Tihomir Radić, a.k.a. Toši Domaćin from Sarajevo, also known as a member of the group “Helem Nejse.”
Members of the CEPOM team – Maja Vasiljević, Katarina Lazarević, Haris Dajč, and Biljana Leković — presented the basic ideas and goals of the project, which is centered on connecting Roma cuisine and music. Since the project was launched to showcase the diversity of Roma heritage and contemporary culture, as well as to promote contemporary Roma musicians and their creative work, special attention was given to presenting the results of field research conducted in the three countries participating in the project. A rich body of material about Roma of different religious (Catholic, Muslim, and Orthodox), generational, and gender identities was collected in the form of interviews that will be included in a digital archive. This audiovisual material will later be used as an audio base meant to inspire the creation of music, and the content will be available on the project’s website, the CEPOM website, and on the project’s social media for the broader public.

Interviews were collected in Bački Monoštor, Padinska Skela, and Obrenovac in Serbia; in the settlements of Kritiri, Tirnavos, and Nea Zoi, Sofades in Greece; and in Prekmurje in Slovenia. The spontaneous storytelling of the interviewees reveals the past and present of Roma culinary rituals, food, and music in everyday life, as well as during family and religious celebrations.

These recipes will serve as the base from which the musical material will be developed – musical pieces that will be brought together on an digital music album. The musicians were asked to explore them and create their own musical narrative. Building on the evocative musicological narrative of the project’s concept authors – musicologists Biljana Leković and Maja Vasiljević, who emphasized creativity and freedom of approach – music producer Toši Domaćin added his own artistic premise for the project, expressed in the following sentence addressed to the musicians: “There are no genre limitations; together we will search for what resonates with you and for the elements that will unify the album into a whole.”
Photo: Belkisa Beka Abdulović