After 30 years Zbigniew Boniek returns to Barcelona! The documentation from Akcja Boniek! will be presented in the frame of this year Screen from Barcelona Festival.

About On Sunday October 14th 2007 in the presence of hundreds of spectators Massimo Furlan, a Swiss performer made a one-man reconstruction of one of the most spectacular football matches in the history of the Polish team: Poland-Belgium (3:0) at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Barcelona. This match  gave the Polish football team third place at the World Cup in Spain. Massimo Furlan brought back the famous game from the “choreographic” point of view of the key football player - Zbigniew Boniek, who was named by FIFA as one of the 100 best-ever players. The reconstruction was commented live by Tomasz Zimoch – brilliant polish sport commentator. Furlan as Boniek deftly followed the action perfectly synchronized with Zimoch’s commentary..

A remake took part at the Xth Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw just before its demolition and transformation into a new Olympic center designed for EURO 2012 championship. Action opened a series of perfomativ events the Finissage of Satdion X and Jarmark Europa Market – the biggest and spontaneous market in Eastern Europe around the symbolic stadium created over the debris of Warsaw uprising.

BONIEK IN BARCELONA 1982-2012
time: 18.05-2.06.2012
venue: Barcelona, el Bastió Blaugrana, c/ Jovellanos 7 + Raval Route, CityScreen
www.stadion-x.pl

Read full selection report: +TU  

36 proposals, representing 10 Europeans countries, were submitted as a result of our call for urban interventions in the district of Ursus in Warsaw, targeted at architects, artists, urban researchers as well as urban activists. After careful consideration of all proposals jury selected proposals which address the questions and have reference to important problems of the locality. The following two projects are selected to development and implementation under Culburb project framework:

Untitled (Kwasieborski design) The use of large scale media at the Ursus train station for the presentation of the survey concerning the identity of the district, conducted among residents.
Ursus District GPS-gardening (Jürgen Lehmeier) A strategy based on creating an alternative map of Ursus attractions and interesting artifacts whose location is indicated by the locals. Project providing to make it available through the Geocaching GIS platform.

Additionally Jury have pointed two distinctions:
1952-2012 (Magdalena Prus) Sound installation project relating to the occurrence of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra at the workers club of Mechanical Works "Ursus" in 1952. The Orchastra performed symphonic poem, "Fable" of S. Moniuszko. This event was the basis of the documentary made by famous Polish director Andrzej Munk. The installation is an attempt to recall this significant events at its sixtieth anniversary.
The Cleaning (Maryna Tomaszewska) A pragmatic action: cleaning and washing of the Ursus railway station building. Together with 10 local volunteers.

CULBURB (name merging “culture” and “suburbs”) is a project aimed at infusing life into the urban space of the suburbs of Central European capital cities. The locations of the project have been selected in the suburbs of Warsaw, Budapest, Ljubljana, Vienna, Prague, Bratislava – all characterised by their own site-specific problems and varied potential. The project initiated by Centre for Central European Architecture in Prague is carried out with financial support of the EU Culture Programme, Visegrad Fund and European Cultural Foundation. The Polish part of the project is coordinated by Bęc Zmiana Foundation in the frame of the 5th edition of the festival Synchronicity. Projects for Warsaw of the Future, which pivots this year around promoting cities through architecture.

Culburb Ursus coordinator: Piotr Bujas
Culburb Ursus organiser: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Warsaw / www.funbec.eu
Culburb organiser: Centre for Central European Architecture, Prague / www.ccea.cz
Culburb co-organisers: Soho in Ottakring, Vienna; Kortárs Építeszeti Központ, Budapest; KUD C3, Ljubljana; Verejný podstavec, Bratislava; Centrum komunitného rozvoja, Bratislava
Synchronicity 2012 is carried out with a grant from the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

Micro-exhibition Big Photos of Nice Plants with a Flying Light... and The Complainer in concert in the shop window at Bęc Zmiana are the most anticipated events of this year’s Night of the Museums in Warsaw! Wojt3k Kucharczyk explains his nocturnal/murky project: normally, murk is murk [Polish: “mrok”], but I think it’s rather condensation of light – you need to have murk around you to see it. What’s more MR OK can be pronounced as MISTER OKAY...

Wojt3k on his photographic practice: I don’t see myself as a photographer. I simply had such an idea and the camera just helped me to make it happen. (...) I wasn’t hunting for plants, I don’t have a clue what species they are, and about their Latin names. I’m a gardener still in the making. I was looking at what I found attractive. It’s a pity photos can’t convey the smell, though it’s a bit easier with air temperature. A flying light probably ought to symbolise something. Maybe it does.

WOJCIECH KUCHARCZYK: MR OK
concert: 19.05, evening
exhibition: 19.05-10.06.2012
venue: Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana, ul. Mokotowska 65

Wojciech Kucharczyk (b. 1969) – artist whose practice relies on music, sound, image, movement and a plethora of other elements. Founder of the legendary record label – mik.musik.! collective. Active as a musician in groups Mołr Drammaz, retro*sex*galaxy, but above all as The Complainer. Has released more than forty records. He used to do a lot of exhibitions, now he’s returning to that. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Lives and works in Skoczów. Travels.

thecomplainer.mikmusik.org
facebook.com/WojciechKucharczykOfficial

Throughout the recent decades social equality was viewed with a high dose of suspicion. The idea of equality was recognised as a threat to freedom and diversity, as well as an avenue to totalitarianism. What came as a result was the creation and justification of immense inequalities, which throughout the recent years have made explicitly manifest the crisis of capitalism. The same period has seen various social groups – from gender-based to cultural – consolidate and express their striving for equality. It is in this very context that we wish to pose anew certain key questions. What does equality mean in a social world that is internally diversified? What are the arguments in favour of economic equality? What are the forces in the contemporary world that purse equality? Does the claim for equality actually  stand any chance of success? What are the major contemporary mechanisms involved in generating inequalities? What is the relation between equality and freedom?

EQUALS SIGNS
meeting around the latest issue of "Bez Dogmatu" quarterly
time: 7.05, Mon, 18.30
venue: Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65/7
participants: Michał Kozłowski, Piotr Szumlewicz, Piotr Laskowski
moderator: Anna Zawadzka
organisers: Free / Slow University of Warsaw, Bez Dogmatu, Bęc Zmiana Foundation

Michał Kozłowski (b. 1974) – philosopher. Deals with history, capitalism, modernity, authority, subject, desire and related fields. Studied philosophy and law at the University of Warsaw, philosophy at KU Leuven, social sciences at the EHESS in Paris. Co-creator of Bez Dogmatu, co-editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique monthly. Lectures in history of early modern philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw.

Piotr Szumlewicz (b. 1976) – journalist and publicist. Graduate of sociology and philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Long-term editor of Bez Dogmatu quarterly and website www.lewica.pl. Has contributed with texts to, among others, Przegląd, Gazeta Wyborcza, Trybuna and the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique monthly. Worked for several months as a political commentator at TV station Superstacja.

Piotr Laskowski (1976) – works at the Jagiellonian University at the Department of Philosophy and Bioethics Collegium Medicum, and at Jacek Kuroń Multicultural Humanist High School in Warsaw. Deals with history of ideas and political philosophy of the 19th and 20th century, as well as history and practice of emancipatory pedagogy.
Anna Zawadzka – sociologist, works at the Ethnographic Archive at the Institute of Applied Political Sciences of the University of Warsaw, editor of Bez Dogmatu and Furia. Ran her own feminist broadcast “Lepiej późno niż wcale” [“Better Late than Never”] at radio Tok Fm. She used to co-create the music group Duldung. Currently works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

<< First page of the magazine Równość as of the 24th June 1897, source: commons.wikimedia.org

VIDEO FOOTAGE OF THE DEBATE (in Polish): +HERE

Do we really need industry in the city? What role can it play in building positive social processes? What is better: neoindustrialisation or reindustrialisation? These questions, debated on the example of Warsaw's district of Ursus, will be tackled by Edwin Bendyk, publicist, director of the Center for Future Studies at Collegium Civitas, author of the recently released book Bunt sieci [Revolt of the Web], and Krzysztof Nawratek, architect and urbanist, lecturer in architecture at Plymouth University.
 
Krzysztof Nawratek is coming to Warsaw upon an invitation of the Association for the Development of Ursus to run workshop in urban studies with students of the University of Warsaw. He remarks in his text, among others: The basic problem of the contemporary city is the loss of subjectivity – money, ideas, regulations, authority, people are significant when they come from outside (…) Reindustrialisation is therefore a necessary condition of the reconstruction of the city's subjectivity, since it provides the possibility to tie particular urban threads, reach agreement between specific scales in which urban actors operate. Hence, reindustrialisation is not merely an idea of introducing industry again to the citie , but of a reconstruction of relations between capital as well as life and place.

Warsaw's area of Ursus is where this reflection acquires a tangible character – the future of the 180 hectares of the area, providing space for nearly one hundred business entities operating among the partly torn down manufacturing halls, has not yet been decided.

 – For long years, the symbol of Ursus was the animated neon sign on the seat of the factory directors – explains Edwin Bendyk – Three tractors with merrily revolving wheels are now a matter of the past, just like the entire URSUS Tractor Factory. The neon sign is easy to restore, but is it possible and necessary to restore industry in Ursus? There is no way back to the proud industrial past, since it was based on an infrastructural and resource-base model that is impossible to preserve. What is possible, though, is neoindustrialisation as a project for construction of a real economy, based on bits, atoms, embodied creative work, and not speculations. 

time: 20.04 (Fri), 18.30
venue: Warsaw, Raster Gallery, ul. Wspólna 63

Edwin Bendyk – publicist dealing with the impact of technology on social life. Contributor to Polityka weekly. Founding member of the Stanisław Brzozowski Association. Lectures at Collegium Civitas and the Centre for Social Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Director of the Center for Future Studies at Collegium Civitas, member of the Council of the Modern Poland Foundation. Author of books:  Zatruta studnia. Rzecz o władzy i wolności [The Poisoned Well. On Power and Freedom] (2002); Antymatrix – człowiek w labiryncie sieci [Antimatrix – Man in the Maze of the Net] (2004); Miłość, wojna, rewolucja. Szkice na czas kryzysu [Love, War and Revolution. Sketches for the Time of Crisis] (2009), Bunt sieci [Revolt of the Web] (2012) / www.bendyk.blog.polityka.pl
Krzysztof Nawratek – architect, urbanist, graduate of the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, PhD degree in technical sciences. Lectured in social geography at the university in Riga. Author of an alternative land management plan for Riga. Between 2006 and 2008, lived in Ireland, where he worked as the chief urbanist at the company Colin Buchanan in Dublin, and later at the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at NUI Maynooth. Currently lectures in architecture at Plymouth University, UK / www.krzysztofnawratek.blox.pl

The debate is held in the frame of this year's edition of the festival Synchronicity, Projects for Warsaw of the Future, and the action Culburb, Ursus. www.architekturaXXI.pl/ursus

Organiser: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana / Coordinator of Culburb Ursus: Piotr Bujas
Project co-financed by: City of Warsaw, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
   
Co-operation: Association for the Development of Ursus – organiser of the competition “Industrial City 2.0” co-organised with the Scientific Group of Spatial Development Students of the University of Warsaw “SPATIUM” / www.ursusnaprzyszlosc.pl

LUBLIN:
time: 17.04 (Tue), 18.00
venue: TEKTURA Przestrzeń Inicjatyw Twórczych, ul. Wieniawska 15a
Participants to the meeting: editor of the book Maciej Frąckowiak, sociologist Łukasz Rogowski, photographer Henryk Kuś. Moderator: Magda Linkowska (art historian).

ŁÓDŹ:
time: 15.03 (Thu), 18.00
venue: Miejski Punkt Kultury Prexer-UŁ, ul. Pomorska 39
Participants to the meeting: editors of the book Maciej Frąckowiak, Krzysztof Olechnicki, Marek Krajewski as well as Marek Domański and Andrzej Rostocki. Moderator: Tomasz Ferenc. Collateral to the debate was the film screening by Invisible City www.niewidzialnemiasto.pl and www.nmbadania.info

POZNAŃ:
time: 10.01 (Tue), 18.00
venue: Arsenał Municipal Gallery, Stary Rynek 6
Participants to the meeting were sociologists from the Adam Mickiewicz University: editor Maciej Frąckowiak, Krzysztof Podemski and Łukasz Rogowski, as well as photographer Sławomir Tobis.

WARSAW:
time: 29.10 (Sat), 15.00
venue: National Audiovisual Institute, ul. Wałbrzyska 3/5, level 2.0, coffee shop
partner of the meeting: National Audiovisual Institute
Participants to the promo meeting: editors of the book Maciej Frąckowiak and Krzysztof Olechnicki, sociologist Rafał Drozdowski, anthropologist Tomasz Rakowski. Moderator: Adam Mazur.

ABOUT THE BOOK: It is not one of the many books on visual culture “in general”, but a collection of texts in which the examples of specific studies illustrate why and how we can use the image in the analyses of social life, both of its universal and contemporary problems – new media, inequalities, social change, knowledge, health and illness, city, identity. Details available +HERE

Editors:
Maciej Frąckowiak – sociologist, deals with the image, tries to treat it as a tool and pretext to study and transform social relations. Contributes with exhibitions, lectures and texts in the field, published in "Kultura i Społeczeństwo", "Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej and Studia Socjologiczne", among others. Currently working on his PhD Thesis (at the Institute of Sociology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) devoted to the contemporary sociological intervention strategies. Participant and co-supervisor of projects Invisible City, Visual Culture Questionnaire, and more recently Collaboratory. Popularisation of Collaboration in Culture. Holder of the scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education, and of the Kulczyk Family Foundation.

Krzysztof Olechnicki (b. 1969) – Habilitated Doctor, works at the Institute of Sociology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Head of the Department of Cultural Studies. Interested in: sociology and anthropology of the image, social anthropology, sociology of religion and new social movements. Awarded scholarship of "Polityka" weekly in the frame of the action Stay with Us, and the Foundation for Polish Science. Editor of the magazine "Ikonosfera. Studia z Socjologii i Antropologii Obrazu". Author of many books: Słownik socjologiczny [Dictionary of Sociology]; Antropologia obrazu. Fotografia jako metoda, przedmiot i medium nauk społecznych [Anthropology of the Image. Photography as a Method, Object and Medium of Social Sciences]; Fotoblogi, pamiętniki z opcją przekazu. Fotografia i fotoblogerzy w kulturze konsumpcyjnej [Photoblogs, Diaries with Transmission Option. Photography and Photobloggers in Consumption Culture].

Marek Krajewski (b. 1969) – sociologist, Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Author of numerous articles on popular culture, consumption and art, as well as books: Kultury kultury popularnej [Cultures of Popular Culture]; POPamiętane [POPremembered]. Editor and academic co-editor of books: W stronę socjologii przedmiotów [Towards Sociology of Objects]; Prywatnie o publicznym. Publicznie o prywatnym [Privately on the Public. Publicly on the Private]; Wyobraźnia społeczna. Horyzonty – źródła – dynamika [Social Imagination. Horizons – Sources – Dynamics]; Handmade. Praca rąk w postindustrialnej rzeczywistości [Handmade. Manual Labour in Postindustrial Reality]. Curator of Outdoor Gallery AMS (1998-2004), initiator of the project Invisible City.

The years between 1939 and 1956 witnessed a social revolution. It was cruel, brutal, imposed from outside, but still it was a revolution. What that revolution did was to plough incredibly deeply the tissue of the Polish society, paving the way for today's expansion of the middle class, i.e. bourgeoisie, to the possibly most profound change in the mentality of the Poles since ages ago: retreat from mentality defined by the rural environment and the grange towards the one shaped by the city and the urban lifestyle – as it is argued by philosopher Andrzej Leder in his text Kto nam zabrał tę rewolucję? [Who Took that Revolution away from Us?] ("Krytyka Polityczna" vol. 29/2011)

That radical change spans between two events: taking over the social-economic position of the Jewish minority and the extermination by Stalin's political apparatus of the social groups whose function was to preserve the symbols and imaginations enabling community-based identification. The vacuum that emerged within the social tissue as a result of those two events provided masses of people migrating from the countryside to the city with a possibility of immediate social advancement. Yet, the origin of that mental leap – the fact that the movement did not involve subjectification of individuals but, on the contrary, their utter de-subjectification – was repressed from the collective consciousness. Whether we want it or not, as members of the following generations we are programmed not to remember.

Designing urban space, which is in fact nothing else but material expression of the imaginations that we hold as regards our very selves, is the best reflection of the cultural phenomenon brought to the fore by Andrzej Leder. The space in the city is exactly like the society that builds it. It can all be seen in the architecture of Polish cities. We are stuck in the past that is not ours, dreaming about a return to the reality of manor houses of the nobility, even if our family history does not feature even a single one – hence the fashion for “manor house” style development. Then again, we dream of “affiliation to the NYC-Tokyo-London elite” – with shopping malls, skyscrapers and popular sushi bars appearing on the scene as an embodiment of that desire. On its part, the National Stadium stands as an interesting example of merging these two fantasies into one, since hypermodernity was wrapped here in the colours of the national flag.

Can we succeed in shaping better cities, better spaces of community by discovering the hidden sources of our visions of our very selves? Alongside Andrzej Leder, the debate also features Jan Sowa, author of the newly-released book Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą [The Ghostly Body of the King. Peripheral Struggles with Contemporary Form], which deals in an unobvious way – through postcolonial theories, Lacan's psychoanalysis or Alain Badiou's theory of event – with the social-cultural identity of Poland. Another prominent guest to the debate is Dariusz Gawin, director of Stefan Starzyński Institute, operating under the auspices of the Warsaw Rising Museum, author of, among others, the book Blask i gorycz wolności [Glare and Bitterness of Freedom], dealing with the problem of memory and its meaning in favour of democracy.

PLOUGHED URBANITES / DISCUSSION
time: 26.03 (Mon), 18.30
venue: Warsaw, Raster Gallery, ul. Wspólna 63
-------
Dariusz Gawin (b. 1964) – historian of ideas, sociologist and publicist. As of May 2005, Deputy Head of the Warsaw Rising Museum and director of Stefan Starzyński Institute. Co-operates with Cracow's Centre for Political Thought. Author of, among others, Spór o Powstanie. Powstanie Warszawskie w powojennej publicystyce polskiej 1945-1981 [The Uprising Dispute. Warsaw Uprising in the Postwar Polish Publicism 1945-1981] (2004), Polska, wieczny romans. O związkach literatury i polityki w XX wieku [Poland, Eternal Romance. On the Liaisons of Literature and Politics in the 20th Century] (2005), Granice demokracji liberalnej. Szkice z filozofii politycznej i historii idei [Limits of Liberal Democracy. Sketches from Political Philosophy and History of Ideas] (2007).

Andrzej Leder (b. 1960) – philosopher of culture. Works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Deals with philosophical foundations of contemporary culture. Author of, among others Przemiana mitów, czyli życie w epoce schyłku [Transformation of Myths or Life in the Era of Decline] (1997), Nieświadomość jako pustka [Unconsciousness as Void] (2001), Przemiana mitów druga, czyli wojna o obraz [Second Transformation of Myths, or War of the Image] (2004), Nauka Freuda w epoce "Sein und Zeit" [Freud's Teaching in the Era of “Sein und Zeit”] (2007).

Jan Sowa (b. 1976) – studied Polish studies, psychology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and at the University of Paris 8, Saint-Denis. PhD degree in sociology, works at the Department of Contemporary Culture of the Jagiellonian University. Author of ca 100 texts published in Poland and abroad as well as books: Sezon w teatrze lalek i inne eseje [Season at the Puppet Theatre and Other Essays] (2003), Ciesz się, późny wnuku. Kolonializm, globalizacja i demokracja radykalna [Enjoy, Late-Born Grandson! Colonialism, Globalisation and Radical Democracy] (2007) and Fantomowe ciało króla. Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą [The Ghostly Body of the King. Peripheral Struggles with Contemporary Form] (2012).

The call for applications has come to an end. We have received over 60 entries from Europe and the USA. Thank you!

CALL for urban interventions in the district of Ursus in Warsaw, targeted at architects, artists, urban researchers as well as urban activists and anyone interested in the problems of the city. The proposed actions can adopt both the form of physical interventions in the urban space as well as temporary, one-off, performative actions.

Proposals should embrace the complex social and political situation, as well as the multi-layered character of the district’s problems. Registration ends on the 29th March 2012. Please send applications (filled application forms and CVs) to bec@architekturaXXI.info

APPLICATION FORMS AND DETAILS: www.architekturaXXI.info/ursus
ENTRIES: not later than 29.03, via e-mail: bec@architekturaXXI.info
MORE ON CULBURB: www.culburb.eu

URSUS is one of the smallest districts of Warsaw, though the most densely populated. It was incorporated into the capital city 35 years ago as a form of “punishment”, as legend has it, for the protests of the workers at the mechanical works in Ursus against the increase in food prices. The works have long ago ceased operation, leaving 180 hectares of land, part of which is still used for manufacturing, though the entire area (forming 20% of the entire district) is in for an uncertain future. How will the new “heart of Ursus” look like? Will it see residential estates or new industry? How are the changes and controversies triggered by the plans received by the inhabitants, and what is the influence on their lives? While the creation of the New City of Ursus is subject to an ongoing debate, the older parts of the districts await urban revitalisation.

CULBURB (name merging “culture” and “suburbs”) is a project aimed at infusing life into the urban space of the suburbs of Central European capital cities by means of cultural acupuncture with a tangible impact on the life of local communities, generating interactions between the inhabitants. The locations of the project have been selected in the suburbs of Warsaw, Budapest, Ljubljana, Vienna, Prague, Bratislava – all characterised by their own site-specific problems and varied potential. The project initiated by the Centre for Central European Architecture in Prague is carried out with financial support of the EU Culture Programme, Visegrad Fund and European Cultural Foundation. The Polish part of the project is coordinated by Bęc Zmiana Foundation in the frame of the 5th edition of the festival Synchronicity. Projects for Warsaw of the Future, which pivots this year around promoting cities through architecture.

Synchronicity 2012 is realised with a grant from the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

<<Ursus, Febuary 2012, photo Piotr Bujas

Culburb Ursus coordinator: Piotr Bujas
Culburb Ursus organiser: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Warsaw / www.funbec.eu
Culburb organiser: Centre for Central European Architecture, Prague / www.ccea.cz
Culburb co-organisers: Soho in Ottakring, Vienna; Kortárs Építeszeti Központ, Budapest; KUD C3, Ljubljana; Verejný podstavec, Bratislava; Centrum komunitného rozvoja, Bratislava

We are excited to launch an open call for films and music videos to be featured within the currently emerging international network of exchange and circulation of films devoted to architectural transformation in Central Europe. Screenings will be held in Budapest and Warsaw, among other cities.

The Central European Architecture Film and Video Exchange is an international cooperation programme aimed at collecting and propagating moving image devoted to the architectural transformation of Central European cities. Its operates primarily in order to initiate international dialogue and debate on the character of Central European architecture and urban studies.

Please send film proposals complete with brief descriptions to bec@architekturaXXI.info not later than the 31st March 2012.

Initiator: Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre / www.kek.org.hu
Partners: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw; Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Małopolska Institute of Culture, Cracow; Punkt, Bratislava; 4AM Forum for Architecture and New Media, Brno; Praguewatch, Prague

Project realised with a grant from the International Visegrad Fund

In the precarious times of rampant crisis, collapse of financial markets, increasing deficit, drastic savings schemes and radicalisation of social stances, the Free / Slow University of Warsaw invites you to a meeting devoted to the status and social role of money in the era of late capitalism and immaterial economy.

Meeting will be hosted by Greek-born philosopher and economist Georgios Papadopoulos. The author of Notes Towards a Critique of Money employs theories inspired by writings of Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard to analyse the social functions of money. He grasps the market as a cultural system, which produces meanings by bestowing value and regulates subjectivity through the processes of production and consumption. At the meeting, the theoretical question about the liaisons between capitalism and desire will provide the point of departure for the analysis of the mounting tension between the global financial market and the newly-emerging social movements. We will focus particularly on the current situation in Athens – the focal point of the financial crisis ongoing since 2008.

Economic value exists only as the mirror image of a promise of enjoyment and utility that presents itself as a justification of value. The content of money, if any, is the being-there of a desire, a crystallization of all the imaginary enjoyment that money can promise. Exactly because money operates as the intermediary between the subject and its commodified object of desire, money becomes the signifer of value and enjoyment. Georgios Papadopoulos, Notes Towards a Critique of Money

MONEY AND DESIRE / READINGS FOR ARTWORKERS
time: 21.02, Tue, 18:30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65/7, Warsaw
recommended reading: Georgios Papadopoulos, Notes Towards a Critique of Money; Jan Sowa, Dług, czyli widmo bogactwa
meeting held in English

Georgios Papadopoulos – graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics. PhD Thesis in preparation in philosophy and economy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Member of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique at Jan van Academie in Maastricht. Currently, coordinator of research project „Drachma, Speculation on Symbolic Vaue”, devoted to the economy of contemporary Greece.

<< Georgios Papadopoulos, Notes Towards a Critique of Money, design: Neda Firfova

We are excited to invite you to the debates and meetings collateral to the premiere of the latest publication of the Free / Slow University of Warsaw Wieczna Radość [Joy Forever], which presents a critical perspective on the contemporary ideology of creativity. It also includes first ever Polish translations of texts by renowned theorists and practitioners of art, such as Luc Boltanski, Issabelle Graw or Martha Rosler.

Joy forever is a promise of a common happiness, provided also in the sphere of economy by widely applied creativity. For the authors of the texts in the latest reader of the Free / Slow University of Warsaw the heart of the problem is rather the status of creative power: is creativity a tool for the emancipation of humanity or rather an instrument of control and a space for investment and speculation?

WARSAW: 14.02, Tue, 18.00
venue: Główna Księgarnia Naukowa im. Bolesława Prusa, ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 7
participants: Michał Kozłowski, Jan Sowa, Kuba Szreder
moderator: Mikołaj Ratajczak

ŁÓDŹ: 22.02, Wed, 18.00
venue: Świetlica Krytyki Politycznej, ul. Piotrkowska 101, backhouse on the left, 1st floor
participants: Joanna Sokołowska, Jan Sowa, Kuba Szreder, Mikołaj Ratajczak
moderator: Wiktor Marzec

POZNAŃ: 26.01, Wed, 18.00
venue: Dom Ekonomisty, ul. Klasztorna 24/25, Poznań
participants: dr Joanna Bednarek (PPG UAM), Maciej Frąckowiak (IS UAM), Krystian Szadkowski (WUW, Praktyka Teoretyczna),
moderator: Maciej Szlinder (Fundacja ZaCzyn, Praktyka Teoretyczna)
organizers: Praktyka Teoretyczna i Fundacja ZaCzyn
www.wuw-warszawa.pl | www.praktykateoretyczna.pl

WROCŁAW: 11.01, Wed, 19.00
venue: Galeria Mieszkanie Gepperta, ul.Ofiar Oświęcimskich 1/2
participants: Kuba Szreder, Janek Sowa  / Wolny Uniwersytet Warszawy
moderator: Karolina Bieniek / Fundacja Art Transparent
partners: Fundacja Art Transparent

Michał Kozłowski (b. 1974) – philosopher. Studied philosophy and law at the University of Warsaw, philosophy at KU Leuven, social sciences at the EHESS in Paris. Co-creator of "Bez Dogmatu" quarterly, co-editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique monthly. Lectures in history of early modern philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw.
Wiktor Marzec (b. 1985) – Łódź-based by birth and choice, sociologist and philosopher, member of the editorial board of Praktyka Teoretyczna. PhD student at the Department of Sociology of Culture of the University of Łódź, awarded scholarship of the University in Tartu, Estonia (studies in semiotics and gender studies).
Mikołaj Ratajczak – philosopher and tranlsator, PhD degree at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, affiliated with the magazine Praktyka Teoretyczna. Graduate of philosophy and German studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Deals with philosophy of subject, language and community, as well as broadly understood problems of biopolitics.
Joanna Sokołowska – art historian, curator at the Museum of Art in Łódź. Author of exhibitions and publications devoted to the reception of the transformation of labour in contemporary art. Curator of, among others, “Workers Leaving the Workplace”, Museum of Art in Łódź; “Arbeiter verlassen die Arbeitsstätte”, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig.
Jan Sowa (b. 1976) – sociologist, essayist. Associate Professor at the Insitutte of Culture of the Jagiellonian University. Has contributed with texts to, among others, Lampa, Krytyka Polityczna and Ha!art magazine, with which he has been affiliated since 1999 (as the editor of the cultural studies department). Editor of the Radical Line of Ha!art Corporation.
Kuba Szreder – graduate of sociology. Curator and founder of interdisciplinary projects. Collaborates with Obieg and Cracow’s publishing house Ha!art, co-editor of The Futurism of Industrial Cities. Curator of the Free / Slow University of Warsaw.

The publication is a result of cooperation with the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw and Austrian Culture Forum in Warsaw, financed by the Polish National Cultural Centre under the Culture Observatory program / www.obserwatoriumkultury.nck.pl

Bęc Zmiana Foundation and the Artistic Bookshop at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art invite you to the meeting around the book Coś, które nadchodzi. Architektura XXI wieku [Something about to Come. Architecture of the 21st Century].

Architecture of the 21st century locates the future of architecture in a broader social perspective – architecture means here not merely the forms of shaping space by means of buildings, but also – in a broader grasp – everything that shapes the architecture of societies: manners of (self)organisation of citizens, liaisons between architecture and economy, social consequences of buildings.
More about the book: +HERE

time: 9.02 (Thu), 18.00
venue: Warsaw, bookshop at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, pl. Małachowskiego 3

participants: Marlena Happach, Piotr Laskowski, Grzegorz Piątek
moderator: Bogna Świątkowska


www.architekturaxxi.info

Marlena Happach – architect and teacher. Assistant professor at the Faculty of Geodesy and Cartography of the Warsaw University of Technology (studies in spatial development). Founder and director of the Association Odblokuj. Consultant in the Architectural Emergency Programme for FRSI Libraries.
Piotr Laskowski (b. 1976) – works at the Jagiellonian University at the Department of Philosophy and Bioethics Collegium Medicum, and at Jacek Kuroń Multicultural Humanist High School in Warsaw. Deals with history of ideas and political philosophy of the 19th and 20th century, as well as history and practice of emancipatory pedagogy.
Grzegorz Piątek – architecture critic, curator. Co-author of the exhibition Hotel Polonia. The Afterlife of Buildings at the 11th Architecture Biennial in Venice (2008), awarded Golden Lion. Curator of exhibitions and projects in the field of architecture, among others: Modernizacion/Modernitzacio (Cuenca/Barcelona, 2010, alongside Jarosław Trybuś); Mountains for Warsaw (Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw, 2009). Member of the Board of Centrum Architektury Foundation

PROGRAMME OF THE FINISSAGE EMBRACES: final tour of the exhibition led by this years’ winner of the Passport Award of "Polityka" weekly Nicolas Grospierre / official premiere of the book Coś, które nadchodzi. Architektura XXI wieku [That Something on the Horizon. Architecture of the 21st Century] / Paweł Giergoń, lecture: Kazimierz Gąsiorowski’s Mosaics / Roman Chymkowski, lecture: Non-Reading Practices at the National Library / meeting at the newly-opened bistro renovated according to Jan Strumiłło’s design.
Visual arts in the architecture of the National Library in Warsaw
Lecture devoted to the practice of Kazimierz Gąsiorowski, late visual artist, author of monumental mosaics created in 1987 in the administrative part of the edifice of the National Library, inaccessible for readers, and numerous works in the public space of Warsaw.

THAT SOMETHING ON THE HORIZON - FINISSAGE
time: 31.01 (Tue), 19.00
venue: Recto | Verso, bistro at the National Library, Al. Niepodległości 213, Warszawa

Paweł Giergoń – art historian, PhD student at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Researcher in architecture and visual arts in the architecture of Warsaw of the communist period. Editor of www.sztuka.net
Book as an object. Non-Reading Practices at the National Library
Report from ethnographic research through participant observation focused on the route followed by copies of books sent to the National Library – from the chancellery to the warehouse. Analytical tools created in reference to traditional cultures are employed here for the interpretation of procedures, strategies and practices which books are subject to in their object-related, i.e. material dimension. Books at the library undergo procedures that are as conventional as reading, though they don’t consist in reading at all.
Roman Chymkowski – head of the Readership Research Workshop of the National Library, Associate Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture of the University of Warsaw, author of, among others, Autobiografie lekturowe studentów [Students’ Readership Biographies] (2011; interested in the anthropology of readership practices and the history of travel writing.

Recto | Verso – new bistro at the National Library, operating in the space of the former canteen. Opened in January, the venue offers sandwiches, dumplings, pancakes, salads, beverages and cakes, warm breakfasts, among others, in the morning, and lunch meals in the afternoon.
Interior design: Jan Strumiłło – b. 1979 in Warsaw. Studied architecture in Poland, France and the ETH in Zurich, where he was Christian Kerez’s assistant. Gathered professional experience in renowned architectural practices: JEMS in Poland and Baumschlager Eberle in Austria and Switzerland. www.janstrumillo.com

Organisers: National Library / www.bn.org.pl
Bęc Zmiana Foundation / www.architekturaXXI.pl

<<< Recto | Verso, photo: courtesy National Library
<<< Nicolas Grospierre, from the cycle Library

In order to know what the architecture of the future will be, we need to find out first what the future society is going to look like.

The fundamental premise of the cycle of events Architecture of the 21st Century is to locate the architecture of the future in a broader social context. After all, the word “architecture” does not mean exclusively the form of space shaped by buildings, but also – in a broader understanding – becomes synonymous with structure and order. Therefore, the point here is not only architecture in its literal sense, but also the mutual impact and tension emerging between the architecture of cities and the architecture of societies. We do not put trust in the visualisations of the architecture of the 21st century produced today by architects: they belong rather to the realm of spectacular science fiction set designs or computer games than serve the purpose of satisfying the needs of city dwellers. Therefore, we are posing a question about the ability to design the future. On its part, it is inextricably linked with imagination which characterises our era, with the spirit of the times that indicates the horizon of action and reflection.

Authors of texts include, among others: Bielecki, Borowski, Buchner, BudCud, Budzyński, Bendyk, Beylin, Cichocki, Cohen, Cymer, Czeredys, Czyżewski, Dominik, Erbel, Filiciak, Foucault, Gdula, Grosz, Happach/Happach, Jay, Jędruch/Leśniak-Rychlak, Krajewski, Kuciewicz/Gancarczyk, Kucza-Kuczyński, Kusiak, Kwietowicz, Laskowski, Leder, Lewicki/Łatak, London, Miesto, Murawski, Nawratek, Piątek, Rodrik, Rudnicka, Rutkowski, Skalska, Staniszkis, Stelmach, Szczęsny, Szlendak, Tarkowska, Tournikiotis, Trammer, Trybuś, Vidler, Walzer, Wasilkowska, Wiśniewski, Wojciechowski, WWAA, Wygnański, Zaremba, Żwirek, +48

That Something on the Horizon. Architecture of the 21st Century
editor: Bogna Świątkowska
editorial cooperation: Grzegorz Piątek, Magda Roszkowska
editorial team: Arek Gruszczyński, Ela Petruk
translators: Emilia Bulman, Jo Harper, Marek Jarosz, Łukasz Mojsak, Małgorzata Nowicka
proofreading: Paulina Sieniuć Anna Hegman, Mariusz Sobczyński
graphic design and typsetting: Tomasz Bersz (berszmisiak.com)
typesetting: Gosia Gąsiorowska
publisher: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

Project realised with a grant from the City of Warsaw

A joy forever is a promise of a common happiness, provided also in the sphere of economy by widely applied creativity. Is it then a tool for the emancipation of humanity, an instrument of control or a space for investment and speculation? 

This publication presents critical perspectives on ideology which recognize the creative sectors of production as central sections of economy and the creative class as a driving social force. The book covers more than the issues of a narrowly understood art world, despite the fact that it pays a lot of attention to them. Here art is conceived as a social lab, where the innovatory ways of organization of labor and its modes of appropriation are tested, as well as different types of production, speculation, generation and accumulation of value. 

This volume includes contributions by renowned thinkers, such as Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Matteo Pasquinelli, John Roberts and artists like Martha Rosler, Patricia Reed and many others. It does not stop off on critical diagnosis but it goes further with a presentation of potential alternatives for the current status quo.

The book is available in Polish version only. English edition - comming soon!

authors: Luc Boltanski, Alexander Neumann, John Roberts, Jason Francis Mc Gimsey,  Dušan Grlja, Massimiliano Tomba, Matteo Pasquinelli, Bojana Romic, Yiannis Mylonas, Joanna Bednarek, Ewa Majewska, Anna Zawadzka, Isabelle Bruno, Patricia Reed, Diedrich Diederichsen, Neil Cummings, Marina Vishmidt, Isabelle Graw, Hans Abbing, The Freee Art Collective, Vlad Morariu, Stevphen Shukaitis, Martha Rosler, Gigi Roggero, Patricia Reed
editorial committee: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa (redaktor prowadzący), Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder
review: dr hab. Piotr Żuk
translators: Paweł Michał Bartolik, Joanna Bednarek, Iwona Bojadżijewa, Piotr Juskowiak, Mateusz Karolak, Agnieszka Kowalczyk, Paulina Sieniuć, Wiktor Marzec, Mikołaj Ratajczak, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski, Maciej Szlinder, Anna Wojczyńska
selection of the illustrations: Martha Rosler, ilustrations from public domain and archive of the artist
editing: Aniela Pilarska
proofreading: Paulina Sieniuć
designing: Grzegorz Laszuk, Anna Hegman (Książki i Strony)
publisher: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana / www.funbec.eu
price: 40 pln
ORDERS

<<< fot. Ewa Dyszlewicz

The Views of Power. Warsaw project treats photography as a vehicle, enabling anyone, at least for a moment, to assume the point of view of those selected few who actually posses real power. It is a series of photographs presenting the views from the office windows of the most important/most influential people in Warsaw. The point of view, which is always a marker of one's social status, is at the same time a direct source of information about the real world while at work. What do the people who hold political, symbolic and economic power see?
Photographs exhibited include views from the windows of politicians, entrepreneurs, people working in media, culture and show business, e.g.: President of the Republic of Poland Bronisław Komorowski, Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, Michał Boni, Marek Belka, Janusz Palikot, Adam Michnik, Igor Janke, Juliusz Braun, Zygmunt Solorz-Żak, Krystyna Janda, Krzysztof Materna, Jerzy Owsiak and Doda.

The first scene of power views of the project was completed in Krakow during the festival ArtBoom 2011.

Project is accompanied by a discussion in which participants will: Maciej Gdula, Jaroslaw Trybuś, Adam Mazur, professor Maria Poprzecka and Konrad Pustoła
time: 6.12 (Tuesday), g.19.00
venue: Ujazdowski Castle Street. Jazdów 2 / www.csw.art.pl

Konrad Pustoła (b. 1976) is a graduate of University of Warsaw?s Economics Department (2003) and Royal College of Art in London (2008). His projects center around the examination of the visual aspects of social and economic relations. He won the First Prize of the Polish Press Photo Competition for his Sanna series (2001). He participated in many exhibitions, including The New Documentalists (2005) at the Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2008) in London, Storia, Memoria, Identitia (2009) in Modena, and PhotoEspana (2010) in Madrid. In 2010 he published Darkrooms, an album that won a prize at The Best Art Album and Catalogue Competition Reminiscencje.

Special thanks to: Małgorzata Ziętkiewicz

time: 1 - 15.12
place: Warsaw, various lokalizacjeL billboards + subway cars
Bec Change, ul. Mokotowska 65
More about the project HERE

<<<Konrad Pustoła: A view from the window of the Chairman of the Supervisory Board Polsat TV Sp. z o. o. Zygmunt Solorz-Zak, 2011

Producer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation / www.funbec.eu

Project is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw

In order to know what the architecture of the future will be, we have to find out what future society is going to look like. That is why the fundamental premise of the Architecture of the 21st Century cycle of events is to place the architecture of the future in a broader social context.
We are not interested so much in buildings, architects’ approaches or new technological possibilities as in everything that has had an impact on the architecture of societies: the ways citizens are (self)organized, the connections between architecture and economics, the social impact of buildings and speculations as to possible future scenarios.
This year, we have witnessed the birth of spontaneous social movements, such as the Occupy Movement in Europe or the “99 per cent” campaign in many cities in the USA. The current global financial crisis began from a speculative bubble on the real estate market in the United States.  It has hit ordinary citizens hard, sparing those who were responsible for it through the use of high-risk economic instruments.
Economists, philosophers and writers admit that we are on the verge of realizing that the hitherto principles governing the way society functions no longer work, although we still don’t know what should replace them.  An empty space emerges which has to be filled with something.  The world today is abuzz with the search for answers.  It is precisely this phenomenon of the twenty-first century that we would like to capture through the exhibition.  This is why we have chosen to present the main part of the exhibition at the National Library, being an institution responsible for gathering knowledge, which is invaluable when looking for inspiration, or indeed, a warning.

Part of the project comes with the website featuring info that might come in handy when speculating about the future of architecture, city and societies:
www.architekturaXXI.info

Collateral to the exhibition is the publication, due out in December.
Catalogue can be read +HERE.

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Partner of the exhibition: National Library / www.bn.org.pl



time: 22.11-31.12, opening: 22.11 (Tuesday), 19:00
venue: Warsaw, National Library, al. Niepodległości 213

COLLATERAL EVENTS / ARCHITECTURE OF KNOWLEDGE
>>>>CURATORIAL TOURS OF THE EXHIBITION:
26.11, 3.12, 17.12, 11:00
>>>>NATIONAL LIBRARY BUILDING. TOURS:  28.11, 5.12, 8.12, 15.12, 11:00
small groups, number of participants is limited, please register at: bec@architekturaXXI.info

Authors of works on display: Franciszek Buchner, Hubert Czerepok, Rafał Dominik, Stanisław Fijałkowski, Tomasz Gancarczyk, Maurycy Gomulicki, Nicolas Grospierre, Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Maciej Landsberg, Konrad Pustoła, Gregor Różański, Tomasz Szerszeń, Filip Zagórski, Rafał Żwirek.

---------------------------------
<<<Stanisław Fijałkowski, Interior design of the National Library in Warsaw, courtesy of the architect
<<<Nicolas Grospierre, from the cycle Library, 2011

Project realised with a subsidy from the City of Warsaw

When we think about the architecture of the future, we must not forget about its associations with the economy or the social situation.  A cycle of photographs by Franciszek Buchner shows how the current economic crisis impacts architecture – in the first decade of the 21st century, many investments in Warsaw were suspended.  As a result, in the city centre we come across skeletons of unfinished buildings which have become contemporary ruins even before their completion.  This term in itself is a paradox, because can traces of the past be part of the present?  Indeed they can, if we think about them in the context of the shared experience of time which is no longer determined by a timeline running from the past through the present into the future.  Today, time is a fragment, a sequence and immediacy.  Anything that is not part of this order becomes irrelevant.  This is when another paradox appears: a ruin, although something that belongs in the past, cannot cease to be a ruin.  But the buildings photographed by Buchner are still awaiting transformation – once they shed the veil of temporariness, they will become fully valid elements of the city, which they have not yet had the time to become.
The state of suspension, the temporary deactivation captured by the artist almost literarily expresses what we want to say through this exhibition: for the time being, we do not know what the future architecture will be nor do we have a vision of future society, but the energy for the search has already been released.

Franciszek Buchner – photographer; graduated from the Multimedia Communication Department of the Photography Section of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań.  He collaborates with the Czułość (Tenderness) Gallery in Warsaw.

time: do 31.12
venue: Warszawa, Bęc Zmiana, ul. Mokotowska 65

<<< Franciszek Buchner, Architektura XXI wieku, 2011

Project realised with a subsidy from the City of Warsaw

In the frame of the project SYNCHRONICITY_2011*, whose this year’s edition is devoted to the architecture of the 21st century, we kindly invite you to a series of meetings devoted to the current phenomena shaping the cityscape of the 21st century.

The first debate revolves around various strategies of urban space occupation by citizens, such as the tenant movement (Syrena Collective), social occupation movements as exemplified by Occupy Wall Street (Joanna Kusiak), street trade, marketplaces and microeconomics as forms of free market emancipation (Ola Wasilkowska), and seemingly frivolous and apolitical artistic activies that can lead to a tangible and interesting twist in the processes of space production and urban transformation (Kuba Szreder on the example of KNOT and Konopacki Palace in Warsaw).

The second meeting presents a documental record of the way the language of visual communication of the European Outraged Movement comes into being and functions. From the very beginning, members of the movement have been communicating by means of hand-written posters and banners, whose message and form reflect the views and engagement of their creators. How can we grasp the visual language of the communications and symbols that emerged from the tent cities of the Outraged? What are the characteristics of this visual language? Can we evaluate it in project-related categories? Is individualism, emotionality, imperfection, brevity its strength or weakness?

The cycle is concludes with a lecture by Krzysztof Nawratek, urban theorist notorious for his controversial claims, aimed at a critical analysis od popular expectations towards architecture. Krzysztof Nawratek is the Director of MA Studies at the School of Architecture, Design and Environment, Plymouth University (UK). In the publication collateral to the cycle Architecture of the 21st century, Krzysztof Nawratek wrote: Architecture begins with dreams. With ideas and fantasies that go beyond “here and now”. Glass houses stood for a dream of a better world, of a better and fairer society. The architecture of the 60s and the 70s stood for a dream of unlimited progress that would surely reach the stars. What do we dream of today? And above all – who dreams? An individual’s dream is not enough to become architecture.

All participant bios and details +HERE: www.architekturaXXI.info

15.11, 18:30
URBAN SPACE OCCUPATION. Artistic installations, citizen occupations, tenant movements, spontaneous trade. DISCUSSION: Kuba Szreder, Joanna Kusiak, Ola Wasilkowska, Syrena Collective.
venue: Syrena, ul. Wilcza 30, Warsaw

16.11, 18:30
VISUAL ORGANISATION OF THE OUTRAGED MOVEMENT. Grassroots design of social movement identification.

LECTURE: Rafał Żwirek and Igor Stokfiszewski ("Krytyka Polityczna")
venue: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, ul. Mokotowska 65/7, Warsaw

17.11, 18:30
NEW RED ARCHITECTURE. Dreams become architecture. Institutions also have to dream.

LECTURE: Krzysztof Nawratek
venue: Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology, ul. Koszykowa 55

*Synchronicity_Warsaw. Designs for Warsaw of the Future is a project realised by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation where voice is given to architects and designers in search of solutions to contemporary social, political, economic, aesthetic and emotional problems in urban space. Since 2007, Synchronicity has brought into being a number of exhibitions, installations in public space and publications.

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Partners of the discussion: Syrena Collective / www.syrena.tk
Polish Architecture Students Association OSSA / www.ossa.org.pl
Project realised with a subsidy from the City of Warsaw

< New York, Occupy Wall Street, phot. David Shankbone / www.blog.shankbone.org

<< Warsaw, Ursynów, Stefan Rusu: Block 89, interactive site-specific installation at KNOT, 2010 / http://knotland.net

<<< Brussels, tents of the Outraged Movement, 16.10.2011, phot. Żwirek

Participants to the promo meeting: editors of the book Maciej Frąckowiak and Krzysztof Olechnicki, sociologist Rafał Drozdowski, anthropologist Tomasz Rakowski; hosted by Adam Mazur.

time: 29.10 (Saturday), 15:00
venue: Warsaw, National Audiovisual Institute, ul. Wałbrzyska 3/5, level 2.0, coffeehouse
partner of the meeting: National Audiovisual Institute
more on the book: +HERE

Maciej Frąckowiak – sociologist, deals with the image, tries to treat it as a tool and pretext to study and transform social relations. Contributes with exhibitions, lectures and texts in the field, published in “Kultura i Społeczeństwo”, “Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej” and “Studia Socjologiczne”, among others. Currently working on his PhD Thesis (at the Institute of Sociology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) devoted to the contemporary sociological intervention strategies. Participant and co-supervisor of projects Invisible City, Visual Culture Questionnaire, and more recently Collaboratory. Popularisation of Collaboration in Culture. Holder of the scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Edcuation, and of the Kulczyk Family Foundation.

Krzysztof Olechnicki – Habilitated Doctor, works at the Institute of Sociology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Head of the Department of Cultural Studies. Interested in: sociology and anthropology of the image, social anthropology, sociology of religion and new social movements. Awarded scholarship of “Polityka” weekly in the frame of the action Stay with Us, and the Foundation for Polish Science. Editor of the magazine “Ikonosfera. Studia z Socjologii i Antropologii Obrazu”. Author of many books: Słownik socjologiczny [Dictionary of Sociology]; Antropologia obrazu. Fotografia jako metoda, przedmiot i medium nauk społecznych [Anthropology of the Image. Photography as a Method, Object and Medium of Social Sciences]; Fotoblogi, pamiętniki z opcją przekazu. Fotografia i fotoblogerzy w kulturze konsumpcyjnej [Photoblogs, Diaries with Transmission Option. Photography and Photobloggers in Consumption Culture].

Rafał Drozdowski – Habilitated Doctor, Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań, Director of the Institute of Sociology at the AMU, Head of the Department of the Sociology of the Everyday at the Institute of Sociology of the AMU. Academic interests: sociology of the everyday, visual sociology, sociological theory. Author of a significant number of academic publications, among others, co-author (alongside Marek Krajewski) of the book To Photography! Towards a Radical Programme of Visual Sciology.

Tomasz Rakowski – Doctor, ethnologist, cultural anthropologist. Associate Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University. Fields of interest: anthropology of degraded and impoverished communities, methodology of field research, things/materiality in anthropological research. Has contributed with numerous academic papers and the book Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. Etnografia człowieka zdegradowanego [Hunters, Gatherers, Practitioners of Infirmity. Ethnography of a Degraded Man] awarded the Józef Tischner Znak and Hestia Prize and the Jerzy Giedroyć Award.

Adam Mazur – art historian, photography critic and historian, curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Author of books: Historie fotografii w Polsce 1839-2009 [The Histories of Photography in Poland 1839-2009] and Kocham fotografię. Wybór tekstów 1990-2009 [I Love Photography. Selection of Texts 1990-2009].

The meeting with the editors of the book Visual Research in Action. Anthology of Texts will be held in the frame of the conference “Culture 2.0: Media-Aware” organised by the National Audiovisual Institute between 27th-29th October 2011.

<<< phot. Mikołaj Długosz

What is the status of the image in social research? This publication bridges the gap in academic studies related to the methodology of visual research and the strategies of their application in the analyses and transformation of the contemporary socio-cultural reality.

It is not one of the many books on visual culture “in general”, but a collection of texts in which the examples of specific studies illustrate why and how we can use the image in the analyses of social life, both of its universal and contemporary problems – new media, inequalities, social change, knowledge, health and illness, city, identity. The common denominator here is the research on society by means of the visual, the perceived and the mediated through various technologies of recording and broadcasting images. (From the introduction)

The book contains texts published in Poland for the first time, among others:

John Berger, Understanding a Photograph;
Marisol Clark Ibáñez, Framing the Social World with Photo-Elicitation Interviews;
Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart, Photographs as Objects;
John Grady, Advertising Images as Social Indicators;
Hubert Knoblauch, The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations;
Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography;
Michael Rich, Richard Chalfen, Showing and Telling Asthma. Visual Narratives as a Means of Diagnoso, Prevention and Therapy of Chronic Illnesses;
Dirk Vom Lehn, Christian Heath, Discovering Exhibits: Video-Based Studies of Interaction in Museums and Science Centres.

Maciej Frąckowiak (b. 1985) – sociologist, deals with the image, tries to treat it as a tool and pretext to study and transform social relations. Contributes with exhibitions, lectures and texts in the field, published in “Kultura i Społeczeństwo”, “Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej” and “Studia Socjologiczne”, among others. Currently working on his PhD Thesis (at the Institute of Sociology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań) devoted to the contemporary sociological intervention strategies. Participant and co-supervisor of projects Invisible City, Visual Culture Questionnaire, and more recently Collaboratory. Popularisation of Collaboration in Culture. Holder of the scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Edcuation, and of the Kulczyk Family Foundation.

Krzysztof Olechnicki (b. 1969) – Habilitated Doctor, works at the Institute of Sociology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Head of the Department of Cultural Studies. Interested in: sociology and anthropology of the image, social anthropology, sociology of religion and new social movements. Awarded scholarship of “Polityka” weekly in the frame of the action Stay with Us, and the Foundation for Polish Science. Editor of the magazine “Ikonosfera. Studia z Socjologii i Antropologii Obrazu”. Author of many books: Słownik socjologiczny [Dictionary of Sociology]; Antropologia obrazu. Fotografia jako metoda, przedmiot i medium nauk społecznych [Anthropology of the Image. Photography as a Method, Object and Medium of Social Sciences]; Fotoblogi, pamiętniki z opcją przekazu. Fotografia i fotoblogerzy w kulturze konsumpcyjnej [Photoblogs, Diaries with Transmission Option. Photography and Photobloggers in Consumption Culture].

Marek Krajewski (b. 1969) sociologist, Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Author of numerous articles on popular culture, consumption and art, as well as books: Kultury kultury popularnej [Cultures of Popular Culture]; POPamiętane [POPremembered]. Editor and academic co-editor of books: W stronę socjologii przedmiotów [Towards Sociology of Objects]; Prywatnie o publicznym. Publicznie o prywatnym [Privately on the Public. Publicly on the Private]; Wyobraźnia społeczna. Horyzonty – źródła – dynamika [Social Imagination. Horizons – Sources – Dynamics]; Handmade. Praca rąk w postindustrialnej rzeczywistości [Handmade. Manual Labour in Postindustrial Reality]. Curator of Outdoor Gallery AMS (1998-2004), initiator of the project Invisible City.

Academic editing: Maciej Frąckowiak, Krzysztof Olechnicki, in co-operation with Marek Krajewski
Graphic design: Grzegorz Laszuk
Cover photo: Felix’s Computer, from the text by Marisol Clark -Ibáñez
Publisher: Bęc Zmiana Foundation in co-operation with the National Audiovisual Institute and the Institute of Sociology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.

International conference of the Free / Slow University of Warsaw
time: 20-22.10.2011
venue: Warsaw, The Old Library, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28

participants: Diedrich Diederichsen, Gigi Roggero, Hans Abbing, Hito Steyerl, Isabelle Graw, John Roberts, Luc Boltanski, Martha  Rosler , Matteo Pasquinelli, Neil Cummings, Alexander Neumann, Bojana Romic, Britta Timm Knudsen, Dusan Grlja, Ewa Majewska, Isabelle Bruno, Jason Francis Mcgimsey, Joanna Bednarek, Joshua Simon, Marina Vishmidt, Massimiliano Tomba, Precarious Workers Brigade, Stevphen Shukaitis, Vlad Morariu, Yiannis Mylonas oraz Goldin&Senneby, Patricia Reed

please register at: szymon[at]funbec.eu
detailed programme forthcoming at www.wuw-warszawa.pl

This year’s conference of the Free / Slow University of Warsaw undertakes critical reflection on the issue of knowledge-based economy and common creativity. The actuating slogan - “political economics of creativity” – is an invitation to a comprehensive and meticulous analysis of economic and social mechanisms that organise the way “creative” economy functions, as well as its links with creativity understood as a social value.

If it is true that contemporary capitalism has made a crucial turn in the frame of its proper ways of generating value, then creativity, and collective creativity in particular, becomes a central category for the entire society. On their part, artistic and cultural (as well as academic) ways of production are no longer extracurricular fields of capitalist social infrastructure. They become the central sectors of production, which subordinate symbolically and economically other fields of labour in the society. Yet, might it be the case that this new paradigm is but a smoke screen to cover up the crisis of the operating capitalist modes of organising production? Maybe we are still under the spell of the old law of value, based rather on living labour than creative networking? If so, the new “creative” labour lends itself to analysis rather as an immense symptom of the current crisis. During the conference, we will make attempts at discussing all those perspectives; we will also be very interested to hear other views related to various models and grasps of the problem.

FSUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
conference curatorial team: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder
FSUW organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

The conference “The Political Economics of Social Creativity” is realised in co-operation with the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the University of Warsaw, with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, in the frame of the project Free / Slow University of Warsaw, edition 2011 “Social Economics of Creativity. In Search of Economic Strategies to Promote the Circulation of Independent Culture”, carried out with the funds of the National Centre for Culture in the frame of the programme Culture Observatory / www.obserwatoriumkultury.nck.pl

 

time: 30.09 (Friday), 18:00
venue: Warsaw, Bolesław Bierut’s office, Banking and Financial Centre “Nowy Świat” (former seat of the Central Committee of Polish United Workers’ Party), Nowy Świat 6/12
number of participants is limited, please register at: bec@funbec.eu

Looking for the vision of the future and recalling the way the 21st century was imagined in the 20th century is the theme of this year’s edition of the cycle Synchronicity*, organised by Bęc Zmiana since 2007.

 

What is the architecture of the 21st century in the traditional sense (buildings, cities), but also in other meanings (social relations, ephemeral events – filling the city with content), and what was it supposed to be? What happened with the 20th century visions of the cities of the 21st century. Has the 21st century already seen any architectural visions that merit attention? We invited to the discussion Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak and Dorota Jędruch, editors of Cracow’s quarterly “Autoportret”, whose latest issue is devoted entirely to utopias. “Can we talk today of the crisis of utopia, utopian thinking? If so, what are the reasons? If not, where is the source of contemporary utopia?” – in “Autoportret” these questions receive their answers from Zygmunt Bauman, Immanuel Wallerstein, Łukasz Stanek, David Crowley, among others.

The venue of the meeting was selected deliberately as highly symbolic of the post-war fate of Warsaw – during the discussion we will make available the copies of the publication Plan sześcioletni odbudowy Warszawy [Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw] by Bolesław Bierut (Książka i Wiedza, 1950). We also asked the young researcher Martyna Obarska, author of the book MDM między utopią a codziennością [MDM between Utopia and Everyday Life], to contribute to the discussion with her voice on the utopias that are currently “under construction” in Warsaw.

The meeting features the premiere display of photos by Tomek Szerszeń from the cycle Warsaw Antiquities

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Project realised with a subsidy from the City of Warsa   

PARTICIPANTS TO THE MEETING:

Dorota Jędruch – art historian, PhD student at the Institute of Art History of the Jagiellonian University. Interested in modern architecture, especially in its social aspect, and contemporary art. Works in the education section of the National Museum in Cracow. Co-creator of the issue of “Autoportret” devoted to utopias.

Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak – art historian and architect by education, editor by choice. Curator of the exhibition of works by C.R. Mackintosh at the International Cultural Centre in Cracow and co-curator of the exhibition 3_2_1. New Architecture of Japan in Poland at the Centre of Japanese Art and Technology “manggha” in Cracow. Editor-in-chief of the quarterly “Autoportret”, devoted to the space where we live. On the idea of the magazine: “We begin with the claim that the surroundings influence humans, and humans influence their surroundings. We are interested in: liaisons between architecture and politics, impact of new media on space, architectural legacy, language used to talk about space, contemporary architecture, building identity through architecture, space of the everyday. We observe these liaisons and acquire knowledge about ourselves – hence the title of our periodical. We want to understand space.” The periodical has been published since 2002 by the Małopolska Institute of Culture. http://autoportret.pl

Martyna Obarska – expert in cultural studies, editor of “Res Publika Nowa”, author of the book MDM między utopią a codziennością [MDM between Utopia and Everyday Life], awarded already as an MA Thesis the 2nd degree prize in the Jan Józef Lipski Competition organised by the Open Republic Society. Prizewinner in the 6th edition of the competition Mazovia Book Academy. Graduate of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities (MISH), PhD student at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw.

Tomasz Szerszeń – photographer, cultural anthropologist. Graduate of photography at the Film School in Łódź, MISH at Warsaw University and PhD studies at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Member of the editorial board of the quarterly “Konteksty”. 2010 saw his exhibition I Was the First Polish Surrealist. Works from 1929-39 at Exchange Gallery in Łódź. He comments on the cycle Warsaw Antiquities as follows: “What if we took Warsaw’s soc-realist architecture out of its local historic-political context and looked at it as something situated beyond time? As the traces of a certain aesthetic utopia, and also – why not? – the ruins of ancient Rome in Piranesi’s etchings: antichità di Varsovia? The ruins of a fallen civilisation, which are within our reach – but they need to be found, unearthed from underneath the layers of time, other layers of the city...”

<<<Tomasz Szerszeń, from the cycle Warsaw Antiquities

 

Inspired by two young curators – Wojciech Tubaj and Monika Kędziora (authors of this year’s exhibition Warsaw I Accuse!), Bęc Zmiana decided to face its own gathering of latest arts. What is this gathering? What are the possible directions of development? Has it already become an art collection? What and who does actually decide?

The object of the research is an extremely varied set of items identified by the curators as the elements of the collection – works by contemporary Polish artists and latest design stand here right next to no-name, no-history and no-purpose objects. The curators and people associated with the Foundation, authors of selected works and specialists in various fields (art historians, curators, lawyers, poets, art collectors and one female construction engineer) attempt to take a joint look at the history of this set and trace the ways how individual objects have made it to the Foundation. The fruits of their work come with the exhibition Bęc! Collection and a report discussing this peculiar set.

Curators: Monika Kędziora (b. 1985) – art historian and theorist, PhD student at the Institute of Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where she’s currently working on her Thesis Narratopic  Imagination: (Re)Constructions of Identity in Installation Art. Has contributed with texts to “Czas Kultury”, “Artluk”, “Arteon” and “Arte e Politica de Identidad”. Co-ordinator of the programme collateral to Mediations Biennale 2010, curator of the exhibition Warsaw I Accuse!

Wojciech Tubaja (ur. 1986) – student at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań and would-be student of art history. His practice revolves around the investigation into repetition in various feilds of art and life. Currently lives and works in Warsaw, co-curator of the exhibition Warsaw I Accuse!, discoverer of Bęc! Collection.

Bęc! Collection
time: as of 26.09.2011, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw


<< It’s gonna be OC, by Wunderteam (www.wunderteam.art.pl), purchased at Raster during Cheap Art Fair, probably in 2002, is one of the most important items in Bęc Collection. It always stands in a well visible place because it speaks the truth.

The work by Piotr Sakowski is somewhat of a little intervention in the shop window of the Bęc Zmiana Foundation in Mokotowska St., Warsaw; the modest gesture manifests not so much the finished work but rather the sheer act of creation.

Piotr Sakowski (1983) – his practice is based on various media, with his projects merging the tradition of conceptual art, ephemeral activities with reflection on post-production. Modest works created by Sakowski adopt the form of small objects, installations and site-specific works. Lives and works in Warsaw.

time: 12-26.09
venue: Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana, ul. Mokotowska 65

<<< Piotr Sakowski, Unconceptual
phot. N.N.

Spoken Exhibitions are live audio dramas devoted to forgotten, overlooked or mythologized chapters in the history of Polish culture of the 20th century. Nonexistent and impossible to materialise, the exhibition is a compilation of fiction and myths, “phantom” works and unverifiable eyewitness accounts, all related to the never-realised 20th century musical, architectural and artistic pieces.

The audio drama in three acts draws its inspiration from the artistic attempts at the “dematerialisation” of the work of art, as well as the experiments with exhibition formats of the 1960s and 70s. The textual collage, divided into roles and composed of both existing and imaginary notes, creates somewhat of a hilarious and unceremonious “institutional opera”, or a staged expert lecture. Spoken Exhibitions will be presented in six European capitals: Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Moscow, London, Kiev.

Spoken Exhibitions scriptwriters: Sebastian Cichocki (curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw), Grzegorz Piątek and Jarosław Trybuś (awarded Golden Lion at the 2008 Architecture Biennale in Venice) and Michał Libera (curator, critic and music theorist).

Soundtrack prepared by: Patryk Zakrocki, Radek Duda, Michał Ścibior and Wojciech Kucharczyk.

The catalogue of Spoken Exhibitions comes with a special edition of the magazine “Format P”, which pretends to be a “libretto” of the piece. The exhibition script in five languages and the soundtrack are available at www.wystawymowione.pl, which opens the possibility of further renditions and interpretations of the audio drama.

SPO – KEN EX – HI – BI - TIONS*
* Institutional opera in three acts
www.wystawymowione.pl

26.08.2011 Brussels, WIELS | 09.10.2011 Moscow, Garage CCA | 10.11.2011 Madrid, Reina Sophia | 28.11.2011 London, Royal College of Art | 02.12.2011 Berlin, Archive Kabinett | 09.12.2011 Kiev, Foundation CCA

Additional funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

Praga Alphabet is an embroidered documentary created during the two-week residency of Vahida Ramujkic and Aviv Kruglanski in Warsaw’s district of Praga. The work comprises 25 representations – each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. While working in the field and talking to the inhabitants, the artists created a tapestry documenting the social space of the neighbourhood. In June and July, the inhabitants of Praga could see the embroidery on display in the window of the upholsterery workshop on the corner of Wileńska St. and Inżynierska St. Now you can see the embroidery on the left bank of the Vistula! For several years now, Vahida Ramujkic and Aviv Kruglanski have been developing the methods of recording reality through documentary embroidery. Their method is referred to as low-tech, as opposed to high-tech (advanced technology). The time needed to create an embroidered work allows to investigate the local status quo by engaging in conversations with the inhabitants, deepening relations, building a sense of community. The works, often authored collectively, document the processes occurring in a given group. The form of the work becomes its content and the documented can become the documentalist – and the reverse.
The project came into being as a result of the artists’ co-operation with Nizio Gallery www.nizio.com.pl
Curator: Paulina Jeziorek

Vahida Ramujkic (b. 1973) – born in Belgrade, where she lives and works. Concentrates on activities in urban space and natural environment. Co-founder of the collective Rotor (www.rotorrr.org), which initiated a series of hilarious and critical projects in the streets, roofs and beaches near Barcelona (2001-2007). Has worked in Europe, North America, North Africa. irational.org/vahida

Aviv Kruglanski (b. 1970) – born in Tel Aviv, lives and works in Barcelona. His practice relies on textiles, which serve as a social catalyst in the public sphere and space. Has belonged to collectives Las Agencias and Yomango, as well as Costura De Código Abierto (Open Source Sewing). During his stay in Chicago, he founded the Dogmatic Gallery and “Goodlookin’ Magazine”. Has organised untypical fashion shows as a form of social intervention. opensourcepants.net
Time: as of 27.07
Venue: Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Mokotowska 65/7

<<< Vahida Ramujkic and Aviv Kruglanski, Praga Alphabet, 2011

21st CENTURY ARCHITECTURE
time: 5.11 (Saturday), 4:00 pm
venue: Warsaw, Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw University of Technology, Koszykowa 55
speakers: Alastair Donald, Grzegorz Piątek, Aleksandra Wasilkowska + OSSA
chair: Claire Fox / Institute of Ideas, London
partners: Battle of Ideas / London, British Council in Warszaw, Polish Association of Architecture Students (OSSA)
producer: Angus Kennedy / Battle of Ideas, Szymon Żydek / Bec Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw
for further details pls contact: szymon[at]funbec.eu
The discussion will be held in English. The entrance is free of charge.

The economic crisis in Europe makes it difficult to predict the future, let alone plan it. So what does this mean for architects? Should they seek to put forward a bold vision of the future, despite current uncertainties? Or should they improvise with and adapt existing 20th century architecture? Will new social movements bring about new forms of spatial organisation, and if so what role can architects play?

Aleksandra Wasilkowska (1978) warsaw based architect. In 2007 she established a studio for spatial and social research and practice after studying architecture at Warsaw University of Technology and Ecole d’Architecture de Bretagne. She has collaborated on projects with scientists and curators to explore the territories between architecture, art and science.
Grzegorz Piątek (1980) architecture critic and curator, graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Politechnika Warszawska (2006). Curated architecture-related exhibitions and art projects among others Hotel Polonia. The Afterlife of Buildings, Polish pavilion at the 11th Architecture Biennial in Venice Golden Lion for best national participation (with Jarosław Trybuś, 2008). Ambassador of Warsaw as a candidate city for European Capital of Culture 2016 (2009-2011) and member of the Advisory Board for Warsaw’s bid team.
Alastair Donald is associate director of the Future Cities Project, and co-editor of The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs (Pluto 2011). He is an urban designer, researching mobility and space at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge. He’s a regular contributor to Urban Design, and has written for Blueprint, World Architecture and Culture Wars, and was co-editor of the Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated (Pluto Press 2008).
Polish Association of Architecture Students (OSSA) representatives - OSSA was established on the initiative of students in 1997 as their desire was to broaden their horizons and gain additional professional experience.
Claire Fox - the director of the Institute of Ideas (IoI), which she established to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint. Claire initiated the IoI while co-publisher of the controversial and ground-breaking current affairs journal LM magazine (formerly Living Marxism). The IoI has since worked with a variety of prestigious institutions in Britain and abroad. Claire convenes the IoI’s flagship event, the yearly Battle of Ideas festival, which will next take place in London at the end of October 2011. The IoI has also established the prestigious Debating Matters competition for sixth form students in the UK and India under Claire’s direction.

The meeting will held as a part of Synchronicity 2011: a project realised with the financial support of the City of Warsaw. www.synchronicity.pl

The meeting will held as a part of the festival Battle of Ideas 2011 Satellite Events 2011. www.battleofideas.org.uk

organisation: Bęc Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw / www.funbec.eu
partners: Battle of Ideas / www.battleofideas.org.uk
Institute of Ideas in London / www.instituteofideas.com
British Council in Warsaw / www.britishcouncil.pl
The Faculty of Architecture at Warsaw University of Technology
Polish Association of Architecture Students / www.ossa.org.pl
Projekt realizowany dzięki dotacji od Miasta Stołecznego Warszawy

<<< source: www.masdar.ae

THE LABOUR OF THE MULTITUDE?
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREATIVITY
time: 20-22/10/2011
venue: Warsaw, Campus of the University of Warsaw: Old Library (Hall 205) and Warsaw University Students' Council Hall, 26/28 Krakowskie Przedmieście
participants: Hans Abbing, Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Matteo Pasquinelli, John Roberts, Gigi Roggero, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl, Joanna Bednarek, Isabelle Bruno, Dusan Grlja, Precarious Workers Brigade, Johsua Simon, Stevphen Shukaitis, Britta Timm Knudsen, Ewa Majewska, Jason Francis McGimsey, Vlad Morariu, Yiannis Mylonas, Alexander Neumann, Bojana Romic, Massimiliano Tomba, Marina Vishmidt and Patricia Reed
www.wuw-warsaw.pl

Addressing the issue of social economy of creativity we seek to enlarge the spectrum of creativity’s political economy. Creativity refers to many things: it is both a means of production and a fetish of consumption, a sheer ideology of the capitalism which calls itself post-industrial. Is it true that contemporary capitalism has made an decisive shift in its modes of producing value and artistic and cultural modes of production (along with scientific ones) are no longer merely supplementary fields of capitalistic social infrastructure? Or maybe we still linger under the rule of the old law of value based rather on living labour then creative networking. In this case the new social economy of the creativity would be a powerful symptom of a present crisis.

the conference is free of charge
number of places is limited / RSVP
reservations: szymon[at]funbec.eu
description: +here
program: +here

Is there a model for international cultural cooperation, as far as building an integrated European culture sphere is concerned? This book depicts international projects as an expanded development strategy, which does not neglect the characteristics, diversity, and the limitations of cultural systems in various countries. It’s an essential instrument for every professional cultural operator.

International cooperation in the cultural sphere has to be perceived as the first step in establishing global citizenship in culture, which is characterized by awareness, responsibility, and feelings of solidarity. (…) The critical approach to globalization, its potential for redistribution of wealth, power, and opportunities at the cost of justice and equality is based on recognizing the cultural diversity and feelings of cultural solidarity confirmed by numerous forms of international cultural cooperation.

Dragan Klaic (1950-2011) – theater expert and cultural analyst, permanent member of the Felix Meritis Foundation in Amsterdam, participant of multiple conferences and symposia. Taught Art and Cultural Policy at Leiden University. Worked as an advisor, publisher, essayist, researcher, and teacher. He was interested in contemporary performative arts, cultural strategies in Europe, strategies of cultural development and international cultural cooperation, interculturalism, and cultural memory.

The Mobility of Imagination. A Guide to International Cultural Cooperation Dragan Klaic
publishers: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, National Audiovisual Institute
editors: Ewa Kolankiewicz, Marcela Wasilewska (Federacja Centrum Szpitalna)
translation: Marcin Turski
graphic design: Grzegorz Laszuk

The book was published by the National Audiovisual Institute for the European Culture Congress.

THE LABOUR OF THE MULTITUDE? THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREATIVITY
open call: international conference of the Free/Slow University
20-22.10.2011, Warsaw

Addressing the issue of social economy of creativity we seek to enlarge the spectrum of creativity’s political economy. Creativity refers to many things: it is both a means of production and a fetish of consumption, a sheer ideology of the capitalism which calls itself post-industrial and an efficient device of social and industrial management, it reflects the elitist privilege of the ruling elite as well as the aspirations of the underprivileged rabble.

If it is true that contemporary capitalism has made an decisive shift in its modes of producing value then creativity and in particular collective creativity becomes a central category for the society as a whole. Or maybe the new paradigm is just a humbug that covers up the overall crisis of the existing one. Maybe we still linger under the rule of the old law of value based rather on living labour then creative networking. In this case the new social economy of the creativity would be a powerful symptom of a present crisis and it could be analyzed as such. Either of the approaches are welcome.

list of confirmed speakers: Luc Boltanski, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Matteo Pasquinelli, John Roberts, Gigi Roggero, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl
curatorial team of the conference: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa, Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder
forms of contribution: a paper delivered in 15-20 minutes during the conference's sessions.
deadline for submissions: 15th of September 2011
contact: szymon[at]funbec.eu
details: www.wuw-warsaw.pl

+++
F/SUW's curator: Kuba Szreder
F/SUW producer: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

International conference "The labor of multitudes? Political economy of social creativity" is a part of Free/Slow University of Warsaw's 2011 program "Social economy of creativity. In search of economic strategy to promote the circulation of independent culture"  co-financed by the Polish National Cultural Centre under the Culture Observatory program / www.obserwatoriumkultury.nck.pl

The conference is relised in partnership with the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw with the support of Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw

participants: Ewa Rudnicka (architect/curator of the UFO project in Warsaw), Pau Faus (architect/artist), Jakub Szczęsny (architect), Kaja Pawełek (curator CCA Ujazdowski Castle)
time: 20.07 (Wednesday), 18.30
venue: UFO (Unexpected Fountain Occupation), Na Rozdrożu Sq., Warsaw

Is it possible nowadays to think about the future in a visionary and holistic manner, characteristic for utopian modernist designs? What sort of new quality is added to urban spaces by the activity of architects on the lookout for new ways, or active beyond the construction industry? Does the architecture of the 21st century consist in raising city or state-commissioned edifices of public use, commercial shopping centres, developer housing estates? Or maybe its character is expressed to a larger extent by temporary, ephemeral interventions in the urban space, such as those carried out by the Spanish architect and artist Pau Faus, French collective EXYZT or Warsaw-based architect Jakub Szczęsny?

The debate featuring the above mentioned participants launches this year’s edition of the cycle Synchronicity, devoted to building the vision of the future, presenting new potential urban development scenarios and reminding how the 21st century was imagined in the previous century.

* The cycle Synchronicity, carried out since 2007, is a project that gives the floor to architects and artists in search of solutions to the contemporary problems of urban spaces. This year’s edition is devoted to visionary ideas and attempts at shaping the future. Details at: www.synchronicity.pl

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
The project is realised with the financial support of the City of Warsaw

<<<Jakub Szczęsny: Stretched Pavilion, Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

FORMAT P is a new experimental periodical in the humanities, published bi-annually by the Warsaw based Bęc Zmiana Foundation. FORMAT P regularly modifies its profile, editorial team, range of distribution, and even the motivations of its creators. However it always retains its handy format: 13x17 cm.

The fourth issue of FORMAT P, entitled “Art Criticism as Pure Fiction”, is the first issue to appear in English. It consists of a number of exhibitions in the form of literary pieces such as sci-fi short stories, poems and interviews with fictitious artists. The latest issue of FORMAT P includes texts by such contributors as Aaron Schuster, Antje Majewski, Dieter Roelstraete, Ovul Durmusoglu, Raqs Media Collective, Sina Najafi, Stine Herbert and Tom Morton, among others. The editor-in-chief of the fourth issue is Sebastian Cichocki from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, curator of this year's exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Graphic design is the work of the established Polish graphic artist Jakub Jezierski.

FORMAT P has a transitive character - the editorial team prepares each edition with a different group of specialists, leaving to them the task of developing the content-related concept. Each edition is bound with a strongly emphasized theme. Individuals and groups associated with intellectual collectives, artistic groups, and institutions are welcome to collaborate in creating the magazine.


Format P. Humanistic Magazine.
Editorial team: Sebastian Cichocki, Bogna Świątkowska, Jakub Jezierski, Clare Butcher, Krzysztof Gutfrański
Graphic Design: Jakub Jezierski
Publisher: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Price: 15 PLN
Orders: bec@funbec.eu

Agnieszka Kurant’s phantom library is a collection of fictitious, phantom and invisible books, which have been vested with a material form. These publications are known only from the mentions in the books of other authors, such as Stanisław Lem, Jorge L. Borges czy Philiph K. Dick. The installation comprises ca. 400 book-objects with titles and names of fictitious authors printed on the covers and spines. These books have been registered with an ISBN and a bar code, thus acquiring commodity status. The artist worked on the project tapping into the results of long-term research carried out by Paweł Dunin-Wąsowicz, Brian Quinette, Enrique Villa-Matas, Jean Yves Jouannais and others who have long been busy cataloguing never-written books. The title of the piece directly addresses the book by Paweł Dunin-Wąsowicz. (Lampa i Iskra Boża, 1997). Cover graphic design by Kasia Korczak (Slavs and Tatars).

The counterpoint of the Phantom Library comes with Mirage. Map of phantom islands – map of the world featuring exclusively fictitious and phantom islands. They result from the observation of mirages, cartographic mistakes, faulty geographic observations, which through mythology, gossip or manipulation of geographic expeditions made their way onto maps of the world in various epochs. The map is printed with a pigment that, like mirage, makes itself manifest only in the sunlight.

The works on display in Vienna (Austria) and Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), among others, relate to Agnieszka Kurant’s interest in how fictitious or invisible elements of reality gain real value and acquire symbolic, economic or political significance.

AGNIESZKA KURANT: PHANTOM LIBRARY
time: until 18.09 | Vienna: Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Schleifmuhlgasse 3, Austria, www.engholmengelhorn.com | Vitoria-Gasteiz: Centro Cultural Montehermosob Kulturunea, Fray Zacarías Martínez 2, Spain,  www.montehermoso.net

Project production: Bęc Zmiana Foundation


Phantom Library is realised with the financial support of the City of Warsaw | www.warszawa2016.eu

Phantom Library project is financed by Adam Mickiewicz Institute
 
<<<Agnieszka Kurant: Phantom Library, book design: Kasia Korczak

The title of the exhibition is an excerpt from an (in)famous statement by Eurodeputy Filip  Kaczmarek: Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but an indpendent artist is an artist who finances their practice themselves. It’s normal that Vicepresident has the right to send for his subordinate director. The deputy was commenting on the fact that vicepresident of Poznań Sławomir Hinc told off the Director of Teatr Ósmego Dnia, Ewa Wójciak. Vicepresident wanted to protest against the voice of support that Wójcik lent to the activity of the politician Janusz Palikot.

The eponymous thesis encourages reflection on the artist’s position in the contemporary society, questions the role of scholarships and private grants against the background of artistic independence. Is it really that every help offered to culture equals the loss of freedom of artistic expression? Exhibition with the participation of the students of Video Workshop run by Marek Wasilewski and Hubert Czerepok at the Artistic University in Poznań

Time: 22.06-12.07
Venue: Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, 65 Mokotowska St.

<<< Karolina Janikowska, video stills, 2011

Sunday, 12th June, saw the tents of the members of the Outraged Movement, also called the 15th May Movement (from the day the action began) disappear from Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid. The organisers announced they were moving their initiative to other places. We therefore invite everyone to the YES WE CAMP tent to 65 Mokotowska St. in Warsaw, which came as a result of 12 Plemion Collective’s trip to Madrid.

Come and get find out about the content of the 15th May Movement Manifesto, see the photos from the vast camping field where young people, not only from Spain but also the entire Europe, launched their protest against unemployment and the failure of the present system.

We’re ordinary people. We’re like you are: we get up every morning to study, work, we have families and friends. We are working people who spend every day earning a living and working for a better future of everyone around. Some of us are progressive, others are more conservative. But we’re all upset and outraged about the way current political scene, economic system and social life look like. The helplessness of an ordinary citizen – 15th May Movement Manifesto was translated into Polish by Dorota Głażewska (thank you!) www.democraciarealya.es

Report of 12 Plemion Collective from Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square and the 15th May Movement Manifesto available (only in Polish) ++TU

YES WE CAMP
time: as of 17.06, starting at ca. 4 PM
venue: Warsaw, 65 Mokotowska St.

The Views of Power Project treats photography as a vehicle, enabling anyone, at least for a moment, to assume the point of view of those selected few who actually posses real power. It is a series of photographs presenting the views from the office windows of the most important/most influential people in Krakow. The point of view, which is always a marker of one’s social status, is at the same time a direct source of information about the real world while at work. What do the people who get to decide about the fate of Krakow see?
Photographs exhibited include views from the windows of Rev. Adam Boniecki; Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz; the Governonr of Małopolska, Stanisław Kracik; President of Krakow, Jacek Majchrowski; Jerzy Meysztowicz; businessman, Rector of the Jagiellonian University , Karol Musioł; Bogusław Sonika and Róża Thun: Members of European Parliament;  as well as Wisława Szymborska, Andrzej Wajda, and Grzegorz Turnau.

Video The Views of Power. The Power of Views
Power as a political and aesthetic category is a collection of fetishes. One of them is a privileged point of view. It is a position that gives omniscience over territory, a sense of pride to its ruler and confirms his status. We do not know what he really sees. It is a view reserved for only the select few. We just try to visualize it on the basis of mass culture. (Produced by Ana Brzezińska)


Konrad Pustoła (b. 1976) is a graduate of University of Warsaw’s Economics Department (2003) and Royal College of Art in London (2008). His projects center around the examination of the visual aspects of social and economic relations. He won the First Prize of the Polish Press Photo Competition for his Sanna series (2001). He participated in many exhibitions, including The New Documentalists (2005) at the Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2008) in London, Storia, Memoria, Identitia (2009) in Modena, and PhotoEspaña (2010) in Madrid. In 2010 he published Darkrooms, an album that won a prize at The Best Art Album and Catalogue Competition Reminiscencje.

Photographs on billboards | various locations | 16th – 30th June

Video | ZPAF i S-ka Gallery in Cracow, ul. Św. Tomasza 24 | 16th – 30th June

Panel discussion with Magda Sroka, Kuba Szreder, Cecylia Malik, Piotr Marecki and Konrad Pustoła | June 16th (Thursday), 6 p.m. | No Local, ul. Sławkowska 14, 2nd floor

Producer: Bęc Zmiana Fundation / www.funbec.eu
This project was a part of the 2011 ArtBoom Festival in Cracow | www.artboomfestival.pl

Partners: ZPAF i S-ka Gallery in Cracow, No Local Fundation, AMS

<<< Konrad Pustoła: the View from Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz's Window, The Views of Power cycle, Krakow 2011

<<< Konrad Pustoła: the View from Wisława Szymborska's Window, The Views of Power cycle, Krakow 2011

For the first time ever, the mysterious trio OH!LOGO will present in Warsaw its actions from the border of design, art and performance. Tapping into pop cultural symbols, found and acquired elements, and above all – their own anarchic creativity – O!L blurs the border between absurd humour and dead serious reflection. On Saturday, they will carry out a designer happening that will consist in unleashing a swarm of viruses in Central Warsaw.

OH!LOGO – is a trio of activists from Germany: designer Mark André Flierl, designer and architect Irakli Kiziria, and artist Sascha Mikloweit. Their activities consist in introducing into circulation self-made objects that are “asynchronous” to reality and pretend to be normal products.

time: 11.06, noon
venue: Warsaw, Zbawiciela Sq.

Organisers: Bęc Zmiana Foundation for New Culture, Goethe-Institut and The Embassy of Germany in Warsaw


Project is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw www.warszawa2016.pl 

Project is realised with a grant from the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation


Project is realised in the frame of the Polish-German festival of modern neighbourhood Neighbours 2.0 (www.sasiedzi20.com) organised by Goethe-Institut and the Embassy of Germany in Warsaw


Dizajn_Wawa 2011 exhibitions are supported by:
  

<<OH! LOGO-6/10_ILOVEYOU_WAW

Immersed in greenery, Battalion AK Ruczaj Square has become the forefront of tension between public and private space. With the right of ownership, public use of the formerly common area has been abolished. Are the inhabitants able to defend the space of the park? Film Fence of the Collective 12 Plemion documents the changes in AK Ruczaj Square.

FENCE MATTER OF TENSION
film and debate featuring Joanna Erbel, Łukasz Jasina, Jolanta Walczak and Aleksandra Wasilkowska. 
time: 9.06, 6 PM
venue: Warsztat, seat of Warsaw - ECOC 2016, 4 Konstytucji Sq

Organisers: Bęc Zmiana Foundation for New Culture, Goethe-Institut and The Embassy of Germany in Warsaw


Project is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw www.warszawa2016.pl

Project is realised with a grant from the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation


Project is realised in the frame of the Polish-German festival of modern neighbourhood Neighbours 2.0 (www.sasiedzi20.com) organised by Goethe-Institut and the Embassy of Germany in Warsaw

Dizajn_Wawa 2011 exhibitions are supported by:
  

<<< Intimate/Public, situation around the path fenced with a private fencing in AK Ruczaj Sq. in Warsaw, video 12 Plemion, phot. Bęc

This year’s edition of Design Wawa. Design in Action is centred on shaping the space around us – the public, but also the private and semi-private; the space of our apartments, staircases and balconies. Within the project, young designers from Poland and Germany denounce stereotypes and deliberately present design with an alternative edge, in alternative places and dimensions. The event gathers over 70 participating designers from Poland and Germany.

In the frame of Design in Action the following events will be organised, among others:

PROTOBAZAR. Tribute to Mohamed Bouazizi – The point of departure is the marketplace as a city-generative venue, where intimate relations between the inhabitants are forged in the public situation. Aleksandra Wasilkowska, together with a group of students of SWPS will organise an ideal micro-trade space.
time:  11.06, Saturday, 12.00 -16.00
venue: weekend marketplace next to Warszawa Powiśle railway station

FILM by 12 Plemion Collective, documenting the changes in the AK Ruczaj Square, tackles the tension that emerges when public and private spaces collide, as well as the right of ownership that abolishes the public use of the formerly common area. Are the inhabitants able to defend the space of the park?
screening and debate: 9.06, 18.00
venue: Warsztat, seat of Warsaw - ECOC 2016, 4 Konstytucji Sq.
 


And at Bęc Zmiana, SLANTED BENCH designed by Paweł Jasiewicz, Ancymon by the duet Agata Hasiak, Krzysztof Seyfried. The bench responds to the problem posed by the slanted threshold next to Bęc Zmiana shop window. The simple structure taps in a user-friendly manner into the minimum of available space.
premiere: 9.06, Thursday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Shop, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

URBAN MUSIC BOX by Patryk Zakrocki will play purpose-composed music in the vicinity of Mokotowska St. at various times of the day.
time: 9-19.06, all day
venue: Mokotowska St. and the vicinity

+++ APART FROM THAT, THE PROJECT DESIGN IN ACTION. MODEL PROJECT. DESIGN WAWA 2011 FEATURES:
several dozens of interventions in urban space, thematic excursions, concerts, workshops and lectures. Details at: www.dizajnwawa.pl

DIZAJN WAWA_2011: DESIGN IN ACTION
PUBLIC/INTIMATE
time: 9-19.06.2011
venue: Mokotowska St, in Warsaw and the vicinity
www.dizajnwawa.pl

Organisers: Bęc Zmiana Foundation for New Culture, Goethe-Institut and The Embassy of Germany in Warsaw


Project is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw www.warszawa2016.pl 

Project is realised with a grant from the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation


Project is realised in the frame of the Polish-German festival of modern neighbourhood Neighbours 2.0 (www.sasiedzi20.com) organised by Goethe-Institut and the Embassy of Germany in Warsaw


Dizajn_Wawa 2011 exhibitions are supported by:
  

<<< Intimate/Public, situation around the path fenced with a private fencing in AK Ruczaj Sq. in Warsaw, video 12 Plemion, phot. Bęc

The visit of French artist ELTONO, whose projects have reached the showcase status in the world’s greatest cities like New York, Sao Paulo or London, opens the cycle UPDATES, organised by Vlepvnet Foundation.

While in Warsaw, Eltono will create a mural on four walls of a tenement in 73 Złota St. and carry out a series of actions in the streets of Warsaw. Equalling the artist and spectator positions, Eltono draws the inhabitants of the tenement to work together on the murals of its walls. Therefore, the eventual shape of the work will be decided by its future audience.

The eventual outcome of the actions will be put on display at a one-day exhibition in an abandoned apartment in Mokotowska St., rented out by Bęc Zmiana.

EL TONO – b. in 1975 in France, lives in Spain. Studied plastic arts at the Saint-Denis Academy in Paris, in 1999 he did a year’s university exchange in Madrid, which eventually grew to become his place to live. He came to be associated with the symbol of a tuning fork, painted with cover tape and acrylic paint.

The cycle UPDATES, organised by vlep[v]Net Foundation, presents world-famous artists active in public space. In 2009, vlep[v]Net Foundation organised a show of the Ukrainian artist APL315 in Warsaw; in 2010 the guest list featured: Belgian expert in street ornithology ROA, Italian master of large format BLU, and ZBIOK. updateswarsaw.wordpress.com

ELTONO: STRAIGHT LINES
Updates – activities in public space
time: 6.06, 19.00 (ONLY ONE EVENING!)
venue: 65/30 Mokotowska St. (entrance in the gate past the courtyard), Warsaw

The cycle Updates is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw
 
<< Eltono in Warsaw

You can buy your kid a toy that will break down in a minute, or you can buy a portrait that will last forever! Magda Bielesz painted 100 small images of metal clockwork toys.

- I thought a portrait of a toy could actually be a good gift for a child. It is sometimes the case that the children grow to become the parents of their own parents. It’s natural and it has just happened also in my life – the artist explains. Each work is a donation – the money  collected from sold paintings will help cure Magda Bielesz’s father. 

Magda Bielesz (1977) – painter, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw; diploma in 2002 at the Guest Workshop of Leon Tarasewicz. Scholarship of the Ministry of Culture. Numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. Works in the collections of Detroit Museum of New Art, Zachęta, Entropia Gallery, Zero Gallery. Lives and works in Warsaw.

time: 31.05-12.06.2011
opening: 31.05, 18.00, Bęc Zmiana
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw + artinfo.pl

Encouraged by the success of the previous editions of the map of Warsaw for young tourists, and supported by the Culture Department of the City of Warsaw, we have prepared a brand new edition of Warsaw USE-IT Map for Young Travellers 2011. Available for download at www.use-it-warsaw.pl

The map is a subjective selection of 120 venues, not only the scenes of the city’s cultural life but also the testimonies to its character and top favourite meeting spots for Warsaw’s young generation. New in this edition are the notes on selected venues in the most  popular areas: Saska Kępa, Powiśle, Praga, Mokotów, Żoliborz and South Central Warsaw. The map includes basic info on Warsaw, public transport, city dwellers’ customs. Published in English, it is targeted at tourists in the age of 18-35.

The map is free. It will be available at all hostels in Warsaw, Tourist Information points, galleries, venues with high tourist traffic, hostels in other cities in Poland and in selected European cities, as well as at www.use-it-warsaw.pl, where it can be downloaded in a A4 format home printer-friendly version.

AUTHORS OF THE MAP: texts for the 2011 edition, like in 2008 and 2009, were prepared by Grzegorz Piątek, architect and architecture critic, collaborator of Bęc Zmiana Foundation. Alongside Jarosław Trybuś, he co-curated the Polish Pavilion at the Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2008, awarded Golden Lion. Currently, Artistic Director of Warsaw’s efforts to obtain the title of the European Capital of Culture 2016.
Author of graphic design: Dominik Cymer www.nobdepot.com, awarded numerous prizes, he designs for the off artistic-industrial collective Będzin Beat, among others.

USE-IT EUROPE deals with the production of maps and other information materials targeted at young people who travel across Europe on a tight budget. USE-IT Europe has so far published maps and guidebooks to: Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels, Dresden, Gent, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Łódź, Malmö, Oslo, Rotterdam, among others.

Publisher: City of Warsaw / www.kulturalna.warszawa.pl
 

Editor and coordinator: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
 

Partner: USE-IT EUROPE / www.use-it.be/europe
 

The publication is the outcome of the cooperation between the Culture Department of the City of Warsaw, European non-profit organissation USE-IT and Bęc Zmiana Foundation. This year’s edition of the map supports Warsaw’s efforts to obtain the title of the European Capital of Culture 2016 / www.warszawa2016.pl

In her book, sociologist Monika Rosińska outlines a bold diagnosis of the state of social awareness of Polish designers, presenting on this occasion the theory and practice of design.

More on the book: +HERE

RETHINKING USE/LIFE.
DESIGNERS, OBJECTS. SOCIAL LIFE
debate around Monika Rosińska’s book
WROCŁAW: 19.05.2011, Thursday, 6 PM, BWA DESIGN, 2-4 Świdnicka St.

Publication supported by the National Centre for Culture

Fictitious figures, institutions and attitudes are the subject of photographs at the exhibition in Cracow’s Bunkier Sztuki, whose off-shoot can be seen at Bęc Zmiana. Curators of the exhibition Alias explain: Fictitious artists seem to have the same troubles as the real ones. They cannot keep themselves from self-promotion. They are sometimes capricious, vulnerable to paranoia attacks, display an excessive taste in collage. They don’t always tell the truth about where they or their ideas hail from. Like real artists, they like travelling, but prefer not to think of themselves as tourists.

Heteronym i.e. fictitious author with their own biography and identity is the theme of this year’s Photomonth in Cracow. Inspiration for the curators of this year’s edition came with the figure of Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoi, who gave life to over 240 literary incarnations

time: 12.05-12.06, opening: 12.05 Thursday, 6 PM
curators: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

+++
SCREENING OF THE FILM: NOT IN THE ORDER OF APPEARANCE
time: 12.05, Thursday, all day
venue: Chłodna 25, 25 Chłodna St., Warsaw

The film, featuring exclusively fictitious artists, acting in earlier fictitious films, is the answer of Max Pinckera, Adam Boomberg and Oliver Chanarin to Setareh Shahbazi’s challenge.

Photomonth in Cracow
13.05 - 12.06.2011
www.photomonth.com

<< Charles Fréger: Légion étrangere, 5, from the series Empire, Portraits photographiques et uniformes, 2006. Courtesy of the artist

Feel free to join a meeting with Cecylia Malik, young artist from Cracow, who climbed one tree a day for a year since 25 September 2009. Thus, an extraordinary cycle of 365 trees came into being, inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel from 1957, The Baron in the Trees.

The photographs released in the form of an album are accompanied by texts from several authors, among others, Sylwia Chutnik, Adam Wajrak and numerous enthusiasts of Cecylia Malik’s action, who suggest various ways of interpreting 365 trees, from emancipatory threads, ecology, the phenomenon of reclaiming public space by city dwellers, to a purely adventure-related reading.
CRACOW: 9.05.2011, 17.00, Biblioteka dla Dzieci i Młodzieży, ul Komorowskiego 11

Publication released with the support of:


Cooperation:


Patronage of the Local Self-Government of the City of Gliwice:


Media patronage:

Yawning Maria Skłodowska-Curie has won the competition for the poster promoting this year’s Museum Night in Warsaw! Building on humorous associations, the poster will contribute to the publicity of the most popular cultural event of the capital. The award-winning work will be featured on the facade of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, among others.
Competition entries came from the entire country, and some even from abroad (Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, among others). Enquiries about the competition were made even from remote Cuba. The number of designs registered in the competition amounted to 1100.

During the proceedings of 04.04.2011, after examining the entries, the Jury of the Competition gave out the following verdict in a secret ballot:
I prize 4 000 zl for the work signed: 220679, author: Adam Świerżewski
II prize 2 500 zl for the work signed: 02031988, author: Marta Dąbrowska
III prize 1 500 zl for the work signed: 107825_1, authors:  Joanna Grochocka, Piotr Jackowski

Distinctions: Joanna Grochocka [Warsaw], Agnieszka Ziemiszewska [Łódź], Paulina Irena Rek [Mińsk Mazowiecki] and Dagna Krzystanek [Gliwice]  – distinction for the motto from Bęc Zmiana Foundation

See all designs +HERE

The competition was targeted at students and graduates of artistic and design faculties of higher schools of all levels, both from Poland and abroad. The task consisted in designing a poster to promote this year’s edition of the Museum Night in Warsaw, scheduled for May 14th. The poster was to refer to the native Varsovian, twice awarded Nobel Prize winner Maria Skłodowska-Curie.
The competition was organised by Bęc Zmiana Foundation and commissioned by the City of Warsaw, the organiser of the Museums Night in Warsaw.

<< Adam Świerżewski, I prize

Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Coffeehouse Literatka and the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Wrocław are proud to invite you to a meeting with the authors and the debate around the book To Photography! by Marek Krajewski and Rafał Drozdowski.

More on the authors and the book +HERE
Comments by Sebastian Cichocki (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw): +HERE

TO PHOTOGRAPHY! TOWARDS A RADICAL PROGRAM OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY
debate around the book by Rafał Drozdowski and Marek Krajewski
time: 14.04, Thursday, 18.30
venue: Wrocław, Kawiarnia Literatka, Rynek 56/57
hosts: Marcin Drabek and Piotr Jakub Fereński from the Institute of Cultural Studies of the University of Wrocław.

The exhibition I Rule (and I Manage) features the latest works from Janusz Łukowicz, explained by the artist as follows: I don’t want to stay aside when there are so many interesting things going on. I don’t think they are too many. All you need to do is to tame them. I try to control the situation and keep an eye on everything. I guide a plastic bag rolling on the street, pushed by the wind. A thrown boomerang does not just fly in the air – it’s a registered letter sent to an unknown address. At least I can be sure it will come back to me. You never know with the forces of nature and laws of physics, but you always trust an institution. I want to control telephone conversations. I arrange them according to a predictable pattern and avoid references to any difficult topics. I also stay alert queueing at the post office. Every day I take out the number 666 from the queueing machine.

Janusz Łukowicz (1968) – studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Imbued with wit, sometimes even provocative, his projects pursue a critique of consumptionism and the rules of free market. Author of: Reception on the Occasion of Obtaining the Passport of “Polityka” (2007), Petty Swindles (2008) and the neon KRYZYS [crisis], which inaugurated Bęc Zmiana’s new venue in Mokotowska St. during the Biednale of 2009.

time: 1.04-1.05.2011

venue: Warszawa, Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65

<<Janusz Łukowicz: Error, print screen, 2009

After the meeting in Warsaw, which enjoyed much interest on the part of the photographic milieus, the time has come to take Poznań. Thus, Marek Krajewski and Rafał Drozdowski will have a chance to present To Photography! Towards a Radical Program of Visual Sociology in the city in which they are professionally active. The authors will talk about the outcome of their work on a radical programme of a new outlook on photography and its role in the contemporary world.

Two esteemed Polish sociologists – Rafał Drozdowski and Marek Krajewski – have just published one of the most significant books on photography of the 21st century. The theses laid out in the book To Photography! Towards a Radical Program of Visual Sociology are radical indeed, and presented in an exquisite style – Sebastian Cichocki, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

More on the authors and the book +HERE
Comments by Sebastian Cichocki (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw): +HERE
Video footage from the Warsaw premiere of the book +HERE

time: 31.03, Thursday, 18.00
venue: Poznań, SPOT, Dolna Wilda 87
participants: the AUTHORS and Marianna Michałowska (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Piotr Wołyński (Artistic University in Poznań), Krzysztof Pijarski (University of Warsaw, The Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź)
moderator: Lechosław Olszewski (SPOT Foundation)

Partner of the meeting:

Artzin polE has been coming out since 2009 with the effort of students and graduates of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. The home-made zin is an independent display channel, shedding light on the works of young, experiment-oriented artists. polE is also a platform to connect artists hailing from various circles, as well as writers and musicians. polE is a distribution channel, and at the same time an object of art in its own right – it integrates the artistic society and triggers a plethora of meaningful interactions. Recent issues of polE are author’s features, conceived by one artist, who may sometimes invite others to give a hand.

Author Piotr Grabowski on the latest face of polE: "Ping Flood" is a hacker attack on a net server. Flooding the server with standard PING signals causes an overload and breaks the connection. In polE#11 we use photos, collages, charts, digital models, images and texts to tell the story of the city and the city dwellers, stricken by a virtual deluge. polE#11 is one of the possible realisations of the set, created by my texts and visual works.
 
The premiere of the latest issue of the artzin polE will see some of the covered works put on display.

Piotr Grabowski (1979) – studied at the University of Warsaw and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, debuting with the exhibition Inferno. Not Found at the BWA Gallery in Zielona Góra. Awarded scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, he also contributes with texts to ResPublika Nowa and taps into the potential of painting, photography, digital images and pitchfork to raise anxiety, mingle, deliberate, bite and punch.

time: 17.03, Thursday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw

<<< Piotr Grabowski: polE#11, 2011

Since 2007, Monika Dróżyńska has been spending her spring and summer strolls taking photos of inscriptions that emerge spontaneously on the walls. The collection of illegal messages makes up an embroidery pattern book, which the artist then comes back to during long winter nights. The urban space-inspired Winter Activities have been taken further with the project Urban Embroidery.

The project saw six embroideries presented – in the form of an urban calendar – on large-scale advertising screens of Videoboard in Cracow, Warsaw, Wrocław, Legnica and Opole from September 2010 to February 2011. The artist thus managed to lawfully reintroduce into the city the inscriptions, which are a spontaneous manifestation of the feelings of the inhabitants. At Bęc Zmiana, we present a selection of embroideries from the years 2007-2011 and the documentation of the project Urban Embroidery. Both projects are included in the exhibition After Word, to be opened at Bunkier Sztuki in Cracow, curated by Magdalena Ujma and Karolina Harazim.

 Monika Dróżyńska comments on her activities:Winter activities are these most pleasurable things that we do in the comfort of our own house, when winter sets the rhythm and the pattern of work. The inspiration comes from the fascination with the city, the inscriptions on the walls, the voice of others, who use illegal channels to comment on reality. After long strolls, which give me the opportunity to come across this urban poetry, it’s great to come back home and process the verses as you like. The sacrosanct ritual: tea, radio and embroidery. These repeated activities usher in peace and relief. It’s like having your favourite cake, which you get daily from your local confectioner.

Monika Drożyńska (1979) – Cracow-based artist, designer, performer, installation author, cultural animator. Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Interested in the tensions on the border of the private and the public sphere. Runs a cycle of workshops on contemporary art for adults at the National Museum in Cracow. Awarded scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Lives and works in Cracow. www.monika.drozynska.pl

time: 21.03, Monday, g. 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw

<<< Monika Drożyńska, from the cycle of urban embroidery

In her book, sociologist Monika Rosińska makes a bold diagnosis of the social consciousness of Polish designers, presenting at the same time the theory and practice of design.

Rosińka’s diagnoses, as well as the theoretical and practical face of design will be discussed by: Monika ROSIŃSKA, Tomasz RYGALIK (designer), Katarzyna ROJ (BWA Design Wrocław) oraz Łukasz DRGAS(Magazyn Praga). The meeting will be hosted by Romuald DEMIDENKO.

More on the book: +HERE

time: 22.03, Tuesday, 19.00
venue: CK Nowy Wspaniały Świat, ul. Nowy Świat 63, Warsaw

Publication supported by the National Centre for Culture


Partner of the meeting: Cultural Centre Nowy Wspaniały Świat

Feel free to join meetings with Cecylia Malik, young artist from Cracow, who climbed one tree a day for a year since 25 September 2009. Thus, an extraordinary cycle of 365 trees came into being, inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel from 1957, The Baron in the Trees.

The Warsaw meeting with Cecylia Malik, awarded the title of Culturist of 2010 [Kulturystka Roku 2010] and the award Cultural Highs [Kulturalne Odloty] will be hosted by Sylwia Hutnik. These events celebrate the premiere of the album 365 Tress published by Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

- My action lasted exactly for a year, i.e. 365 days, during which I climbed 365 trees, a different one each day. It is my diary, but also my private rebellion, my little revolt. - as Cecylia Malik describes her project.

The photographs released in the form of an album are accompanied by texts from several authors, among others, Sylwia Chutnik, Adam Wajrak and numerous enthusiasts of Cecylia Malik’s action, who suggest various ways of interpreting 365 trees, from emancipatory threads, ecology, the phenomenon of reclaiming public space by city dwellers, to a purely adventure-related reading.
Crowds of girls will want to climb higher than one can, higher than one lives. To the clouds, or maybe even stars. They will look from above at their house to date with its suddenly microscopic plasma TV screen.
Sylwia Chutnik

Although Cecylia is a painter, her tree project is for me not exclusively artistic. It is related to nature, because it gives trees back to us, people.
Adam Wajrak

Cecylia Malik – graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Co-founder of Art Farm and Small Bunkier Sztuki Club in Cracow. Awarded the title of “Culturist of 2010” [“Kulturystka roku 2010”] for the project 365 Trees – award of the Instructors of Radio Cultural Centre of Polish Radio Programme 3. Awarded the prize Cultural Highs [Kulturalne Odloty] by the readers of “Gazeta Wyborcza” in Cracow.

Sylwia Chutnik – specialist in cultural studies, writer. Awarded the Polityka Passport prize in literature for the year 2008. Graduate of Gender Studies. Head of MaMa Foundation dealing with mothers’ rights. Belongs to the Women’s Association of the 8th of March. Warsaw guide leading tours of her own design following the traces of eminent women.

MEETINGS WITH CECYLIA MALIK: AUTHOR OF THE PROJECT 365 TREES
CRACOW: 10.02 (Thursday), 19.00, Tourist Services Centre, 11 Powiśle St.
WARSAW: 14.02.2011 (Monday), 18.30, Club-Cafe Chłodna 25
 
!!DON’T MISS: FORTHCOMING MEETINGS WITH CECYLIA!!
SANOK: 5.03.2011, Tuesday, 18.00, Galeria Bazar Sztuki, ul. 2 Pułk. Strzelców Podhalańskich 1
GLIWICE: 8.03.2011, Tuesday, 17.30, Galeria Miejska MpiK, Rynek 4-5
ŁÓDŹ: 23.03.2011, Wednesday, 18.00, bookshop Mała Litera, MS^2 , ul.Ogrodowa 19
KATOWICE: 24.03.2011, Thursday, 18.00, Rondo Sztuki, Rondo im. gen. J. Ziętka 1
KRAKÓW: 9.05.2011, 17.00, Biblioteka dla Dzieci i Młodzieży ul. Komorowskiego 11

Publication released with the support of:


Cooperation:
 

Patronage of the Local Self-Government of the City of Gliwice:
 

Media patronage:

This year, Museums at Night in Warsaw is scheduled for May 14. The promo poster competition is addressed to pupils, students and graduates of artistic schools at any level, both in Poland and abroad.

The poster is to be: modern, clear, legible and refer to the native Varsovian, twice awarded Nobel Prize winner Maria Skłodowska-Curie, whose year we are currently celebrating on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her Nobel in chemistry.

The works will be subject to evaluation by the Jury comprising: Katarzyna Ratajczyk (director of the City Promotion Department), Andrzej Mańkowski (acting as the deputy director of the City Promotion Department, Artur Frankowski (Graphic Design Creators’ Association, Fontarte studio), Grzegorz Piątek (artistic director of Warsaw’s candidacy to the title of ECC 2016), Czesława Frejlich (editor in-chief of “2+3D” quarterly), Jerzy Porębski (dean of the Faculty of Industrial Design, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), Bogna Świątkowska (head of Bęc Zmiana New Culture Foundation)

Submission deadline: do 28.03
Awards: 1st prize: 4 000 PLN, 2nd prize: 2 500 PLN, 3rd prize: 1 500 PLN Competition results shall be announced: 5.04.2011

The competition is organised by Bęc Zmiana Foundation upon the commission of the City of Warsaw – organiser of Museums at Night in Warsaw

Secretariat of the competition: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, 65/7 Mokotowska St., 00-533 Warsaw bec@funbec.eu, tel. 22 827 64 62, 22 625 51 24;

AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD (in Polish):
Regulations of the competition - PDF
Attachment 1 - PDF
Attachment 2 - PDF
Attachment 3 - PDF
Attachment 4 - PDF

Please feel kindly invited to the lecture of Dariusz Bałszczyk, author of the monograph on the architect Juliusz Żórawski. The book was released in late 2010 by the SALIX ALBA publishing house.

Juliusz Żórawski (1898-1967) – is one of the most esteemed and many-sided avantgarde architects, designer of modernist tenements from the second half of the 1930s, inspired by the theories and architectural practice of Le Corbusier. After the war, he did not manage to erect any building in Warsaw and his attempts at continuing academic teaching work at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology were equally unsuccessful. Following numerous conflicts, he moved and settled down in Cracow, where he continued his teaching and research activity, becoming in the course of time one of the most eminent architectural theorists in Poland.

Dariusz Błaszczyk (1965) - art historian and film director by education. Cooperates with Polish Radio Theatre.

time: 2.02, Wednesday, g. 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
applications welcome at bec@funbec.eu

Cecylia Malik, young artist from Cracow climbed one tree a day for a year since 25 September 2009. Thus, an extraordinary cycle of 365 trees came into being, inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel from 1957, The Baron in the Trees..

My action lasted exactly for a year, i.e. 365 days, during which I climbed 365 trees, a different one each day. It is my diary, but also my private rebellion, my little revolt. Cecylia Malik

The photographs released in the form of an album are accompanied by texts from several authors, among others, Sylwia Chutnik, Adam Wajrak and numerous enthusiasts of Cecylia Malik’s action, who suggest various ways of interpreting 365 trees, from emancipatory threads, ecology, the phenomenon of reclaiming public space by city dwellers, to a purely adventure-related reading.

Crowds of girls will want to climb higher than one can, higher than one lives. To the clouds, or maybe even stars. They will look from above at their house to date with its suddenly microscopic plasma TV screen.
Sylwia Chutnik

Although Cecylia is a painter, her tree project is for me not exclusively artistic. It is related to nature, because it gives trees back to us, people.
Adam Wajrak

Cecylia Malik graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Co-founder of Art Farm and Small Bunkier Sztuki Club in Cracow. Awarded the title of “Culturist of 2010” [“Kulturystka roku 2010”] for the project 365 Trees – award of the Instructors of Radio Cultural Centre of Polish Radio Programme 3. Nominated to the award Cultural Highs [Kulturalne Odloty] of “Gazeta Wyborcza” in Cracow (results 5.02.2011).

CECYLIA MALIK: 365 TREES
album premiere: 4.02.2011
publisher: Bęc Zmiana New Culture Foundation, Warsaw 2011
First edition
ISBN 978-83-62418-07-7

Publication released with the support of:


Cooperation:


Patronage of the Local Self-Government of the City of Gliwice:


Media patronage:

The disappearing wall paintings, traces of consumer society of the communist era in Poland will be the subject of the debate participated by: Anna Brzezińska-Czerska, initiator of the website www.blizejkonsumenta.pl documenting old frescoes and advertising neon lights, artist Dominik Lejman, co-author of the project Best Before (+DETAILS HERE) and Bartosz Stępień, author of the book Łódzkie Murale - niedoceniona grafika użytkowa PRL-u and founder of the websitewww.murale.mnc.pl

Monumental propaganda frescoes and advertising murals, which increasingly covered the walls of Polish buildings in the 1970s, enjoy nowadays a lively interest on the part of visual culture researchers and artists, constituting the subject-matter of new publications, websites and artistic undertakings. What does the revived interest in these remnants of the Gierek era stem from? What can communist murals and frescoes arouse today but nostalgia? Is there any room left in the space of contemporary cities for social and educational advertisements?
Introduction: Tomasz Fudala
Moderation: Miesto (kolektyw vlep[v]net)

Time: 26.01, 18
Venue: Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, ul. Pańska 3
Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

In the book Too Photography!, the authors outline a radical programme for a new perspective on photography and its role in the contemporary world. They don’t deal with images and the content of photographs. They are most interested in what they conceal and veil, i.e. technology, human activities related to storing, cataloguing, processing, destroying photos and their display, as well as in the social behaviour of the owners of photo equipment. The book presents a new approach to the broadly understood phenomenon of photography and its impact on shaping the social and cultural landscape.

Two esteemed Polish sociologists – Rafał Drozdowski and Marek Krajewski – have just published one of the most significant books on photography of the 21st century. The theses laid out in the book To Photography! Towards a Radical Program of Visual Sociology are radical indeed, and the style of presentation is exquisite – Sebastian Cichocki, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Rafał Drozdowski (ur. 1961) – habilitated doctor, professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, director of the Institute of Sociology, executive of the Department of Quotidian Sociology at the Institute of Sociology. From 1991 to 2009 member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers.

Marek Krajewski (ur. 1969) – sociologist, professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Frequently contributes with articles devoted to popular culture, consumption and art as well as books: Kultury kultury popularnej [Cultures of Popular Culture] (ed. I Poznań 2003, ed. II 2005), POPamiętane [POPremembered] (Gdańsk 2006). Editor and scientific co-editor of books: W stronę socjologii przedmiotów [Towards Sociology of Objects] (Poznań 2005), Prywatnie o publicznym. Publicznie o prywatnym [Privately on the Public. Publicly on the Private] (Poznań 2007).

Order this book book: +HERE
Comments by Sebastian Cichocki (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw): +HERE

TO PHOTOGRAPHY!
TOWARDS A RADICAL PROGRAM OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY
debate around the book by Rafał Drozdowski and Marek Krajewski
time: 25.01, Tue, 19.00
venue: Yours Gallery, 33 Krakowskie Przedmieście St., Warsaw
participants: the authors and Karol Hordziej (Photomonth in Cracow), Adam Mazur (critic, curator), Paweł Bownik (photographer), moderator: Jakub Śwircz

The exhibition Beyond Earth presents a series of works by Michał Gayer, inspired by the popular science novel Beyond Earth, written by one of the pioneers of astronautics, creator of the theory of movement and space rocket model Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857- 1935). The artist comments on the book, first published in 1907, as follows: „The only science fiction novel by Tsiolkovsky, the father of the world’s cosmic space science, written in the early 20th century, extends a greatly accurate vision of space flights in 2017. Literary fantasy was founded on the author’s vast knowledge of the Cosmos. His predictions have been confirmed by accounts of Soviet astronauts from expeditions on subsequent missions of Soyuz spacecraft. One of them, A. Leonow preserved his impressions in drawings, which served as illustrations to the book”.

Michał Gayer (ur. 1984), graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, currently assistant at the Department of Painting. Co-creator of the enigmatic group Ośmiornica. Lives and works in Silesia.

Conversation with the artist was published in notes.na.6.tygodni #62
Time: 18.01-15.02
Venue: Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St.

<<< Michał Gayer, from the series Beyond Earth, 2010

The publication Best Before presents the effects of research-related and artistic work of Dominik Lejman, Karolina Wysocka and Peter Ferko, which is aimed at investigating and documenting the disappearing murals / wall paintings, the so-called “urban frescoes” catering for advertisers or propaganda of the 60s, 70s and 80s. These wall paintings have been preserved in a residual form in the Polish cityscape, remaining a vital reminder of the bygone era, which appeals to all users of the public space – not only aesthetic, but also reporting on the economic and social situation as well as initiating the relation with the past experienced on a daily basis. The photographs by three artists are supplemented with reflections of two critics – Marek Bertelik and David Crowley.

Best Before, 2008-2010
authors: Peter Ferko, Dominik Lejman, Karolina Wysocka
authors of texts: Marek Bartelik, David Crowley
graphic design: Kris Łukomski
publisher: ASP Foundation in Poznań, Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Supported by: Erste Stiftung
Bilingual Polish and English Edition

The authors of To Photography! Towards a Radical Program of Visual Sociology are not dealing with images and the content of photographs. They are most interested in what they conceal and cover, i.e. technology, human activities related to storing, cataloguing, processing, destroying photos and their display, as well as in the social behaviour of the owners of photo equipment. The book presents a new approach to the broadly understood phenomenon of photography and its impact on shaping the social and cultural landscape.

Rafał Drozdrowski (1961) – habilitated doctor, professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, director of the Institute of Sociology, executive of the Department of Quotidian Sociology at the Institute of Sociology. From 1991 to 2009 member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers.

Marek Krajewski (1969) – sociologist, professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Frequently contributes with articles devoted to popular culture, consumption and art as well as books: Kultury kultury popularnej [Cultures of Popular Culture] (ed. I Poznań 2003, ed. II 2005), POPamiętane [POPremembered] (Gdańsk 2006). Editor and scientific co-editor of books: W stronę socjologii przedmiotów [Towards Sociology of Objects] (Poznań 2005), Prywatnie o publicznym. Publicznie o prywatnym [Privately on the Public. Publicly on the Private] (Poznań 2007).

TO PHOTOGRAPHY!
TOWARDS A RADICAL PROGRAM OF VISUAL SOCIOLOGY
authors: Rafał Drozdowski, Marek Krajweski
graphic design: Błażej Pindor
publisher: New Culture Foundation Bęc Zmiana

Comment by Sebastian Cichocki / Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw: http://muzeumproqm.blogspot.com

The mechanisms of exclusion related to creativity and the possible subversive potential of the concept are the subject of the last Readings for artworkers session this year. The focus remains on the pursuit of sociological analysis of the notion of creativity.

Although creativity is universally postulated, practiced at various workshops and trainings, not all of its kinds are recognised and remunerated. Why are specific practices considered creative and therefore salaried? Can complex strategies of survival, elaborated by those who fell out of the job market, be understood in terms of creativity? Can the categories derived from neoliberal discourse be applied to the experience of people who found themselves beyond its field of vision. Can the notion of creativity be recovered for social critique? Does it still have the subversive potential in which many would like to believe? These are the topics for our debate, based on ethnographic writings by Tomasz Rakowski, among others.

host: Anna Zawadzka
special guest: Tomasz Rakowski
suggested reading: Tomasz Rakowski, Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy. Etnografia człowieka zdegradowanego

Anna Zawadzka – sociologist, works at the Ethnographic Archive of the Institute of Applied Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw, editor of “Bez Dogmatu” and “Furia”, host of the feminist broadcast “Better Late Than Never” on Tok FM radio, once co-founder of the band Duldung.

Tomasz Rakowski (1974) – ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, adjunct at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw, in constant collaboration with the Institute of Polish Culture, Warsaw University, doctor at the emergency unit of one of the hospitals in Warsaw. Focused on ethnographic methodology, phenomenology in social sciences and anthropological research on the concept of development.

time: 21.12, Tue, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

FSUW Curator: Kuba Szreder | FSUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
The FSUW 2010 project is realised with financial support from the City of Warsaw.

<<< ‘Poverty shaft mine’ [Biedaszyb] in Upper Silesia, 1920s, source: wikipedia

The Second Summit of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw is devoted to reflection on the transformations in the field of science and art. The three-day meeting will gather educators, artists, activists and culture theorists from the entire Europe. During the Congress we will work on studies of specific problems pertaining to a critical analysis of system-related conditions in a comparative perspective. This year’s FSUW Congress is to serve the purpose of mapping mechanisms of resistance and searching for alternatives to the transformation of independent institutions of culture and universities into effective and profit-oriented enterprises.

The proceedings of the Summit will be accompanied by afternoon events open for the public: Jan Simon’s exhibition “Four Pata-economic Undertakings”, presenting the principles of alternative economics, and the premiere of the new translation of the notorious book by Ivan Illich Deschooling Society. Jan Simon’s exhibition will feature, among others, “Zollskulptur” – sculpture made of smuggled cigarettes, part of the project “A Survey of Lotto Systems. Mind’s Struggle with the World” and the work “Lagos Transfer” on display at the Museum of Art in Łódź. Participants of the debate accompanying the premiere of the new translation of Illich’s Deschooling Society:  Jan Sowa, Przemysław Czapliński and Piotr Laskowski.

CREATIVE INDUSTRIES AND KNOWLEDGE FACTORIES:
ANALYSIS AND RESISTANCE
time: 7-9.12.2010, Tuesday-Thursday, 11-17.00
venue: Solec, 44 Solec St., Warsaw / www.solec.waw.pl
applications: szymon[at]funbec.eu
working language: English
hosted by: Janek Sowa, Kuba Szreder
                
COLLATERAL EVENTS:
JAN SIMON: FOUR PATA-ECONOMIC UNDERTAKINGS
exhibition opening: 7.12.2010, Tuesday, 19.00
time: 7-19.12.2010
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

IVAN ILLICH: DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
publication premiere: 8.12.2010, Wednesday, 19.30
debate: Jan Sowa, Przemysław Czapliński, Piotr Laskowski
venue: Solec, 44 Solec St., Warsaw / www.solec.waw.pl

The programme of the Summit includes the following seminars: Matteo Pasquinelli (Berlin): On the ruins of creative city | Krystian Szadkowski (Brussels/Poznan): Regaining education – conclusions from global students and workers; struggles 2006-2010 | Tomasz Szkudlarek (Gdańsk): Knowledge society and its workers | The Carrot Workers Collective (London): The carrot and the stick regulate our present: from student loans to mortgages and the imperative to creatively and flexibly self-actualise. | Kaja Pawełek (Warszawa): When vocation becomes profession. | Piotr Kowzan (Poznan): Pedagogy of debt: from migration to institutional changes | Critical Practice (London): Critical Practice: A case study of a culture in common | Heath Bunting (Bristol): A fortune of $1,000,000 begins with a single transaction | Microsillons (Geneva): The fly in fly out workshop | Kuba Mikurda (Krakow): Analysis of the National Programme for the Development of Humanities. | Radical Education Collective (Ljubljana): Beyond the factories of knowledge: for a world without capitalist exploitation | Magdalena Rek-Woźniak (Lodz): Picnic for hobos? On institutionalised culture and social exclusion in post-industrial city.
There will be a live coverage of the Summit available at: www.wuw2010.pl

FSUW Curator: Kuba Szreder | FSUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

The FSUW 2010 project is financed with support of the City of Warsaw.

Partner: Solec / www.solec.waw.pl

BOING is a family of three pieces designed by Jan Strumiłło for the specific venue on Mokotowska in Warsaw. Their function responds to precise brief. The form was born of fascination with ruled surfaces. Is is a reaction to the interior’s prismatic logic. The works of Matthew Nowicki and Waclaw Zalewski provided inspiration. Simple materials serve to explore dynamic shapes. Forces follow straight lines but as they join two different curves, complicated surfaces emerge. Rubber cables communicate tension. All these means are used to hide/show merchandise objects. Physical sensuality and tensile indiscretion are powered by solid mathematics.

Jan Strumiłło - Born in 1979 in Warsaw. Studied architecture in Poland, France and Switzerland. His M.Sc. from Warsaw University of Technology was followed by MAS from ETH in Zurich. He worked for offices in Poland and across Europe, notably JEMS in Warsaw and Baumschlager Eberle in Switzerland/Austria. In 2010 started own practice. To date he built a sports hall in Bierun (with J.& R. Szczęsny and K. Banaszewski )as well as Witryna art gallery in Warsaw. Received prizes and mentions in numerous architectural competitions. In 2008 launched an academic career as assistant to Christian Kerez at the ETH in Zurich. Presently a PhD candidate at the Warsaw University of Technology, he appeared as a visiting lecturer at the faculty of Design of Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. In 2010 with Maria Jeglińska co-founded EESTT– a think-tank devoted to the study of eastern European architecture and design. Together with Maciej Dembiński he researches innovative concepts for country houses as Strumiłło-Dembiński.

www.janstrumillo.com

<<<photo: Jakub Certowicz www.cargocollective.com/jakubcertowicz

The publication and exhibition Typespotting Warsaw documents Artur Frankowski’s typographic research across Warsaw. Where in the capital can you find the most interesting lettering and inscriptions? Do inscription forms in the city have an impact on its inhabitants? The exhibition and publication are aimed at a subjective analysis of the typographic landscape of Warsaw. During a virtual walk through the city, we are presented with selected advertisement boards, street signboards and inscriptions – examples from the past and the present of the city in the state of constant transformation.

Urban lettering is a distinct and multidimensional world. Sometimes it's arranged like layers of a birthday cake. Sometimes mixed like unidentified ingredients in a brownie. Anyhow, you don't need to leave for another city, for example predictable and orderly Brussels, to feel like "urban tourists". In the ever-changing Polish capital and with its lettering style also Varsovians can get the impression of venturing on a typographical safari.

The lettering of the capital is a mother lode of typographical inspirations. What fascinates are foil inscriptions and majuscules carved with precision in MDM (residential area in Central Warsaw) as well as neon signs with torn endings, conveying mysterious content. While roaming, you can also come across interesting findings on the pavement. These can be lettered leaflets of escort agencies containing orthography in the style of the most exquisite literature of Warsaw's futurists, which encourages collecting these cards for the sheer joy of reading about grattiss champagne drunk in the companion of various "Marylins". A stroll around the Royal Baths can bring about discoveries of an entirely different nature, such as fancy inscriptions on Stanisław August Poniatowski's solar clock, commemorating the king's name-day, on the 8th of May 1786. (Magdalena Frankowska, Typoorientation, Typespotting. Warsaw.)

Artur Frankowski – designer, typographer and typeface inventor. Co-author (alongside Magdalena Frankowska) of the book Henryk Berlewi, lecturer in typography and graphic information processing. Belongs to the International Typography Association ATypI and the Graphic Design Creators’ Association (STGU). Co-founder of the typography-design studio Fontarte.
www.fontarte.com

exhibition: 30.11-31.12.2010
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

The project is realised with financial support from the City of Warsaw
 
<< Artur Frankowski: Typespotting. Warsaw, 2010, published by Bęc Zmiana Foundation

A new Polish translation of Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society is released 34 years after the first edition. The book, discussed worldwide by progressive educators, artistic milieus demanding radical changes in culture and cultural education, is an excellent point of reference for the current Polish debate on the future of culture and social life. Deschooling Society was first published in Poland in 1976 in a then microscopic 3000 copies. The new translation features a slightly modified title and an introduction by Piotr Laskowski, Jan Sowa’s conversation with Zbigniew Libera, Hanna Kostyło’s text on the life of Illich, and drawings by Hubert Czerepok.

Instead of another reform of education, Illich postulates society without school, i.e. society that independently establishes educational networks: ephemeral, changeable, dynamic educational groups, somewhat of temporary autonomous spheres. Their creation depends on the needs that ever easier to satisfy in the era of the Internet – unrestricted access to educational resources, possibility of getting across to people who are willing to share desired abilities. But also a change in the structure of knowledge – from the pyramid, or taproot trunk into the rhizome. [Piotr Laskowski, from the introduction: Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Bęc Zmiana, 2010]

Do join us at the debate around Ivan Illich’s book, featuring: Prof Przemysław Czapliński, Piotr Laskowski and Jan Sowa.
Time: 8.12.2010 (Wednesday), 19.30
Venue: Solec, 44 Solec St., Warsaw

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) – Austrian thinker and critic of contemporary society, „humanist radical”, as Erich Fromm put it, one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century.

Przemysław Czapliński (b. 1962) – researcher in Polish culture, essayist, translator. Member of the jury of the Nike Literary Award, co-founder of the Department of Anthropology of Literature at AMU in Poznań, Ordinary Professor since 2002.

Piotr Laskowski (b. 1976) – Egyptologist, ideological historian, teacher. Co-founder and the first director of Jacek Kuroń Multicultural Humanist High School in Warsaw. Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian university in Cracow. Published Sketches from the History of Anarchism [in Polish].

Janek Sowa (ur. 1976) – Doctor of Sociology, psychologist. Co-founder of Ha!Art Corporation Publishing House. Author and editor of books in psychology, sociology and social ciritque. Lectures at the Institute of Public affairs and Centre for Humanist Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Co-author of the initiative Goldex Poldex / www.goldexpoldex.pl

Publication is part of the FSUW 2010 project financed with the support of the City of Warsaw

Published with the support of Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw



<<< Ivan Illich, Odszkolnić społeczeństwo, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw 2010. Graphic design: Grzegorz Laszuk

The Bęc window will provide you with an opportunity to admire the fabric prepared by Alevtina Kakhidze. During the meeting you will also have a chance to get a free piece of the work by the Ukrainian artist! So come to Bęc and take a piece of art back home!

* “If you look at the shop window from afar, the glittering goods will look like stars. And stars, as you well know, belong to everyone – including you.” – this is the motto of the latest work from the artist. The 300-metre long fabric presents shop windows of the most exclusive and recognised brands worldwide. It was produced in one of the factories in Łódź and designed by Kakhidze.

Alevtina Kakhidze (b. 1973) – Ukrainian artist. In 2010 in residence at the CCA in Warsaw under the a-i-r laboratory programme. Wife of the engineer and developer Vladimir Babyuk, has been negotiating business alongside her husband for thirteen years. Her frequent travels abroad and artistic residences grew unbearable for Vlad, so they decided to establish together a centre for artistic residence in the garden of their large house in the suburbs of Kiev. www.alevtinakakhidze.com

time: 20.11.2010, 12.30-14.30
vanue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Alventina Kakhidze, Fabric, 2010

The Warsaw part of the international research project The Anatomy of a Street will be recapped during the open session devoted to changes in the architectural cityscape of Eastern Europe after 1989. The meeting embraces a presentation of analysis results concerning centrally located Mokotowska St. in Warsaw, among others.

Participants: Levente Poylak and Eszter Steierhoffer (Contemporary Architecture Centre in Budapest), Grzegorz Piątek, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Wojciech Kacperski and young architects from Warsaw. The discussion preceded by a walk in Mokotowska St. led by Warsaw guides, Magdalena Śliwka and Wojciech Kacperski.

Mokotowska is a long street, situated somewhat aside, but merging various directions, crossing squares. It’s not as metropolitan as the central axes “for the people” – Marszałkowska or Jerozolimskie Avenues,but it’s metropolitan in its human scale “for a man”. Mokotowska is a very pluralist street. The inscriptions and visual info on the walls of the tenements and their backyards reflect the same social composition as we can see in the street. From little inscriptions praising capital football teams, through declarations of love, advertisements from the dawn of Polish transition, large letters announcing “sale” and “discount”, stencil graffitis by activists, graffiti, to posh signboards and bright shop windows of internationally present brands. Mokotowska, lateral but the most central of streets, human and democratic, reflecting the ongoing transformations in our society.
Text: Miesto/ www.miesto.pl

PROGRAMME OF THE SESSION THE ANATOMY OF A STREET*:
Hosted by: Grzegorz Piątek
Aleksandra Wasilkowska: Marketmeter. Creeping Trade on the Example of Mokotowska St.
Wojciech Kasperski: Mokotowska Street, New Sentiment
Sebastian Bałut (590architekci), Małgorzata Kuciewicz (Centala), Simone De Iacobis: Warsaw Smile. Mokotowska, Bracka, Zgoda
Eszter Steierhoffer, Levente Polyak: The Anatomy of a Street, Budapest

*The Anatomy of a Street is a project initiated by the Contemporary Architecture Centre in Budapest, embracing “case studies” of four streets in central locations of four Eastern European capitals: Budapest, Bratislava, Prague and Warsaw. www.anatomyofastreet.org

Time: 20.11.2010 (Saturday), 12.30-16.00
Walk: 12.30, corner of Mokotowska and Hoża St., Warsaw
Session: 14.00, Info Qultura, 4 Konstytucji Sq., Warsaw



<< phot. Miesto

IVAN ILLICH: DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
The Free/Slow University of Warsaw proudly presents Deschooling Society – notorious book by one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. Ivan Illich portrays a vision of society without school, i.e. such that independently creates educational networks. A must-read for the time marked by the ongoing debate on the future of educational system in Poland. www.wuw2010.pl

Publication supported by The City of Warsaw and Austrian Cultural Forum

 
MONIKA ROSIŃSKA: RETHINKING USE/LIFE. OBJECTS. SOCIAL LIFE
What is design and how does it function in Poland? We present a sociological perspective on the matter, with the introduction by Marek Krajewski. Where do objects surrounding us on a daily basis come from and who are the people that design them? Find out what needs Polish design caters for.

Publication supported by National Centre for Culture

One of the founding myths of contemporary art is the belief in the position of the author – a brilliant artist whose signature turns a lavatory pan, straw cubes or an encyclopedia entry into a work of art. Pierre Bourdieu suggests that art, as the foremost creation of contemporaneity, does not differ significantly from the magic of primeval societies. In the view of anthropology, one has to shift the critical eye from the magician to the entire magic community, in search for the rules of the magic world. In our case, it boils down to examining the very domain of art. At the forthcoming Readings, we will debate on Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that both the artist themselves and their “work” are secondary to artistic circulation. A work of art does not exist without museums, art dealers, specialist journals and artistic schools. On the basis of the example of the emergence of conceptual art in the 1970s, we will discuss who, how and why creates the creator.

Sugessted readings:
Alexander Alberro, Conceptual art and politics of publicity
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, excerpts: The Production of Belief, Historical Anamnesis and the Return of the Repressed, The Social Genesis of the Eye
Additional readings:
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art

time: 16.11.2010, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

hosted by: Teresa Święćkowska, Kuba Szreder

FUW curator: Kuba Szreder
 / FUW organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the City of Warsaw
<<< Umberto Boccioni: I, We, Boccioni (1905-7)

The exhibition Global Prosperity, presented in Gdańsk and Warsaw is a result of the expedition undertaken by Max Cegielski and photographer Michał Szlaga to Alang, in the Gujarat State, India – home of one of the largest ship scrap yards worldwide. There are currently 50 000 vessels roaming the seas of the world, whose repairs simply don’t pay off after 25-30 years. Several hundred ships are scrapped in Asia per annum – recycling is profitable on a large scale only where low-cost workforce is available – gaining the state industry ca. 15-25 mln tons of steel to reuse. 90% of the ships are scrapped in Indian Alang, Gujarat.

We ventured to Alang not because it is the largest and the oldest place like that worldwide, but because five container ships built for India in the Lenin Shipyard, Gdańsk in 1980 were scrapped here. They were launched when Poland was in the course of shaping its new mythology, during the strikes in the era of Solidarity. Christening vessels with names of poets-saints, India, independent since 1947, transferred historic figures into the industrial epoch, thus merging modernity with ancient times.

In Alang we expected to see a burial ground, but according to the Hinduist concept  of incarnations, nothing in nature evaporates, and the same pertains to global economic circulation. Contemporary analysis of the flow of cash and good matches surprisingly well the ancient philosophy of metempsychosis, although the scrap yard didn’t seem to share anything with the classic, metaphysical myth of the subcontinent. It is not a graveyard, but a place where matter is born anew. Metal particles don’t disappear, but integrate into new forms. Indeed, the life of ships comes to an end here, but other entities emerge in their place. Energy does not disappear, on the contrary, it is used again. Nothing is wasted, hundreds of thousands of people make a living on this industry. On the beach alone, twenty thousand workers toil during peak periods. Following this most difficult phase, ships are fragmented into smaller and larger parts, transported into the mainland, processed and sold. Global prosperity is the dream of both shipyard workers from Gdańsk and Hindus from Alang. globalprosperity.blox.pl

Concept and text: Max Cegielski, Photos: Michał Szlaga, Video: Kuba Czerwiński

Gdańsk: 15-30.11.2010, Wyspa Institute of Art, 1/145 B Doki St.
Warsaw: 24.11. 19.00, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski,  2 Jazdów St.

Project realised with the financial support of:
National Centre for Culture


Partners: European Solidarity Centre, The City of Gdańsk,
Wyspa Institute of Art, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw
     
            
Media partners: 

<<<Michał Szlaga, from the cycle Global Prosperity, 2010

+ATTENTION: We are looking for employees of the shipyard in 1980 who were involved in the construction of container ships Kalidas, Tulsidas Ramdas, Ravidas and Kabirdas (or Chandidas). Please contact: bec@funbec.eu

The exhibition Global Prosperity, presented in Gdańsk and Warsaw is a result of the expedition undertaken by Max Cegielski and photographer Michał Szlaga to Alang, in the Gujarat State, India – home of one of the largest ship scrap yards worldwide. There are currently 50 000 vessels roaming the seas of the world, whose repairs simply don’t pay off after 25-30 years. Several hundred ships are scrapped in Asia per annum – recycling is profitable on a large scale only where low-cost workforce is available – gaining the state industry ca. 15-25 mln tons of steel to reuse. 90% of the ships are scrapped in Indian Alang, Gujarat.

We ventured to Alang not because it is the largest and the oldest place like that worldwide, but because five container ships built for India in the Lenin Shipyard, Gdańsk in 1980 were scrapped here. They were launched when Poland was in the course of shaping its new mythology, during the strikes in the era of Solidarity. Christening vessels with names of poets-saints, India, independent since 1947, transferred historic figures into the industrial epoch, thus merging modernity with ancient times.

In Alang we expected to see a burial ground, but according to the Hinduist concept  of incarnations, nothing in nature evaporates, and the same pertains to global economic circulation. Contemporary analysis of the flow of cash and good matches surprisingly well the ancient philosophy of metempsychosis, although the scrap yard didn’t seem to share anything with the classic, metaphysical myth of the subcontinent. It is not a graveyard, but a place where matter is born anew. Metal particles don’t disappear, but integrate into new forms. Indeed, the life of ships comes to an end here, but other entities emerge in their place. Energy does not disappear, on the contrary, it is used again. Nothing is wasted, hundreds of thousands of people make a living on this industry. On the beach alone, twenty thousand workers toil during peak periods. Following this most difficult phase, ships are fragmented into smaller and larger parts, transported into the mainland, processed and sold. Global prosperity is the dream of both shipyard workers from Gdańsk and Hindus from Alang. globalprosperity.blox.pl

Concept and text: Max Cegielski, Photos: Michał Szlaga, Video: Kuba Czerwiński

Gdańsk: 15-30.11.2010, Wyspa Institute of Art, 1/145 B Doki St.
Warsaw: 24.11. 19.00, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski,  2 Jazdów St.

Project realised with the financial support of:
National Centre for Culture


Partners: European Solidarity Centre, The City of Gdańsk,
Wyspa Institute of Art, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw
     
            
Media partners: 

<<<Michał Szlaga, from the cycle Global Prosperity, 2010

+ATTENTION: We are looking for employees of the shipyard in 1980 who were involved in the construction of container ships Kalidas, Tulsidas Ramdas, Ravidas and Kabirdas (or Chandidas). Please contact: bec@funbec.eu

Today, Gdańsk Shipyard exists in collective awareness primarily as a venue where strikes took place and history was created, and not a place of hard and humdrum quotidian labour. Overwhelmed by symbols, sacred dates, names and political conflicts, we have forgotten that industrial action was not the only activity shipbuilders were involved in. The shipyard was their home, the venue where many of them came in their youth to receive training, the enterprise where they spent most of their lives. Their work gave them a sense of pride. Even now they feel attached to the local landscape: cranes, seagulls and vessels that they built with their own hands. Now ships are produced by qualified workers in China and Korea, who haven’t got the faintest idea of Occupational Safety and Health regulations, fixed working hours or the Solidarity. After some years, even cheaper, uneducated peasants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India cut the fleet into pieces.

In Alang we expected to see a burial ground, but instead we found a place where matter is born anew. Indeed, here the life of ships comes to an end, but other entities emerge in their place. Energy does not disappear, on the contrary, it is used again. Nothing is wasted, hundreds of thousands of people make a living on this industry. On the beach alone, twenty thousand workers toil during peak periods. Danger looms everywhere, a cut bow can fall off too soon, gases explode in engine rooms, objects fall down, asbestos contaminates the place – on average, one person dies here each day. Following this most difficult phase, ships are fragmented into smaller and larger parts, transported into the mainland, processed and sold. Here as well nobody has ever heard of safety regulations, but one of the workers asked: Am I supposed to die of hunger or of asbestos poisoning?

Conception and text: Max Cegielski, Photo: Michał Szlaga, Video: Kuba Czerwiński

Gdańsk: 15-30.11.2010, Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, ul. Doki 1/145 B
Warsaw: 24.11. g.19, CSW Ujazdowski Castle, ul. Jazdów 2

The project is realised with financial support of: Narodowe Centrum Kultury

Partners: Europejskie Centrum Solidarności, Miasto Gdańsk, Instytut Sztuki Wyspa
       
Patronage:

<<<Michał Szlaga, Global Prosperity, 2010

At the forthcoming Readers for Artworkers we will examine the notion of creativity and investigate its political potential, thus continuing our reflection on the transition from the creativity of production to the production of creativity, or in other words, from the hegemony of working masses to “cognitive capitalism”. Are we under the rule of an entirely new law of value? Are art and science indeed new models of production in the very core of contemporary capitalism? Have we already made the transition from the production of commodities to the direct production of life? Theorists of cognitive capitalism give a positive answer to these questions. It is not subjugated living labour that constitutes the support of global economy – it is creativity. Just one more effort will suffice to set it free from the fetters imposed by the Empire and jump through to the kingdom of liberty.

Michał Kozłowski (born in 1974) – philosopher. Deals with history, capitalism, modernity, power, subject, desire and their appurtenances. Studied philosophy and law at the University of Warsaw, philosophy at KU Leuven, social sciences at EHESS in Paris. Co-creator of the “Bez Dogmatu” quarterly, co-editor of “Le Monde Diplomatique Polish Edition”. He lectures in the history of early modern philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw.

Suggested reading:
1) Moulier Boutang: Cognitive Capitalism and Entrepreneurship, +LINK
2) Radical machines against the techno-empire. From utopia to network,+LINK
3) Franco Berardi: What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today? Subjectivation, Social Composition, Refusal of Work, +LINK
4) Stevphen Shukaitis:  Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life, +LINK

time: 2.11.2010, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

hosted by: Michał Kozłowski

FUW curator: Kuba Szreder
 / FUW organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation


FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the City of Warsaw

<< General Motors assembly line, 1920s

Is it possible to decrease the dimensions of flats and improve the quality of life of their inhabitants at the same time? This question will be answered by the architect Jakub Szczęsny as well as Tomasz Gancarczyk and Piotr Fabirkiewicz, whose research stems from reflection upon rampant consumptionist appetite for space resulting from cultural traumas, fashion, commercial aesthetic models and TV series delivering expertise on the manner of habitation.

The issue of availability of flats has long occupied architects, urban planners and economists acting upon the assumption that thinking of cheap or less expensive houses is to begin with reflection on the needs of contemporary people. At the beginning of the 1980s marketing specialists, supported by their dependent architects, began to fulfill the main role in the reflection on habitation. Since then, the functional programme of new architecture has stemmed mainly from the willingness to maximise profit and the resultant knowledge of the needs of precisely determined target groups as well as the image of life, promoted by the media and pop culture, that these groups desire to lead in the houses and flats of their own.

The exhibition comprises a spatial installation and projects for reduced habitation typologies. 

Jakub Szczęsny – born in 1973. Architect, lecturer and curator. Studied at the Paris La Défense School, the Faculty of Architecture of ETSAB in Barcelona and at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology. Member of the CENTRALA architectural office. Co-author of, among others, sports hall in Bieruń, temporary installation of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, interiors of the new Cervantes Institute in Warsaw and the architectural entourage of Polish video avant-garde exhibitions in Warsaw’s CCA and the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao. Lives and works in Warsaw. www.centrala.net.pl

Tomasz Gancarczyk – born in 1984. Architect. Undergraduate of the Faculty of Architecture at Warsaw University of Technology. Since 2008 he has co-operated with the architectural office CENTRALA. Lives in Warsaw. www.tomekgancarczyk.pl

Piotr Fabirkiewicz – born in 1985. Architect. Student of the Faculty of Architecture at Warsaw University of Technology. Co-operates with the architectural office CENTRALA. Lives and works in Berlin.

time: 26.10 - 22.11
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
www.synchronicity.pl 

The project Synchronicity_3 is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw.


<< Le Corbusier: Modulor

The exhibition The Future in Culture: European Funds for Good Investments features 35 among 90 buildings of cultural institutions realised with the support of European funds for culture, among others, in Białystok, Częstochowa, Bielska-Biała, Olsztyn, Pacanów, Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Zakopane Gardzienice, Łódź, Wrocław and Warsaw. Investments are carried out with the funds of the Operational Programme – Infrastructure and Environment, EEA Grants and Norway Grants, among others.

The architectural office WWAA (authors of the Polish Pavilion at EXPO, Shanghai) vested the exhibition with an original visual form, which is worth attention in its own right. Usual racks and boards were replaced with colourful panels and tapes with graphic representations, made specifically for the purpose, of recently built seats of cultural institutions. The form was inspired by the tradition of topping out an object under construction. The majority of projects on display are actually at the final stage of completion. The structure consists of transparent, multi-colour PVC stripes, attached to an elliptical frame.

The exhibition comes as a result of co-operation among the National Centre for Culture, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, WWAA Studio and the Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

Time: 19.10-15.11
Venue: Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście, corner of Karowa St.
www.kulturasieliczy.pl

<< WWAA, The Future in Culture: European Funds for Good Investments

The author remains a central figure in the reflection on literature, art and creative work. Death of the author, announced by Roland Barthes, remains wishful thinking and not an accurate description of reality. Despite critique, romantic individualism is still a lively and dominant concept, which perfectly matches the ideology of information capitalism, where everyone is an author and all, event most trivial, products of the mind are bound by copyright.

Following Barthes’s and Foucault’s critique, we will examine the romantic, individualistic concept of the author and the historic conditions of its emergence as well as functions performed by this concept in various domains, e.g. the art market or literary critique. It will also provide a context for discussing alternative concepts of creative work on the example of the idea of thought collectives by Ludwik Fleck.

Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961) – microbiologist, specialist in immunology and the forerunner of the sociology of knowledge. His concepts were 30 years ahead of the notion of scientific paradigm forged by Thomas Kuhn. According to Fleck, contemporary science is based on outdated values. The discrepancy between contemporary practice and old inadequate theory results in the loss of independence of science in favour of industry and politics.

Teresa Święćkowska – scientific employee at the Institute of Information and Book Studies of the University of Warsaw, editor of “Bez Dogmatu”.

Suggested reading:
1. R. Barthes, Death of the Author, in: Image-Music-Text (Hill and Wang, New York 1977). First published in 1968.
2. M. Foucault, What is an Author, in: Harari, Josué V., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, New York 1979). First published in 1969.
3. L. Fleck, How the Bordet-Wassermann Reaction Originated and How a Scientific Discovery Arises in General (Polish text first published in 1934).

time: 19.10.2010, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

hosted by: Teresa Święćkowska

FUW curator: Kuba Szreder
 / FUW organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation


FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the City of Warsaw

<< Portrait of an unknown writer, phot. Paul Marsan Dornac

Heath Bunting is an artist known in Poland mainly for his urban survival projects, although physical critique of urban space is only a part of his activity. Bunting deals with the issues of status, power and economics. He gained artistic education by himself and fills the gap resulting from his lack of obedience with a sense of humour.

The exhibition at Bęc Zmiana features, among others, a series of status maps – graphic representations of formal and legal “identifications” of a given individual, whose status demands an ongoing collection of data: date of birth, ID series and number, passport, registered address, etc. Observation of the maps will enable an analysis of status data owned by an EU citizen, a Pole, and the artist himself.

The works on display also include: superweed kit (a box containing a series of genetically modified grains), day plan book (publication devoted to the economy of a day and effective planning), promissory notes (bills of exchange issued by the artist, which oblige him to deliver an artistic act of a determined financial value).

Heath Bunting – co-founder of the net.art movement and founder of www.irational.org. In the 1990s he was involved in hacking and spamming activity. He calls himself a “hacktivist”. In 2002 he realised the project Borderxing, presented at London’s Tate Modern, where he documented his year-long trip across Europe, during which he repeatedly crossed borders “illegally” in places beyond border guards’ control.

time: 18.10-25.10
opening: 18.10 Mon, 18.30
curator: Paulina Jeziorek
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Denny Island, phot. Heath Bunting

At the Fringe is an exhibition whose sheer title speaks for itself. ‘I show works that I value because they attracted my attention and made me anxious’, the curator explains. Some of them have long awaited display. The works at the exhibition are simple and surprising, together they create an explosive mix and explore the recesses of imagination.

Taking photographs of a city from an airplane gives an extremely objective insight into its structure. Mechanical, documentary manner applied in the work Warsaw from Above by Mikołaj Długosz allows to tackle the matter of the end of privacy in the world that is constantly digitalised by cameras, and delivers a great aesthetic pleasure at the same time. Edible work by Tom Bogaert, Black Box, seductive because of its monumentality, stands in silence like Pandora’s Box. The headless protagonist of the work Socks Holder by Ariel Schlesinger is a dandy in dirty socks full of holes. What happened to him? Is that a joke? Did someone get too close to him? Equally mysterious and murky is the work by Ivo Nikic, crystal clear and dirty at the same time. It will keep you awake at night!

curator: Katarzyna Wyrozębska/Interview Gallery* The gallery where Wyrozębska conducts live interviews with invited artists

time: 5-15.10, opening: 5.10, Tue, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<<Ivo Nikić: Gloves, 2009

The new cycle of meetings Readings for Artworkers* will begin with a seminar devoted to tracing the path from the creativity of production to production of the creativity or, to put it differently, from the hegemony of working masses to “cognitive capitalism”.

Releasing creative powers inherent in man or human collective has been one of the main topoi in emancipatory theory at least since the beginning of the 19th century. Optimal conditions for human creativity to flourish have always been considered. There were also attempts at identifying what separates the creative nature of human from its proper vocation and at indicating true creative social and historic forces. Creativity is to be an aim of struggle, as well as the weapon aimed against what is stiff, predictable, rickety, mechanical and dead.

What occurred after the revolt of 1968 was a revaluation of the role of creativity in capitalist relations of production and social relations. Creativity became a programme, virtue and a pet of capitalists, governments, authorities and educators. Thus, capitalism propagated the utopia of synthesis of a creator and a producer in every single one of us. An artist, a scientist, an intellectual – restless and disobedient spirits – became the productive forces of the contemporary world, its architects and builders. What was the essence of that revolutionary, yet subtle change? To what extent was it about ideology, deeply enrooted practice and discourse organising our world view?

Hosted by: Michał Kozłowski
Suggested reading: Mario Tronti Lenin in England; | Sergio Bologna The Tribe of Moles.
Learning props: www.wuw2010.pl or at: szymon[at]funbec.eu

time: 5.10, Tuesday, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

Readings for Artworkers is a series of seminars referring to the tradition of open universities, self-education artistic groups and free education.

FUW curator: Kuba Szreder / FUW organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the City of Warsaw

The Free / Slow University of Warsaw kindly invites everyone to participate in the new semester of work, which will culminate in the December congress Our Way II.

We continue our critical reflection on the transformation of the public sphere in Poland, we analyse current changes that occur in the culture-creative circulation, in the world of independent initiatives, official art institutions, academies and universities.

Please feel free to join the debates around Readings for Artworkers. This season, the seminars are hosted by Michał Kozłowski, Teresa Święckowska, Kuba Szreder, Ola Hirszfeld and Anna Zawadzka. At the meetings, we will trace the dangerous liaisons of culture and cognitive capitalism, we will subject to vivisection the figure of author and copyright. We will analyse the omnipresent obligation to be creative, leading to exclusion, exploitation and alienation. We will discuss the role of copyright in the contemporary capitalism and the open source movement as an alternative mode of social organisation.

Free / Slow University of Warsaw – established in 2009, nomadic and networking educational institution. The FUW was founded with the aim of improving competences of cultural milieus, it is open for participants from all over the country. Our activities refer to the tradition of open universities, self-education artistic groups and free education. www.wuw2010.pl

time: October-December, Tuesdays, 18.30
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

FUW curator: Kuba Szreder / FUW organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the City of Warsaw

Closing down the marketplace at the 10th Anniversary Stadium shifted Jarmark Europa from the real world to the realm of ideas, myths and legends. We preserved a fraction of the spontaneous architecture of the marketplace as a readymade installation, a piece of architecture ‘in transit’, conceived to emerge just for an instant. Pace of changes in the city overwhelms even temporary structures. Like our stall, which didn’t make it on time to the marketplace, they can become useless before they are even built.

The stall accompanies the presentation, held at Bęc Zmiana, of the installation by Jerzy Goliszewski, commenting on hyper-dense temporary architecture in a constant state of flux. On the ceiling of the Bęc Zmiana venue tin plate roofs were supposed to flourish – a part of the landscape, transferred here in real scale, which until recently could be admired from the crown of the Stadium or platforms of the Stadion railway station: ocean of light roofs of various materials, just like in favelas and marketplaces all over the globe.

The interior of the stall gives out the sounds of the Radio Stadion broadcast – prepared within the Finissage of the Stadium in April 2007. The stadium local radio was transformed into weekend broadcasts, suspending for an instant the causative force of official language and retrieving the ‘invisible’ users of the public space of Jarmark Europa. All output was created by an international community of tradesmen in their mother tongues.

Jerzy Goliszewski -  studied painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Deals with installation, painting and printmaking. His works mostly feature ordinary materials - wood or paper, although he also ventures to experiment with other matter. Lives and works in central Warsaw. www.jerzygoliszewski.com

Grzegorz Piątek (1980) – architecture critic, architect by education. Curator (alongside Rob Wilson, RIBA) of the exhibition OPEN:POLAND. Architecture and Identity (London, 2009). Curator (alongside Jarosław Trybuś) of the exhibition Hotel Polonia. The Afterlife of Buildings in the Polonia Pavilion, honoured with a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennial in 2008. Since 2005, content-editor of the ‘Architektura-Murator’ monthly.

Transit is a part of the project Synchronicity_3 devoted to micro spaces and ways inhabitants of large cities use to synchronise their needs with the (im)possibilities of the existing status quo. Small venue rented by Bęc Zmiana in the centre of Warsaw is an inspiration and a challenge for architects, artists and designers invited to cooperate.

Jerzy Goliszewski: Transit
curator: Grzegorz Piątek
start: 13.08, Friday, 19.00 + afterparty at 5-10-15
time: 13.08- 30.09
venues: Bęc Zmiana [installation], 65 Mokotowska St.
5-10-15 [object], 73 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Project is realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw

www.synchronicity.pl

Readings for Artworkmen is a series of seminars at the Free/Slow University of Warsaw based on the principles of self-organization, parallel exchange of knowledge and intensive participation of artists, intellectuals, cultural activists and theoreticians of culture as well as members of many other disciplines.This time we will have an opportunity to read and debate on the first Polish translation of the renowned text by Henri Lefebvre The Right to the City.
On the occasion of the 221st anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution, also called the Great, we invite you for a journey around the inconsistencies of the late capitalism with texts by Henri Lefebvre and Gyorgy Lukacs in our pockets. Although the weather, and also the political situation, would rather encourage a practical realisation of the apotheosis of idleness, we – putting the bourgeois principle of self-moderation into practice – will embark on reconstructing urban utopias, critical theory and romantic love.

Right to the city – as Lefebvre claims – is the right to the city of its inhabitants. Not contemporary “Olympians” – the ruling class, who don’t live anywhere anymore, as constant mobility has become their life practice, but the proletariat – forced to live where they can – people confined to their place of residence, relocated conforming to fashion, settled outside the city centre and crowded in houses that enable “survival”, but not real life.

“Urban air emancipates” Marx claimed, and it might be worth pondering what it means nowadays. Are we still seduced by Lefebvre’s resentment-free, vital and materialistic suggestions? How does the right to the city sound today and what does the division into the master class and the proletariat mean in the era of the galloping postmodern? We will ask these and other questions at the Knot in Praga.

Host: Ewa Majewska; Special guests: Łukasz Stanek and Maciej Czeredys

SUGGESTED READINGS: H. Lefebvre, Right to the City, 1967; H. Lefebvre, Civil society, 1986; polish translation of the fragment of the text by Lefebvre Le retour de la dialèctique, 12 mots clefs pour le monde moderne, Paris 1986

Time: 2010-07-13, at 18:30
Venue: The Knot in Praga Północ, Warsaw: Garden of the Konopacki Palace, Strzelecka St 11/13, Środkowa St junction; the nearest tram stops: Konopacka St - line 32; Inżynierska St - lines 3, 23, 25, 32

FUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
FUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

The Free / Slow University of Warsaw, hosted by the KNOT, kindly invites everyone to joint planning of the next congress of independent culture Swoją Drogą 2 (In its own right 2), which is due to take place in December 2010.

There is one goal for the participants and potential collaborators – during the barcamp we want to find the answer to the question: how to organise an alternative cultural congress with modest means and limited resources. Enthusiasm is pivotal for that matter, but is it enough? Find out yourself!

The starting point programme proposal for the December summit stipulates further common reflection upon the neoliberal transformation of public sphere in Poland. This time, we suggest broadening the scope of reflection: we want to merge critical consideration in the field of cultural production with investigation of transformations in the domain of science and university education (the so-called Bologna Process, reform of scientific research funding mechanisms, changes in grant distribution scheme, new methods of managing scientific-teaching personnel, etc.). Both fields are currently subject to similar neoliberal formatting and disciplining. By combining reflection on these two domains - many of us are involved in both of them at the very same time - we stand a better chance of formulating a proper diagnosis of the present situation and elaborating mechanisms of resistance against neoliberal hegemony.

PARTICIPATION
Refund of travel and accommodation costs for non-Warsaw participants is available. Funds limited, please apply immediately at: szymon@funbec.eu

OUR WAY, BY THE WAY FOREPLAY
Barcamp of the FUW in The Knot
time: 07.11, Sunday, 12.00-16.00
venue: The Knot in Praga Północ, Warsaw: Garden of the Konopacki Palace, Strzelecka St 11/13, Środkowa St junction; the nearest tram stops: Konopacka St - line 32; Inżynierska St - lines 3, 23, 25, 32

FUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
FUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation,
www.wuw2010.pl

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

The exhibition Weird evokes conspiracy theories, mysterious phenomena and their descriptions existing in popular circulation of information, the so-called common knowledge. Unexplained occurrences, catastrophes, natural disasters inform equally mysterious statements. The artist addresses the socio-pop sphere, which is were they function. In the TV news, every phenomenon receives its logo, graphic setting, jingle and schematic representation, e.g. Flood or Catastrophe. These „icons” are to assist in perception of these events, explain, flatten and compress them. Rafał Dominik’s works constitute reflections of these mysterious occurrences.

The exhibition embraces objects-sculptures and video works. They are presented at Bęc Zmiana, with some objects on temporary display on in parks at the Vistula. Objects made of easily portable materials will „wander” around Warsaw.

Rafał Dominik (born in 1985) – author and co-author of such interdisciplinary creative initiatives as: Mebleks, Waves of the Baltic Sea (with Ula Niemirska) and music projects Galactics (disco polo) and Donkey Donk (techno). Studied painting in Leon Tarasewicz workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Lives in Warsaw. www.mebleks.blogspot.com

WEIRD
Rafała Dominik’s wandering objects
start: 08.07, Thursday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
and parks at the Vistula in Warsaw

<< Rafał Dominik, Weird, 2010

On the occasion of Warsaw Fest / wrszw.pl we kindly invite you to the premiere of a new series of t-shirts AS and LUNCHEON MEAT by a typograhic duo Fontarte, combined with a presentation of a standard designed by Jakub Stępień!

Magdalena Frankowska (1972) and Artur Frankowski (1965) have worked together as a design studio since 2004. Authors of a book on Henryk Berlewi, forerunner of contemporary functional typography and advertising graphics. www.fontarte.com

Jakub Stępień aka Hakobo (1976) – graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, one of the most outstanding Polish designer of the young generation. Cooperates with major art institutions in Poland, designing posters and exhibition catalogues and collaborating on display set design. www.hakobo.pl

*WRSZW.pl is a currently developed non-commercial portal-platform, which is to serve as a daily guide to Warsaw socio-cultural activities, a shortcut that leads straight through the information jungle to community events. Along with other Warsaw initiators of cultural activity, we formed a group. Cause in a group it goes briskly. We are developing a portal to build a milieu. We are building a milieu to create modern city. We begin with a presentation of July’s ordinary/special programme of activities. It is ordinary as it has not been planned for ages. That’s how we work on a daily basis, often 365 days a year. It’s special as, in such a mass, it brings joy.

Fontarte: Luncheon Meat+AS | Jakub Stępień: Standard
t-shirts and work leaders’ standard
time: 05.07, Monday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Fontarte, Wawa, 2010

Finissage of the consciousness-expanding exhibition 10 Hz is combined with the premiere of publication entitled Inside Itself. The abundantly illustrated Polish-English album, accompanying Ania Witkowska’s and Adam Witkowski’s exhibition Sleepwalk in Gdańsk, transmogrified into a nearly retrospective coverage of the artists’ oeuvre! Iwona Bigos, Daniel Muzyczuk, Agata Rogoś, Stach Ruksza, Marcin Dymiter, Bogna Świątkowska, Dominik Kuryłka, Monika Weychert-Waluszko and Sebastian Cichocki were invited to contribute with their texts. Graphic design and editing by Ania Witkowska. Published by the Gdańsk City Gallery 1.

Ania Witkowska, Adam Witkowski: Into the self
time: 07.07, Wednesday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

The exhibition 10 Hz is organised within the framework of the Synchronicity_3 project realised with financial support of the Warsaw City Hall.


<< Ania Witkowska, Adam Witkowski: Inside Itself, Gdańsk 2010

When we talk about future form of community, design social utopias we are seduced by the vision of the social as perfect whole. Inability to bring the whole into being the way it has been planned undermines our belief in the ideals that were behind it. The presumption that "Ideal were good but the practice didn't meet them" which is often an argument against communist social.

During the seminar we would like to take this statement as descriptive not normative one and reflect on the society as an ongoing process of constant transformation in which nothing is definitively decided. I would like to discuss the society as assemblage of part that for a whole that it not logically necessary but contingently obligatory. And to look on the moments that we regard as failures as the potentially (and there interesting moments) that necessary points of passage into the better reordering of elements.

READINGS
1. Manuel DeLanda: A New Philosophy of Society. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
2. Oskar Hansen: Ku Formie Otwartej

In 2010 the underlying theme of the cycle of interdisciplinary events Synchronicity are micro-spaces and methods applied by inhabitants of large cities to synchronise their needs with real (im)possibilities. The small space rented by Bęc Zmiana in the centre of Warsaw is an inspiration and a challenge for architects, artists and designers invited to cooperate.

We begin with an insight into internal spaces: Ania Witkowska and Adam Witkowski, two artists whose works often address the world of pop culture, carried out a replica of the renowned Dream Machine. The appliance, built in the 1960s by beatniks Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs and mathematician Ian Sommerville, produced alpha waves (8-12 Hz) in the brain, which normally occur in the state of deep relaxation, meditation and falling asleep. Deeming the outer world invalid, it makes us focus on internal, infinite spaces. The exhibition also features video works.

I began with the assumption that if I really observe myself asleep, I will also notice if I am wearing the same clothes as when I was going to sleep; I decided to change them every four days. I was convinced that recalling what clothes I was wearing when falling asleep would not present any problem whatever while dreaming. Discipline I acquired during my dreaming exercises gave me a reason to think that I was able to store such details in memory, and recall them afterwards while dreaming. I tried as hard as I could to follow my criterion, but the results were not as I expected...
Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming, 1993

Adam Witkowski – (born in 1978) deals with visual arts (painting, graphics, installation, video), sound and music (radio projects, theatre and film music, field recordings). As of 2007, lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Workshop of Multimedia Graphics. www.adamwitkowski.com

Ania Witkowska – (born in 1978) deals with visual arts (installation, video) and graphic design. Often addresses pop culture and consumer world, infecting it with the virus of art, frolicks with the world of advertising and marketing strategies. www.aniawitkowska.com

Ania Witkowska, Adam Witkowski
10 Hz (dream machine, video)
time: 15.06-07.07
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

Project realised with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall
  

ArtBazaar Records is a record label releasing music by plastic artists.
The initiative bears a reference to students’ label Alma Art operating in the 1980s, which released vinyl records with music by artists related to Warsaw’s RR Gallery. The music accompanied projects and exhibitions of the artists during opening nights and concerts at the gallery. Nine albums released by Alma Art include music by, among others, Andrzej Bieżan, Andrzej Mitan, Krzysztof Knittel, Helmut Nadolski Jubilee Orchestra or Jarosław Kozłowski. Album covers played an equally important role as the music in the entire enterprise – designed by artists such as Edward Krasiński, Andrzej Szewczyk, Ryszard Winiarski, Tadeusz Rolke or Włodzimierz Borowski.

Alike Alma Art, ArtBazaar Records presents music by the youngest generation of artists. Records are released in the number of 250 copies, 66 of which with hand-made covers by artists. Records available for sale!

ABR 001 – Mariusz Tarkawian: Ameboid
The album Ameboid comprises electronic music merging synthesiser harmonies with surprising sounds of the external world – human voices, folk tunes, civilisation noise. 66 album covers were hand-made by Mariusz Tarkawian. Every single one is different!

ABR 002 – Wojtek Bąkowski: Chute
Chute could be a soundtrack to a non-existent Spoken Movie 0. The album, comprising a radio play in three parts, tackles objects and issues that are normally overlooked on a daily basis – whirring refrigerators, breaths, neighbours’ talking, mysterious hamsters living in the walls of our apartments. The B-side of the album contains only one piece – the magnum opus, black suite Death.

Time: 10.06 (Thu), 19.00
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Mariusz Tarkawian: Ameboid, Artbazaar Records, 2010

One year after the funeral ceremony of Witryna* (Shop Window), Julia Staniszewska and Agnieszka Sural – curators of the original Witryna in Konstytucji Sq. in Warsaw – make use of the shop window at Bęc Zmiana to present the monitoring of Oskar Dawicki’s work Ten Thousand. With this work, the artist revealed a hypothetical budget of an exhibition by displaying it in Witryna in the form of a wad of banknotes. Additionally, two CCTV cameras were installed for security monitoring of the money. They were supposed to catch potential robbers of Ten Thousand on tape. Yet the registered situations, both inside and in front of Witryna, became a source of information about the audience and accidental viewers of the exhibition. The monitoring tape acquired the character of a panoptical study, allowing to observe the viewers, who often didn’t know or forgot that they were being watched.

* A year has just passed since the activity of the Witryna Gallery, operating from September 2007 to June 2009, was suspended. Witryna exhibited works beyond the traditional museum or gallery context, occupying the border zone between institutions and public space. Closure of Witryna came as a result of the curators’ objection to a project takeover attempt by the management of InfoQultura. The gallery was to resume its activity on the basis of an agreement with the new administration. However, the promise of appointing a new host of InfoQultura by means of a competiton, made by the director of the Office for Culture, remained unfulfilled.

Time: 2-14.06, opening: 2.06 (Wednesday), 19.00
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
curators: Julia Staniszewska, Agnieszka Sural
monitoring service: Bartek Kraciuk
www.dobrawitryna.com

<< Oskar Dawicki: Ten thousand, monitoring still, 2008

The MURRR GALLERY is a 24-metre long street gallery in Warsaw’s Praga. The first feature this year is Playing Tag, mural by Iwona Zając.

Iwona Zając frequently tackles social issues. Since 2000 she has been dealing with wall painting and presented her murals both in Poland and abroad. One of her most renowned works is Shipyard – series of stencil graffiti on the outer walls of Gdańsk Shipyard, featuring stories of shipyard workers about their life and work. For the last several years her murals have thematically revolved mainly around the family: Mama, She-Foreigner, He taught me that. It is also the case with Playing Tag, the work that Iwona Zając carried out upon invitation of the Murrr Gallery.

- In my murals I tell my private stories, play with form, colour, share what irritates, fascinates and moves me with the audience. The murals are my personal painted diary, record of my life – the artist states.

Iwona Zając (born in 1971). Lives in Gdańsk and London. Painter. Since 2002 resident of the Colony of Artists (currently The Young City) on the premises of the Gdańsk Shipyard. iwona-zajac.com

ABOUT THE MURRR GALLERY
The Murrr Gallery was established in 2009 for artists to present works tailor-made for the venue upon invitation, embracing the specific character of the place, but also the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. At the Murrr Gallery, artists’ works harmonise, intermingle and enter into a dialogue. Previously featured artists are Dominik Cymer, Truth and Jan Kallwejt.

Venue: Lay's Wall, 24/26 Zamoyskiego St., Warsaw
Time: from 25.05.2010
Start: 25.05 [Tuesday, 12.00]
www.galeriamur.pl

OWING TO SUPPORT OF LEY'S

Album and exhibition 1994 by Mikołaj Długosz is a reflection on the foundations of modern Polish consumer culture. It presents dreams of goods and consumption, items available at bargain prices and in bulk at chain supermarkets, coming from the era marked by turbo-capitalist acceleration of the Balcerowicz Plan. The packshot photos featured by Długosz were taken in 1994 to serve the purposes of commercial releases.

In 1994 Mikołaj Długosz merges his passions of an anthropologist of the everyday, a collector of unexciting photographs and an aesthete, sensitive to the beauty of the world. 1994 is a catalogue of items without prices, shifted beyond their commercial context, although not beyond history, as the project’s title indicates. Real goods against abstract background, that’s what stays in mind, just like memories of items and fetishes that were once pivotal in the lives of consumer masses. 1994 is neither heaven nor hell of things, it is something in-between. It is not an object of cult, rather something commonplace and trivial. It is a kind of zero level indication for photo advertisements and commercial phantasies.
Adam Mazur

Mikołaj Długosz (born in 1975). Between 1999 and 2002 studied at the National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź and has made a living on portraying people for illustrated magazines since 2002 (among others: “L’Uomo Vogue” and British “Tank Magazine”.) Works on display at group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. Awarded with the Chimera 2005 prize for the cover of “Magazyn Lajfstyle”. Author of the album and exhibition Such nice weather and the album Real Foto featuring a collection of photos found on the Internet.

1994, EXHIBITION
time: 17.06-17.07
venue: M2 Gallery, 6 Oleandrów St., Warsaw

The publication was released with financial support of Coca-Cola

<< Mikołaj Długosz: 1994

Premiere of the latest album by Mikołaj Długosz, entitled 1994, is the main feature of this year’s Warsaw International Book Fair!

Besides, the joint stand of Bęc Zmiana Foundation and 40 000 Painters Publishing House features:
- meeting with Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz, authors of 77 dzieł sztuki z historią
- books at bargain prices
- Chopin concert on a whistle!
You’re kindly invited!

264B: INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING STAND
art, design, architecture, photography
Time: 20-23.05, 10.00-18.00
Album premiere: 20.05, Thu., 18.00
Author’s meeting: 21.05, Fri., 18.00
Venue: stand 264, sector B
International Book Fair
Palace of Culture and Science, 1 Parade Sq. (Plac Defilad), Warsaw

<< Mikołaj Długosz: 1994, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw 2010

This year’s Readings are inaugurated by a debate around the film Integral Reality with the participation of its authors – the h&h collective. The 21-minute movie combines hypnotic image with equally hypnotic, ideologically determined message conveyed in the aural layer, constituting the essence of the neoliberal myth. Additionally, possible reference points in the debate are provided by Jean Baudrillard’s writings: The Perfect Crime, 1995 and The Hyperreal (in: The Perfect Crime).

Reading #1: Integral reality
11.05., Tuesday, 18.30, admission free
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
Hosted by: h&h collective (Ola Hirszfeld, Michał Herer)

* Readings for Artworkmen is a series of seminars at the Free/Slow University of Warsaw based on the principles of self-organization, parallel exchange of knowledge and intensive participation of artists, intellectuals, cultural activists and theoreticians of culture as well as members of many other disciplines.
The Free University of Warsaw – nomadic and networking educational institution established in 2009. The FUW was founded with the aim of expanding competence of the cultural milieu and is open for participants from the entire country. Our activity evokes the tradition of open universities, artistic self-education groups and free education.  www.wuw2010.pl

FUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
FUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation,

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall


<< Integral Reality, movie still, h&h, 2009

At Bęc Zmiana, as of Tuesday you can see spin-offs from the exhibition No sleep! simultaneously on display in Zielona Góra and from the artistic outing Good and Risky Party. In our micro-venue in 65 Mokotowska St. we present photographic documentation of the symposium and a selection of works from the Zielona Góra BWA gallery.

This latest show comes as the second part of the exhibition-informative cycle developed by Bęc Zmiana. This year in Mokotowska St., we present the most interesting highlights of current Polish art. Works of artists whose exhibitions take place at the same time outside the capital are brought closer to Warsaw audience at Bęc.

Stay Awake! as well as the outing and symposium Good and risky party are a continuation of the project Ain’t No Sorry, which was held in autumn 2008 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Stay Awake! features works of graduates of Polish Academies of Art and the young generation of artists, both those who participated in Ain’t No Sorry and those invited specifically for the present exhibition. Stay Awake! was inspired by Zielona Góra’s space and artistic past. Organisers of the exhibition encourage a return to the idea of artistic outings, understood as an occasion for communication, exchange as well as meeting and getting aqcuainted with artists, musicians, theorists and viewers.

Time: 4-23.05
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

HGW: Hakobo Graphic World is a monograpic exhibition of works of Jakub Hakobo Stępień, graphic artist and designer, which is on a simultaneous display in Wrocław and Warsaw. The exhibition inaugurates this year’s edition of the international festival OUT of STH in Wrocław as well as a series of shows scheduled for this year by Bęc Zmiana, enabling Warsaw audience to see spin-offs from exhibitions in other Polish cities.

The exhibition HGW: Hakobo Graphic World features minimalist, monochromatic, powerful graphic signs, but also wonderfully vibrant posters by Hakobo, whose artistic oeuvre is more appreciated abroad than in Poland. Jakub Stępień established his characteristic and easily discernible style of posters, elaborate visual identification systems, but also fashion design. Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, for 10 years he has been exploring themes informed by the aesthetics of stencil graffiti and skate street culture, experimenting with fonts, legibility and undermining widespread graphic design gimmicks. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication devoted to Jakub Stępień’s projects – the album HGW: Hakobo Graphic World released in limited series.

Jakub Stępień aka Hakobo (1976) – graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, one of the most outstanding Polish designers of the young generation. John Foster, author of the album New Masters of Poster Design – Poster Design for the Next Century included him in the group of 50 best poster artists of the world. His works were published by the Dutch magazine Items and French Etapes, specialising in publications devoted to graphic design. Hakobo cooperates with major art institutions in Poland, designing posters and exhibition catalogues and collaborating on display set design. Author of visual identification of, among others, Museum of Art in Łódź, Dialogue of Four Cultures Festival and the first design festival in Poland – Łódź Design 2007. www.hakobo.pl

Time: 09.04-22.05
Openings: 09.04, Friday, 19.00,
BWA Design, 2-4 Świdnicka St., Wrocław

Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Jakub Hakobo Stępień, HGW, 2010

The latest book by Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz 77 dzieł sztuki z historią. Opowiadanie zebrane  [77 Works of Art with a history. Collected tales] comes as a result of collecting stories, not objects of art. 77 dzieł sztuki z historią is a book for both those who are just embarking on their adventure with contemporary art, and those who fancy unique stories from behind the scenes of the art world.

Where and when did artistic impotence seize Wilhelm Sasnal? How and why was Zuzanna Janin preparing for a fight with Przemysław Saleta? How did Wojciech Fangor earn his first flat? Which classic Polish painter entitled his work Shit honking on a bend? On the occasion of what auction did Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewcz first meet?

Authors of texts and covered artists include, among others, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Paweł Althamer, Edward Dwurnik, Wojciech Fangor, Wojciech Fibak, Tadeusz Kantor, Józef Robakowski, Wilhelm Sasnal, Andrzej Starmach, Leon Tarasewicz, Andrzej Wróblewski, Jakub Julian Ziółowski.
The premiere features a debate with guests: Piotr Bazylko, Karol Radziszewski, Piotr Kosiewski.

Piotr Bazylko (1968) i Krzysztof Masiewicz (1969) – authors of artbazaar.blogspot.com, blog devoted to Polish contemporary art market and Przewodnik kolekcjonera sztuki najnowszej [Collector’s Guide to Latest Art], published in 2008 by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation and Ha!Art Corporation.

Karol Radziszewski (1980) – painter, performer, commentator. Founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine DIK Fagazine. Lives and works in Warsaw.

Piotr Kosiewski (1967) – art historian, critic. In constant cooperation with the Znak monthly and Kwartalnik Literacki. Co-editor of collective volumes, among others Historycy polscy i ukraińscy wobec problemów XX wieku [Polish and Ukrainian Historians and Problems of the 20th Century] and Wojny bałkańskie [Balkan Wars]

Time: 29.03.10, 19.00
Venue: Numery Litery Café
26 Wilcza St., Warsaw

P. Bazylko, K. Masiewicz: 77 dzieł sztuki z historią. Opowiadania zebrane
publisher: 40 000 painters, Bęc Zmiana Foundation
format: 11,7 x 16,5 cm, abundantly illustrated
price: 36 PLN

Deer-bookstand comes from the collection signed by Rafał Dominik - Mebleks. The author describes it as follows: However bad that sounds, Mebleks is a kind of project for alternative design, or not even design, but designing things that are abstract and strange, but vested with an utilitarian function. I aimed to create something like a company which would sell things that don’t exist (being sheer concepts) and attempt to deflate the conceited and stiff contemporary design. Yet, apart from that all, it also provides an opportunity to have a good laugh and surprise myself making up ever-stranger objects, names etc.

Rafał Dominik – born in 1985. Author and co-author of such creative initiatives as: Mebleks, Fale Bałtyku (with Ula Niemirska) and music projects Galaktic (disco polo) and Donkey Donk (techno). Studied painting in the workshop of Leon Tarasewicz at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Lives in Warsaw.

Deer-bookstand available on sale. Info on site (in the forest)

Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65/7, Warsaw
Until 15.03, Mon-Fri, 11-19, weekends and afterhours through the shop window

<< Rafał Dominik, Deer (Mebleks), phot. R. Dominik

The Island. Synchronicity – Jakub Szczęsny’s project of a floating platform for water purification, presented by Bęc Zmiana, entered the Semi-Final of The Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

The competition is organised every year by The Buckminster Institute in New York to select and popularise projects that have the future potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.  

All semi-final projects are included into the research programme of the Institute and the winner is awarded a 100 000 $ grant to support the development and implementation of the project. Final results in May!

At the same time, preparations are carried out in Warsaw to implement the project on an experimental basis. The device purifies water only owing to the effort of the city dwellers who are willing to obtain clean water from the Vistula – it is powered by training machines installed on the platform.

*The project was carried out in 2009 as a part of the Synchronicity 2 festival, realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw. It is covered heavily in the media abroad, not only those devoted to architecture and design, but also those concerned with ecology and responsible business.


Full list of Semi-Finalists available at:
http://challenge.bfi.org/30_Semi_Finalists

 << Jakub Szczęsny, The Island. Synchronicity, 2009

About The Buckminster Fuller Challenge >

Maurycy Gomulicki, artist, graphic designer, photographer and author of artistic installations, abundant personality and pleasure connoisseur was awarded the title of the Man of the Year by readers of Gazeta Co Jest Grane.
Maurycy’s last year’s project "Światłotrysk", commonly referred to as the ”pink neon” is located in the park in Warsaw’s Kępa Potocka. It shines bright every evening owing to the support of The City of Warsaw, The District of Żoliborz and Vattenfall Polska.
We would like to thank everybody who voted for Maurycy!

More information about the competition available at >>

<<<Photo: father and son, Maurycy and Atom, [Agent Toxic]
More Maurycy’s photos available at flickr >>

The neon sign, in the shape of a huge glass with pink soda bubbles flying into the air, is 17 metres high and was designed by Maurycy Gomulicki. The work on the neon sign took almost two years. It is placed in the open urban space of Kępa Potocka Park.
The aim of the project was not only to show Gomulicki’s work in open urban space which he favours, but also to place it in the Żoliborz district, with which his family has been connected for generations.
Maurycy Gomulicki about the project: “(…) We are a serious and hard-hit nation, we know how to think, analyse, but how do we actually handle such a subject like the beauty of life – how much space is given to it in our art and culture? There are times when you might think that Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo never existed here; that only the January Uprising and Treblinka serve as important counterpoints in our history. When we stroll around Warsaw we find monuments to glory, martyrdom and heroism every couple of minutes. But I, like it or not, aware of the blood shed still smile at the satyrs and nymphs in Łazienki Park or in the Saxon Garden; the treble clef at the back of the Music Academy building pleases me; I wait expectantly for the next Rose Exhibition. Hence the idea for a contemporary monument to lightness, joy, to beauty of the moment and its transience: you can and should enjoy life, it is worth reminding, focusing attention on it, and provoking this type of experience (…).”

Maurycy Gomulicki, b. 1969 in Warsaw. Polish graphic artist, photographer, author of art installations and short films. Studied at the Graphic Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1987-1992). He also studied at the Facultat de Belles Arts at the University in Barcelona 1992-1993; at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, 1994; and at Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico [w pol. wersji nie ma, że to Meksyk!] 1997-1998. He has presented his works – computer graphics, drawings, installations, and photographs – at numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad. A consultant and co-author of photographs in the ABCDF project: Mexico City visual dictionary (2000-2002). His project Air Bridge was carried out in 2003-2005 as part of InSite – Art Practices in the Public Domain in San Diego, US and in Tijuana, Mexico. His photo album W-WA with pictures of Warsaw was published by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation in 2007. He lives in Warsaw and Mexico.

The project has been carried out by Bęc Zmiana Foundation as part of the Transformations Art Festival by the Vistula, thanks to the Capital City of Warsaw grant.
www.warszawa2016
Partner: Żoliborz District Government

Sponsor of neon sign:

<<<Photo by Mirella von Chrupek

Chto delat/What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod (see full list of participants on the web site) with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.
Since then, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a repoliticization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context. These newspapers are usually produced in the context of collective initiatives such as art projects or conferences.

In his talk, Chto delat co-editor David Riff will talk about the potentialities and pitfalls of artistic, intellectual, and poltical self-organization under hostile contexts such as the one in Russia, and how projects like Chto delat can spark developments beyond their narrow, sectarian scope.

David Riff studied cultural anthropology at SUNY New Paltz (US) and slavonic studies and art history at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). In the early 2000s, he wrote two monographs on the non-conformist Soviet artists of the Sixties, Vadim Sidur and Vladimir Yankilevsky. He has been living in Moscow since 2002, where he has been translating and writing art criticism and theory, contributing to Flash Art, springerin, Moscow Art Magazine, documenta 12 magazine (issues 2 and 3), as well as Rethinking Marxism. A member of the workgroup Chto delat and co-editor of its newspaper since 2003, Riff also participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale in collaboration with Dmitry Gutov on a project called the Karl Marx School of the English Language. He is currently contributing editor of the Russian internet culture portal openspace.ru

Wednesday, 28.10, at 18.00
DELIKATESY.TR, ul. Marszałkowska 8, Warszawa

The meeting will be carried out in english

Co-operation:

WUW curator: Kuba Szreder
WUW organiser: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana
WUW partners: Fundacja Res Publica, Fundacja InSitu, Stowarzyszenie Komuna Otwock, Stowarzyszenie Artanimacje, Stowarzyszenie Duopolis

The WUW project is financed from the dotations of the capital city of Warsaw

<<< Negation of negation at show "October. Exit. Memory. Desire", ARTRA Galery, Milano 2007

THE ISLAND. SYNCHRONICITY is a floating platform, which holds nine pieces of training equipment placed around a small trough with purified water flowing from cisterns with filters placed above it. The water is pumped straight into the Vistula river by kinetic pumps fuelled by the muscle power of persons using the equipment.
The platform is connected with land by a wheelchair-accessible gang-plank that is closed at night. The platform is lit by LED lights, thanks to which it serves as a sign even after dark, when it is closed.

A book consisting of texts that problematize the project summarizes the work of Kuba Szczęsny and his group of co-workers invited to participate in this enterprise.
By transmitting the energy from fitness machines to a system of filters, not only does he associate physical effort with an ultimate objective, rendering it labour-like, but he also makes it possible to experience the fruits of our labour (to see, touch, sense and taste). One of the most acute consequences of labour alienation is the decrease in the sense of agency.  By enabling the experience of the direct transposition of one’s effort (and common effort) into the rectification of an ostensibly hopeless situation, Szczęsny’s ‘island’ sustains political competencies and gives us practice in thinking in utopian terms. Kuba Mikurda, Miracle on the Vistula, Island. Synchronicity, Foundation Bęc Zmiana 2009

www.synchronicity.pl

Time: 13-26.10.2009
Opening: 13.10 (Tuesday), 8.00 pm
Discussion/Book Launch Party: 20.10, Delikatesy.TR, Marszałkowska 8, Warsaw
Place: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Mokotowska 65,  Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

Synchronicity_Warsaw is a project where voice is given to architects who search for solutions to contemporary social, political, economic, aesthetic and emotional issues visible in urban spaces.
The first part of the project was a book from the three-volume publication W [Is for Warsaw] published in 2007. Entitled No Hear, No See it was prepared by architect Jakub Szczęsny, who invited several designers from around the world to take part in the project.
In 2008 Synchronicity_Warsaw took the shape of an exhibition showing projects of possible scenarios of Warsaw city’s development. Jakub Szczęsny’s Synchronisation light installation was also completed as part of the project.
A number of projects have been carried out as part of Synchronicity_Warsaw in 2009. Magda Czapiewska’s and Karol Murlak’s Światłosłowa [Lightwords] were about inscribing a quote from Andrzej Sosnowski’s poem on the Vistula boulevard; the inscription was made in graduated letters visible only after dusk. Maurycy Gomulicki’s Światłotrysk [Lightspurt] neon was made as a monument to bliss, the beauty of the moment, and to life’s pleasures in the Kępa Potocka park. And there was The Island. Synchronisation, Jakub Szczęsny’s research project. As a result, and thanks to the voluntary commitment of Warsaw’s residents, the Vistula water purifying system was worked out.

<<< Jakub Szczęsny: The Island. Synchronicity, Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Warsaw 2009. Graphic design: Tomek Bersz / Marian Misiak

Together with a group of theorists, researchers and artists from London we will examine the human-physical dimensions of public space. The meeting was initiated by members of Critical Practice (Marscha Bradfield, Neil Cummings, Michaela Ross, Cinizia Cremona).
 
What happens with our bodies when we are in public view or speaking publicly? For what types of bodies is our public space constructed? What type of physical attributes are excluded from the public sphere, and which types are featured on posters and advertisements?
 
The meeting will be conducted under open space conference principles according to which the agenda is generated by participants. Everyone in attendance is highly encouraged to speak up during the discussions.

PUBLIC BODY, barcamp
Time: 17.10, saturday, 14.00-21.00
Place: "Nowy Wspanialy Świat" (old cafe "Nowy Świat"), Nowy Świat St. 63
Registration: aga@funbec.eu

The WUW project is financed from the dotations of the capital city of Warsaw

<<< source: http://criticalpracticechelsea.org

This time the Free University (WUW) is going on a field trip. The upcoming weekend session of WUW will focus on urban and suburban survival techniques in the times of late capitalism. We will spend two days learning and trying out practical, low-cost ways of making our day-to-day life more pleasant.
 
On Saturday we will head to the Kampinos Nature Reserve where we will swing on ropes, climb trees, gather mushrooms, ford rivers, and go moose watching. Dress appropriate for this time of year, and bring provisions and a thermos full of your beverage of choice.
 
On Sunday, Tomek Saciłowski will take us to hang out with some hip gardeners. Activities will include conserving fruit (lots of apples and nuts this year), ceramics, basket weaving and we will have a bonfire. All this in accordance with the principle: The less you pay, the less you work.  Now that’s what we call freedom in the air!
 
Vahida Ramujkic – is currently researching social and environmental transformations through the application of physical and mental recycling. Using her intuition and experience, she tries to create situations in which good things can happen spontaneously. Read more at http://irational.org/vahida/
 
Tomek Saciłowski – gardener, allotment-holder, author, artist, and founder of the pioneering initiative „Allotment, Work, Education."

Time: 10-11.10.2009, saturday and sunday
Place: 10.10 (saturday), 11.00am meeting at Bęc Zmianą, Mokotowska St. 65  11.10 (sunday), 12.00am, "Rodzinne Ogródki Działkowe Siekierki", Nadrzeczna St. 6a, allotment  #76

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

<<< Heath Bunting, International Tree Climbing Day

The project Disappear by the Vistula is a serie of art-ecology-existential experiments carried out on the banks of the Vistula River.

Our starting point is a simple observation: more civilisation means less nature. If we promote a wild river it ceases to be wild. Maintaining a fine balance between culture and nature, art and environment, artists and society is possible only if we break off with artistic public-relations clichés in public space. This is why we challenge the logic behind spectacular urban-space production strategies. Instead of dazzling the public with art, we walk on the borders of visibility, travelling across the ambiguous margins of vision. We focus on the subtle play between the artist and the space in which he works.

Together with a group of artists we offer a series of experiments on the process of disappearing, camouflage, invisibility. Slight river bank manipulations, pirate cruises, iriy visits, arranging disturbing film sets, hiding in the wild. We attempt to become part in the nature or civilisation context in order to make the difference between the individual being and his/her social or ecological surroundings unobvious. As the Dutch and Italian painters centuries ago, we too are fascinated by the issues of mimesis, that is of the representation and mirroring of nature by culture. The assimilation of the picture to what it is supposed to depict. Yet in our case this eternal problem is filtered through flirtations with the achievements of public and land art. Thus, instead of having issues with links between depicting and that what is depicted, we work on the dynamic beam of relations linking the artist with his environment. Their inner dynamics push us beyond what is easily noticed, easily classified or judged. Together with the Vistula’s stream we sail out to the fog-enveloped unobvious.



The actions summation will be a publication about man-civilisation relation, disappearing, camuflage and spreading out from different perspectives.

Remarkable artists who move round the paradoxical axis of visibility have been invited to take part in the undertaking: Paweł Althamer, Kurant, Hubert Czerepok, Konrad Pustoła, Honza Zamojski, Joanna Rajkowska, Kasia Krakowiak, Roman Dziadkiewicz, Maciej Kurak, Robert Rumas, Łukasz Jasturbczak, Natalia Romik.

Curator: Kuba Szreder
Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

Runs: august-october 2009   Place: Warsaw, banks of Vistula River
The project is a part of Transformations Art Festival by the Vistula, accomplished thanks to the grants of the city of Warsaw.

www.znikanie.pl

The  project is financed from the dotations of the capital city of Warsaw

DIZAJNWAWA_3/ GOGO (Maria Makowska, Piotr Stolarski)

In the face of the increasing number of presentations of objects demonstrating the abilities of Polish and international design, GOGO team’s offer is a tempting invitation to contemplation.
Despite its modest size the exhibition is a mature statement, given the non-existent discussion about the nature of design in our country where the dream of “catching up” and “outrunning” international design is stronger than critical thought on the multiplication of objects-products.

For the Dizajnwawa exhibition series GOGO created a designer’s workshop, that is a place where the designer spends a “wolfish” amount of time. For GOGO it is neither a workshop with machines nor a park bench, but a desk with a laptop plus a source of light. The bench and the lamp, which were made especially for the exhibition, allude in their form to previous projects made by GOGO; they are also provided with comments, dominating the objects, taken from Charles Bukowski’s short poem, Art: “As the spirit wanes the form appears”.

The objects designed by GOGO are fully functional and at the same time perverse, like the Grand Piano coffee table. It should become a furniture bestseller of the 2010 Chopin Year despite being made of the cheapest material – high-polish OSB. Another important issue in GOGO’s work is unusual application and the physical tangibility of materials used to make the projects. In the case of the Re-use-it lamp they are recycled, welded plastic bags with the remainders of logos of well-known supermarket and clothing-company chains.

Time: 29.09-12.10
Place: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

*DIZAJNWAWA is a series of exhibitions focusing on the work of young Warsaw designers. They have been invited to participate because of their exceptionally interesting design creations, use of novel solutions, and their projects’ connection either with the public space of the city or with Warsaw as the country’s capital.

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

<< GOGO, Grand Piano coffee table, Pawn stool, Re-Bag-It lamp, quote from Charles Bukowski’s poem Art, 1979 [“As the spirit wanes the form appears”]

Meeting with Magda Starska, draughtswoman and author of installations is an annoucement of the broader experiment which is prepared with help of neuro-cognitivist, dr Dawid Wiener. The cooperation's starting point is apprisal of contemporaneity, builded around questions like: how to assess impact on human perception which would have intercommunication freed from the limitations of time and space. Starska and Wiener describe contemporary society as "flat" and "dense", because conditions of human meeting seem suspended. Effects of this state have had vast influence over emotional and cognitive abilities. Starska's experiment supported by neuro-cognitive background will assume that "returning" of sense of space will bring back to spectators feeling of stability between this what really is and this what is only work of imagination. It could be also a kind of cut down to size - into reality of primal reactions and emotions. During meeting Magda Starska will present docuentation of her previous works, video recordings and drawings (one week exhibition).

Curator: Michał Lasota (Galeria Stereo, Poznań)
Co-op: Zuzanna Hadryś (Galeria Stereo, Poznań)

ABOUT PARTICIPANTS
Magdalena Starska - author of drawings, performance and installations. In 2005 she obtained diplomma on Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan University (professor Jaroslaw Kozlowski workroom). Member of PENERSTWO group. The base of her artistic practice is to create social situations. Her point of interest is in what way personal and common features could are valuable in a sense of social terms. She lives and works in Poznan.
Dawid Wiener - Professor at Institute of Logics and Cognitive Science of the Psychology Departament at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Chief of Neurocognitive Lab. His research area are emotions investigations, cognitive psychopathology and impact of information technology on human behaviour. Lives and works in Poznan.
Michał Lasota - curator, co-founder of Fundacja Transmisja and Galeria Stereo in Poznan. Involved in promotion of young art, organizer of group shows ("Śniące ciała", "Brzuch", "A!", "Dobre do domu i na dwór") and individual exhibitions (for example: Radek Szlaga & Wojtek Bąkowski, Izy Tarasewicz). Lives and works in Poznan.

MORE ABOUT EKSPEKTATYWA: www.ekspektatywa.pl

Time: 31.08.2009, 7.30PM
Place: Bęc Zmiana, ul. Mokotowska 65, Warszawa

Organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

DIZAJNWAWA_2/ Urban Dynamo/Kompott (Maja Ganszyniec, Paweł Jasiewicz, Krystian Kowalski, Dominic Hargreaves, Harry Thaler, Valentin Vodev, Nicola Zocca)

Projects facilitating safe and spatially economical bike parkings, vehicles facilitating transport with the use of one’s own muscle power, as well as a foldable bike, comfortable enough to carry thanks to its construction and its shrinking into compact size can be found among the projects shown at the exhibition. There Nicola Zocca’s and Harry Thaler’s Compressedairbike is a work which merges comfort with environment-friendly design.

The authors of the Urban Dynamo concept, Maja Ganszyniec, Paweł Jasiewicz, Krystian Kowalski and Marcin Krygier (Kompott design team), write the following about the selection of works for the exhibition:
The city lives because we move inside it, and the way we do that creates its space. The aim of this exhibition is to present alternative means of transportation in the city, as well as possibilities of creating its image.
We have chosen projects which show how to cleverly combine the possibilities of public transport with vehicles powered with one’s own muscles. The energy accumulated in the body allows cheap, easy and environment-friendly transport around town. By presenting a couple of examples, Urban Dynamo shows how to transform urban impediments into life energy without rejecting the inventions of civilization.

Time: 13-28.08.2009
Place: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65/7, Warsaw

Organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

<<< Kompott: Parkcycle
<<<Dominic Hargreaves: Transporter

First edition of interdisciplinary cycle Ekspektatywa is devoted to Guglielmo Marconi theory about possibility to hear whole sounds which diminished with use of special sensitive devices. Gdansk based artist Kasia Krakowiak with Andrzej Klosek - architect and acoustic take his goal on question of aural qualities of sound wave phenomenon and possibility of its existence against the lapse of time. What happens with sound which diminished and isn't audible any more? And in what way - if its even possible - we can hear unrecorded sounds from the past? The team inspired by the story of last song played on the sinking titanic start to create fullly analogue broadcasting-receiving-measuring fixture for investigate possibility of hearing passed sounds in the case of echo phenomenon. Working with echo in the city goes to concentrate audience with questions of "soundscape".

ABOUT ARTIST
Born in 1980. She was an assistant of professor Miroslaw Balka at Sculpture Departament of Adam Mickiewicz University Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2008 she has developed mobile radio all. FM project. Participant of many group and also individual shows. She creates interdisciplinary groups, co-operating with mobile-phones technology, shortwave transmitters users, programmers. Her project FreeRadioJaffa is sound intervention in the public space based on Mini FM technology - by aproppriating frequencies from existing stations and to broadcast her own shows on it. In Israel her shows deals with situation of Arab people eviction from Jaffa,in Wroclaw [PL] - with situation of inhabitants of after-german houses. Within the 'Ain't no sorry show' exibition at Warsaw MoMA she used potential of noise. She continues this investigation by project 'I'll take you to the Moon' at CCA in Torun (within the show 'Gone to Croatan'). Lives and works in Gdansk.

www.radiofreejaffa.com
www.20khz.hmfactory.com

ABOUT EKSPEKTATYWA
Taken from 1921. Michal Arct's dictionary word "ekspektatywa" means: to waiting for,to expect, to apply with hope". Therefore Ekspektatywa is direct reflection of expectancy state  and curiosity facing with possible scenarios of developing the future. Its well-being depends only on the innovative potential of respective subiects from society (in question). Intentionally refering to unrealized prospects and ideas based on trusting in technology development, the goal of the project was to share experiences dealing with technological development and to activate dialogue between art and science. In six editions we will present various statements, scientific methods and creative attitudes. For each project we invite no less than one person from the art and science worlds, and additionaly inside which we want to issue - beside the general presentation - special publication, summing up each edition.
www.ekspektatywa.pl

Start / Preview: 29.07 - 6.08.2009
Place: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65, Warszawa

Organizer: New Culture Foundation Bec Zmiana

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall.

After last year's success a new, up-dated map of Warsaw for young travellers is being published. It presents 105 spots in the city chosen again by travellers, young inhabitants and owners of hostels in Warsaw. The second version of the map of Warsaw emphasises the ties between the city and Frédéric Chopin, celebrating the forthcoming Chopin Year.
The map is a result of cooperation among the non-profit organisation USE-IT EUROPE, which is tourist info for young people, Promotion Department of the City Hall of Warsaw and Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

The following maps and city guides have so far been made available by USE-IT Europe: Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Oslo, Malmö, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Dresden and lately for the first time also Łódź.

USE-IT publishes maps and other informative materials, geared towards young people travelling through Europe on a tight budget. The aim of USE-IT is to create non-commercial publications with practical and possibly up-to-date content. They include information that is of a genuine use to travellers: Where to find the best parties? Which museum is really worth a visit? What are the local customs? USE-IT publications are anything but another boring tourist reader. Maps, guides and websites with the USE-IT logo are created by authors from a given city. Hence they include more than just superficial info, featuring humour, objectivity and an untypical selection of venues. For the maps are exclusively for young people, according to the rule that something for everyone is actually good for no one. / www.use-it.info

Authors: Grzegorz Piątek (text), Dominik Cymer / www.dominikcymer.pl, Rafał Szczepaniak / www.rafal-szczepaniak.com (graphic design)

The map is is free of charge and available at hostels in all major cities in Poland and in selected European cities as well as on www.use-it-warsaw.pl [download PDF A4 format].

The map of Łódź, prepared especially for ‘young travellers’ between 18 and 35 years old is now available within the European information system on cities attractive to young tourists. The map is a result of cooperation among the non-profit organisation USE-IT, Promotion, Tourism and International Cooperation Department of the City of Lódź Municipal Office and Bęc Zmiana Foundation. It is in English and features several dozens of venues, selected in the course of work by authors living in Łódź or very familiar with the city.

USE-IT publishes maps and other informative materials, geared towards young people travelling through Europe on a tight budget. The aim of USE-IT is to create non-commercial publications with practical and possibly up-to-date content. They include information that is of a genuine use to travellers: Where to find the best parties? Which museum is really worth a visit? What are the local customs? USE-IT publications are anything but another boring tourist reader. Maps, guides and websites with the USE-IT logo are created by authors from a given city. Hence they include more than just superficial info, featuring humour, objectivity and an untypical selection of venues. For the maps are exclusively for young people, according to the rule that something for everyone is actually good for no one. www.use-it.info

Authors: Jakub Wandachowicz (text), John Kubiniec (translation), Maja Ruszkowska- Mazerant (Purpose – enterpreneurship in culture www.purpose.com.pl, coordinator Łódź), Michał Justyna (photography). Graphic design: Jakub Stępień / www.hakobo.art.pl

The map is is free of charge and available at hostels in all major cities in Poland and in selected European cities as well as on www.use-it-lodz.pl [download PDF A4 format]. 

Young Poland is a cycle of events closing the Polish Year in Israel, which reviews the most interesting works by Polish artists of the young generation in various areas of broadly defined design: industrial design, architecture and photography.

Black and White. Young Polish design. Group exhibition. 
The exhibition is a presentation of the youngest generation of designers who use simple means for a new, fresh look at the latest trends in the world's design, often flirting with art. Polish modern design is best visible in small items, in which Polish material culture is interpreted creatively. Sometimes, it draws on folk art, sometimes on the unique aesthetics of Polish urban spaces, often appealing to the viewer's sense of humour. The simplest materials are paired up with modern ones, a graceful design of an objects often compensates for its fragility and evidently temporary character. Polish youngest design is distinctive, black-and-white: you either like or hate it. Therefore the exhibition will feature designs that are either black or white. The exhibition will be held in the lobby of the Maxim Hotel, where the majority of Polish artists, curators and journalists involved in the Polish Year in Israel event will stay. 
Participating designers: 
Aleksandra Adamczyk, AZE Design, Babaakcja, Agnieszka Bar, DBWT, Maja Ganszyniec, GOGO, Paweł Jasiewicz, Kafti Design, Agnieszka Kajper, Knockoutdesign, Lapolka, Limo, Robert Majkut, MALAFOR, Karina Marusińska, Ola Mirecka, Puff Buff, Tomek Rygalik, Zuzanna Malinowska i Katarzyna Bazylczyk.

Opening: 7 June, 8 p.m, Runs: 7 – 30 June 
Venue: the Maxim Hotel, Hayarkon Str. 86, Tel Aviv

Real foto Mikołaj Długosz
Real foto is a series of photographs found on the Polish web auction service Allegro and compiled by Mikołaj Długosz, who follows the path of artists such as Martin Parr, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. This frequently bizarre collection of photographs of objects put up for sale says more about their owners than they would like to disclose themselves. The photography critic and curator Adam Mazur wrote about Real foto: "These pictures were not intended to be beautiful but useful. Thanks to Długosz, they have become useful in more ways: they make a statement about the country's economy, culture, society and aesthetics; they make a statement about us. One might say this have always been the case with amateur photography which nobody ever treated as art. But these days so many pictures are taken that the artist's role is to order and fish out – from a chaos, from a mass of images – integral wholes that will not overwhelm but make the viewer's imagination start working in a different direction and change our way of looking at what is most fleeting. It resembles a collection of illuminations, initiations, which are like a flash but lead nowhere. These pictures are superficial and flat. This is what makes them graceful. This is an antidote to deep art photography”. 

Opening: 4 June 8 p.m. 
Runs: 4 – 9 June venue: Halalit (SpaceShip) Gallery, Hayarkon Str. 70, Tel Aviv 

Resourceful Workshops Tomek Rygalik 
Tomasz Rygalik, one of the most talented Polish designers of the young generation will hold a workshop with the local community of Jaffa and participants of the Blue Festival. Through a simple system of connectors they can build any forms they wish using OSB boards: a deck chair, a bench, a table, a kids' playing platform, a sun shade or anything their fancy dictates. The number of combinations and forms is infinite. The objects created during the workshop will be presented to a cultural centre in Jaffa. 

Dates: 18 June 
Venue: Blue Festival, Jaffa, old harbour 

Sensorama [interactive installation].  Jakub Szczęsny (Poland), Eifo Dana Group (Israel) 
Sensorama is a winter-making machine. It will land in the old harbour of Jaffa, inviting participants of the Blue Festival, tired from the June heat, to a sensory trip that will carry them away for a moment from the 2009 Israeli reality to Poland's hardest winter of the 20th century in 1979. The machine will reproduce all the sensations generated by a frosty winter such as images, temperature, smell, sound and the level of air humidity. Putting their heads inside Sensorama, three persons, complete strangers to one another, will simultaneously experience a reality totally alien to them, which cuts down to size everything that normally separates them: religion, origin or social status. 

Date: 18 June 
Venue: Blue Festival, Jaffa, old harbour

Młoda Polska. Dizajn 2009 / Young Poland. Design 2009 
3 - 30 June 2009

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Stowarzyszenie Artanimacje
Partners: Halalit, Maxim Hotel, Filmoteka Polska
Project co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polish Year in Israel 2008/2009 
Project financed from the means of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland
www.poland-israel.org

Exhibition catalouge - pdf

MURRR Gallery came to life in a busy space of the capital, daily swept by thousands of glances. Now it has become an exhibition space for modern, urban style large-format works. MURRR Gallery will reveal successive projects in a series of presentations, each of them lasting several months. The artists’ works will have the chance to harmonize, overlap and be in dialogue with each other. What’s more, they will be able to displace each other from the MURRR Gallery’s space. A simple rule, like all city rules: “It’s not your place!”

MURRR Gallery is a visible sign in the city’s space. It is 24 metres long, and it is there that the works of the outstanding young Polish artists invited will be presented. The works will be created exclusively for that space, bearing in mind its uniqueness, as well as the character of the immediate neighbourhood.
The first presentation shows the works of Dominik Cymer, an acclaimed graphic artist and designer affiliated with BędzinBeat team, author of many brilliant projects on industrial topics. Dominik Cymer creates a world of extraordinary colour intensity, full of surprising events, creatures, buildings, and constructions. His work Wydobycie koloru [Colour Output] can be understood as a search for and discovery of colour in a world often described as grey. It can also be an indication of a certain lifestyle, a way of thinking about the world in which the bright side gets the better of the dark side.
FILM: WORK / EDITING

Dominik Cymer does graphic design, illustration and interactive media. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions, among others Dizajn! Dizajn! at Bielska Gallery BWA, Bielsko-Biala; Alarm Warszawa! at InfoQultura, Warsaw; Alternatif Turistik at Kronika, Bytom. Netizens Creative Director. Winner of numerous awards, including KTR Polish Advertising Competition (2008, 2009) in Advertising Illustration and Graphic Design for Use-It map of Warsaw, published by the Capital City of Warsaw and Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

Artists invited to participate in the project: Dominik Cymer, Truth, Jan Kallwejt, m-city Co-operation: Bęc Zmiana Foundation www.galeriamur.pl

Date: starts June 1
Place: Lay's Wall, Zamoyskiego 24/26, Warsaw

Under the heading “How Much Is Enough?” a series of meetings with Daniel Hauser, member of RELAX Studios Swiss art team, make up the first part of the newly set up Warsaw’s Free University. It is a two-day film club where the topic of discussion will be the creations of both Polish and foreign movie directors while looking at the golden age of toppling capitalism.
WFU is a nomadic and network educational institution. Visits to Warsaw made by foreign artists and cultural activists are to be taken as opportunities for meetings, discussions and sharing of thought. The meetings are supposed to be somewhat spontaneous, going beyond the typical “artist meets audience” format. They will often be of a working nature, linked to the research conducted by the invited guests, as well as local projects. The aim of those meetings will be to form a joint and mutually rewarding exchange. This type of activity constitutes one of WFU’s bases for action.

In their activities RELAX Studios centre on the question of relations between artistic production and economic as well as political structures of our societies. They are known as the creators of conceptual interventions in public spaces, interfering with office buildings, corporate and institutional headquarters (including UN Headquarters in 2004). They often work with short mottos and phrases set in public spaces, the more catchy ones being “thinking alone is criminal,” or “you pay but you don’t agree with the price”. In Warsaw RELAX Studios are currently working on actions in public spaces. The results will be shown in early autumn 2009 as part of Passengers Festival, an artistic undertaking for times of crisis which has been turning the global economic system upside down. A big role is to be played by ironic references to classic cinematic pictures of money-making, in addition to hectic economic activity. RELAX Studios meetings are organised in partnership with Passengers Festival and Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council.

Date: May 28-29 (Thursday, Friday), 6 pm
Place: Nizio Gallery, Inżynierska 3, Warsaw
WFU Curator: Kuba Szreder
WFU Organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
WFU Partners: Res Publica Foundation, InSitu Foundation, Komuna Otwock Association, Artanimacje Association, Duopolis Association

WFU 2009 Project is funded by the Capital City of Warsaw grant. www.wuw2009.pl

Those interested in Polish art of the 80s immediately recognise the title of Ryszard Woźniak’s, member of Gruppa art group, painting made almost 30 years ago. The title has been used by Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz, authors of www.artbazaar.blogspot.com, in their newest project. Originally the painting was the artist’s reaction against the declaration of martial law. A reaction indeed traumatic and painful since the whole nation was “pushed” onto the stage against its will, as the artist once said in an interview with ArtBazaar.
How is that work interpreted by the succeeding generations? Is it one of the incidents in Poland’s newest history? Maybe it is just a piece made by an artist from legendary Gruppa, or simply a picture symbolizing the 80s in Polish art?
Bazylko and Masiewicz invited artists from the Poznan “new wave” to take part in the project. Jan Plater Zyberk from Krakow is an exception, yet he refers to the reactions to the events of 1981 most directly. In his work 10 III 1981 (the date of the new prime minister’s, Wojciech Jaruzelski’s meeting with the leader of “Solidarity”, Lech Wałęsa) he presents a record of fifteen simultaneous solitary games of chess. They are an attempt at simulating martial law – they formed the basis of the calculations on martial law’s probability of success.
Each of the artists from Poznan finds his own way of interpreting the work “New Wave is Pissing Along”. Honza Zamojski makes an envelope stamp, which is a symbol of Wu Tang Clan, the hip hop band from New York. “We’ve been surprised by Wojtek Bąkowski’s work,” Bazylko and Masiewicz confess, “because we’ve known his music interests in 80s new wave. Still, Wojtek did not allude to music interpretation but showed… a yellow man scoffing down a Bolesławiec ashtray, for those where the only ones available in the 80s, as he claimed.” The presented works can be viewed at the exhibition; you can also buy a case with the artists’ work (edition of 30 copies). In addition, a limited-edition catalogue of 100 copies has been made for the exhibition; you can also purchase Magda Starska Wiry’s book with all of the pictures made for ArtBazaar.

Time: starts May 15
Place: Bęc, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw

<<< Jakub Czyszczoń, tributetonowafala.blogspot.com

The In/Out wall unit made by Magdalena Czapiewska and Karol Murlak looks even more elegant inside Bęc Zmiana’s raw space. The minimalist simple geometric form, a combination of open recesses and closed shelves creates a space for placing books and other products of material culture.
In/Out was created during Meblościanka 2008 [Wall Unit 2008] design workshop, carried out by Vox Company and Tomek Rygalik in Poznan, May 2008. It was an international project, in which students and young designers from Polish art schools and The Royal College of Art in London took part. In/Out went into production at Vox Furniture and has been available for purchase since February 2009. Now, for the first time in Warsaw at Bęc Zmiana.
Material: laminated board (body), varnished MDF (front), colour: white. Price: 3490 PLN (we accept orders, shipping takes 3 days).

www.voxdesign.pl

After moving out from Mokotowska 65 the previous tenant left holes in the floor tiles. They were so deep they became the focus of our attention. Magda Czapiewska’s and Karol Murlak’s FLUO is a repair programme as well as a way of meeting the holes’ needs. They have been filled with material reflecting the light of ultraviolet fluorescent lamps, currently attracting even more attention. Mostly after dark.

www.designlab.com.pl

The 10th-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated capital, and was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders.  Since then the Stadium and the open-air market have become an  Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of discount shopping, a  storehouse of urban legends, a piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for botanists.
The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the city, inspired Joanna Warsza’s curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X  and the related reader, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was. A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of
the 10th-Anniversary Stadium by Anna Gajewska, Joanna Warsza and
Ngo Van Tuong (2006); Boniek!, a one-man re-enactment of the 1982  Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan, with commentary
by Tomasz Zimoch (2007); or Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio
Simulator and backyardradio (2008) were subjective excursions undertaken by artists into the reality of a Stadium ‘no longer existant’. The projects, of a participative and semi-documentary nature, touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, or the problematic exoticism of the place.
The afternoon seminar at The Building and in its garden will offer a selection of short, partly performed lectures, forming a multi-faceted picture of the Stadium’s deterioration, its bizarre existence as a ‘city within a city’, and the artists’ interventions. The architectural and topographic situation of the Building in Berlin — as a detached edifice with a plot of green lawn — will play a major role in the construction of the event, which will feature a live radio broadcast by backyardradio and a garden project curated by Sebastian Cichocki.

Berlin, The Building, Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
Saturday April 25th., the program starts at 4 p. m.
5:00 – 5:30  Dr Stefanie Peter, anthropologist, The Stadium as Stage
5:30 – 6:00  Anda Rottenberg, curator and critic
6:00 – 6:30 Joanna Warsza, curator, Laura Palmer Foundation, Finissage of Stadium X
7:30 – 8:00 Sebastian Cichocki, curator at Warsaw MOMA, A Walk through the Ruins, or In Praise of Entropy (radio edit)
8:00 – 8:30 Warren Niesłuchowski, writer and philologist, Stadion | Spadion | Spatium: Signing-Off
8:30 – 9:00 Pit Schultz & Diana McCarty, berlin backyardradio, The Radio and The Baazar
 
Stadium X — A Place That Never Was: A Reader
Edited by Joanna Warsza. Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Ewa Majewska, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Van Tuong 
photos Mikołaj Długosz, Marta Pruska, Marta Orlik 
Published by Ha!art and Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw and Kraków, 2008/2009
On sale in Pro QM Berlin and at the Building
 
Organizers: The Building, Laura Palmer Foundation, Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Partners: Polish Institute Berlin, Ha!art publishing house, Pro QM Berlin, backyard radio Berlin.
This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of The German-Polish Foundation

www.stadion-x.pl

It is easier for us to say what this paper is not than to give a stiff definition of its scope. It is wiser to eliminate particular scenarios and toil in an unknown direction than stubbornly confirm the present state of affairs. An undefined tomorrow and a yesterday hard to deconstruct is more exciting than a today—predictable through and through.
The motivations behind the creation of “Format P” thus remain unclear. It is certainly not an art magazine, a literary quarterly, exhibition catalogue, nor a thematic anthology of articles (although this might be closer to the truth). We are aware of this new magazine’s moody spirit. Its content is and will remain amorphous, full of rhizomes and weeds, yet at the same time disciplined by a set of internal rules. Even the title is treated sketchily by us, for we interpret the letter P according to our current needs and whims. We roam through storehouses, get lost in big cities, we are into wandering around contemporary ruins, zoos, provincial museums, secret service archives, cemeteries. Additionally, we owe a lot to accidental reads and unplanned meetings (like the one with a certain F.R. David, who sat in the Cabinet, a club filled with smoke, in a grand M-Metropolis).

FORMAT P has a transitive character, the editorial staff co-operates with a different group of specialists on each edition, that group being entrusted with working out the concept of one edition’s substance. Each edition is bound with a strongly emphasized theme. Both individuals and groups connected with intellectual, artistic teams as well as institutions are invited to collaborate in creating the magazine. FORMAT P directs its attention to independent, peripheral centres, situated outside the mainstream; it focuses on occurrences on the “peripheries” of both art history and literature, known only to a small group of specialists. The magazine operates as a “printed lab”, in search for new, interesting correlations between different fields of culture and science.

FORMAT P#1 is focused on “The Hell of Things”. It was created in collaboration with three young curators: Dominik Kuryłek, Krzysztof Gutfrański and Ewa Opałka, as well as with the help of Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom.

www.format-p.pl

The revealing of a micro-establishment’s potential on Mokotowska 65 in Warsaw. Biednale 2009 [Poor Biennial 2009]. Part 1: Current Topics

The work launching activities on the 15 square meters of Mokotowska 65 was created by Janusz Łukowicz, author of the Drobne Machlojki [Minor Swindles] series. About his work titled Kryzys [Crisis] Janusz wrote the following: “The crisis is already here. It might have always been here, always of some sort. If not a financial one, then some other.” We’re interested in the other!

In old-time Warsaw Mokotowska used to be the street of the affluent bourgeoisie, and it’s no different today. It’s a street of expensive restaurants, boutiques, shops with glamorous design, and spa salons. In this urban-economic space Bęc is presenting the strategy for our times. Minimum expenditure. Maximum experiment. Biednale 2009.

The experimental space of the small establishment rented by Bęc Zmiana Foundation right after a shop specializing in wooden cats moved out, will emerge as a bookshop, a place for young designers of the new generation to present their works, a Lomo-shop, a journal reading room, a cultural information spot, as well as a meeting place and space for the presentation of interdisciplinary creative work.

Transformations of the Mokotowska 65 space will be open for monitoring during their undergoing. Their frequency is yet unknown.

Date: from 5.03.2009 (Thursday), opening at 7 pm
Place: Warsaw, Mokotowska 65 (near 3 ††† Square)

<<<Janusz Łukowicz: Kryzys [Crisis], neon (Styrofoam, board, Christmas tree lights), 2008 

A mix of Socialist mausoleum, Aztec temple, and bunker system with a network of small gardens, along with a grid structure of endless market stalls – here is one of possible pictures of Socialist Realist ruin – the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and the Jarmark Europa open-air market surrounding it. After twenty years of a phantom-like existence in the middle of Warsaw, this expanse in 2008 became the construction site of a new national stadium. The book offers a selection of texts presenting a multi-faceted picture of that site’s deterioration and its bizarre existence as a ‘city within a city’. It pictures the area as a Land-Art piece and picturesque ruin, a primeval forest, a realm of precariousness and discount shopping, a work camp for archaeologists and botanists, a ‘Vietnamtown,’ a sonic phenomenon or architectural splendor. The reader also documents the series of site-specific art projects entitled The Finissage of Stadium X curated by Joanna Warsza and provides them with a theoretical context.
The Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated, and was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being at the same time ‘revived’ by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism. Jarmark Europa suddenly became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, as well as a major tourist attraction. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non)presence in the middle of Warsaw brought about the series of art projects, and later this reader.
Over the course of time, the 10-th Anniversary Stadium which is now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was. www.stadion-x.pl

Stadium X – A Place That Never Was – a Reader
Edited by Joanna Warsza
Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Halina Galera, Ewa Majewska, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Barbara Sudnik-Wójcikowska, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Văn Tưởng. Bilingual issue: PL/ENG. Published by: Bęc Zmiana Foundation & Korporacja Ha!art
www.ha.art.pl

The book was sponsored by the City of Warsaw and Narodowe Centrum Sportu www.stadioncity.pl

Under a dark underpass down the busy Łazienkowska Route, that divides two picturesque parks: Agrykola Park and Park na Skarpie, dozens of colorful (red, yellow and green) lamps have been attached as a result of an idea of Jakub Szczęsny, an architect. Whenever someone appears in the area during a night, light flash sequences brighten up the darkness. Simple conception based on spotlighting effect is meant to modify the perception of the public space. It is also an invitation for a walk, an answer to night flanuers' needs and an attempt of a city’s synchronization.

The light installation by Jakub Szczęsny is a part of the project SYNCHRONICITY_Warsaw. Projects for the Future Warsaw and is coordinated by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation. More information at www.synchronicity.pl

Time: from 15th September
Start up: after dark, in collaboration with plan B and plac zabaw
Place: Warsaw, the archway under the Łazienkowska Route in the Agrykola Park

<<< photo: Drążek

Supported by the Capital City of Warsaw

An excerpt from the introduction to the Notes.for.collectors
by Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz

"It is astounding that there are still no books on the Polish market allowing the understanding of the most contemporary art market. In our publication we tried to show that — contrary to popular opinion — it is not a mystic territory reserved solely to wealthy snobs, and that the only true requirement is the need for constant education. Well... and maybe some guts, too.
You can start collecting newest art in many ways, according to your abilities and the need to surround yourself with unique objects. This publication aims to encourage making the first step.
The final shape of this publication is a result of many a compromise. A bilingual edition initially planned took on this form only partially. The part describing the Polish art market from the fall of communism until today is only in English and is addressed mainly to the foreign reader. The “how-to” part is, on the other hand, addressed specifically to the Polish reader. The supplement, however, in which the most interesting “young names” on the Polish art market, the most important works made in the recent years, as well as basic information on the Polish and international art market can be found is intended for everyone. We hope you will enjoy our work!"

Authors: Piotr Bazylko & Krzysztof Masiewicz    www.artbazaar.blogspot.com

Notes.for.collectors is free of charge and can be found in galleries, museums of contemporary art, in selected cafes in Poland, in the Bec Zmiana Foundation Office in Warsaw, and on http://bec.art.pl/notes.php [download PDF].

Published thanks to financial support from Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation

Supported by:

     Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Republic of Poland: Operational Program Promoting of Reading

    The Capital City of Warsaw

The map of Warsaw is made for young travellers. It presents 103 spots in the city chosen by travellers, young inhabitants and owners of hostels in Warsaw. The map was made in cooperation with USE-IT EUROPE, which is tourist info for young people and Promotion Dept. of the City Hall of Warsaw.
USE-IT publications contain information that young travellers really need. Where are the free concerts? If there’s one museum I have to see, which one? How can I stop looking lie a tourist?
USE-IT publications are made by young people for young people. People like advice from their equals, so USE-IT publications usually include portraits of locals as well (with picture) - young people telling what they think about the city, or giving a special tip. USE-IT does not make publications with „something for everybody”. But chooses to aim at a specific target with specific needs.

Text: Grzegorz Piątek, Design and illustration: Dominik Cymer www.nobdepot.com & Rafał Szczepaniak www.rafal-szczepaniak.com

The map is free of charge and can be found in hostels in Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan, Gdansk, in the Bec Zmiana Foundation Office in Warsaw, and on www.use-it-warsaw.pl [download PDF A4 format].

Warsaw is one of the biggest capitals of New Europe. It’s problematic past is still visible not only in the dysfunctional city structure. What is even more characteristic is an obvious lack of dynamism and vision in the municipal policy observed from the beginning of liberalization in Poland. The city seems to be paralyzed by the syncope of political elections, an impossibility of continuing any long-term plans and an obvious myopia of local authorities when it comes to the evaluation of Warsaw’s potential. Lack of vision doesn’t show only in the elaboration and execution of masterplans, it’s other side is the lack of idea “what” Warsaw should become, what are this city’s ambitions, how Warsaw should be perceived and marketed.
Our exhibition’s main idea is to show to Warsaw public- from simple every-day bread consumers , through planners, to local politicians that working on the vision requires a confrontation and openness towards different perspectives not necessarily belonging to the standard range of tools used in municipal planning. The perspective can be large, intentional, subversive, analytical or intuitive and it’s main value is the one of a daring, uncastrated thought that embraces the future instead of fearing it.
For this reason we will confront ideas on Warsaw’s future approached by fifteen entities from Asia, Americas, Europe and Australia. Some of them were prepared for different locations (Philadelphia, Seoul, Madrid) and represent examples of what was, according to it’s creators, a most appropriate answer to Warsaw problems. Another group is composed out of projects prepared especially for the Polish capital, but still basing on a vague idea of Warsaw. The third group will be composed out of two projects starting from a hipothesis and developed through analytical work. This way we will show both instinctive and analytical approach.
The exhibition is composed out of two opposed projects:
1. No Hear No See
13 projects by different world architects elaborated or chosen from previous work on basis of ignorance and sensations on Warsaw actual situation instead of deep, multilayer analysis. The projects were published in “W (is for Warsaw)” book by Fundacja Bęc Zmiana.
2. Deep Submergence
Three projects by Centrala Designer’s Task Force Warsaw), S'A ARQUITECTOS + Esestudio (Lisbon/ Barcelona) and by RaumLabor (Berlin) collective starting with a hipothesis and leading towards clearly expressed conclusions, where the visual realism is less important than a direct and convincing representation of analytical outcome. Due to time limitations the projects will allow a “deep submergence” into only one chosen field of research as base for the vision development. The research fields can be: social, economical, ecological, geopolitical, historical, climatic or geographic.

www.synchronicity.pl

Curator: Jakub Szczęsny (Centrala / www.centrala.net.pl)
Organizer: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

Project supported by the City of Warsaw
Partner: Goethe-Institut Warschau

Stadiums and borders are meant to build the national identity. Whereas the stadiums are the real architectural objects constructed within few years; borders are the products of our imagination. They are in fact consisting of contracts, performativ acts, symbols and potential violence. Borders and stadiums are supposed to tell us, who we are. Berlin - Bern group SCHAUPLATZ INTERNATIONAL will recreate in the middle of the lawn a fragment of the polish eastern border in 1:1 scale. An observation point will be constructed on the crown of the Stadium. Look at it in all it's beauty and misery. In this space of multi-meaning and contradiction, past and future SCHAUPLATZ INTERNATIONAL wants to cool down.
Until recently Frontex was located near the 10TH-ANNIVERSARY STADIUM. Frontex, the EU agency based in Warsaw, is responsible for the border security in Europe. In cooperation with the police, the army and the secret service Frontex is organizing the intervention groups, people hunting and charter deportation. In consequence the emigrants are using more and more dangerous ways to pass the borders. Frontex's employees, on their way to work, were passing every day by the Stadium and the market – the place that was dividing people in legal and illegal ones.
The artists were inspired by the phenomenon of the Stadium - built from the ruins of Warsaw as a monument of the communist regime, then the seat of the pioneers of the capitalism, the only place diverse culturally where the emigrants gathered, the meta-ruin. Very soon the new National Stadium for Euro 2012 will be built on this location. The amazing contrast between the derelict monument with the new, bottom-up energy of the traders and the emigrants, the architecture of the future, questioned procedures of Frontex and all other unknown features – will create the climax of the control observation point. Just sit and watch.

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

        Project supported by City of Warsaw

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana i Fundacja Laury Palmer
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Szwajcarska Fundacja dla kultury Pro Helvetia, Narodowe Centrum Sportu, Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Orfi, teleskopy.pl, mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 15th June, 2008 from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
admission free, entrance next to the tunnel from Al. Zieleniecka

annas kollektiv is an interdisciplinary group of two dancers, two architects and a video artist. Since 1999 annas kollektiv has created site-specific work and has aimed at offering new views on public spaces. The artists confront the architecture as a potential city-set raising questions about social, urban and culture meanings that are generated by it. Their performances are also dematerializing the architecture objects – through e.g. optical disturbance of gravitation, changing the emergency exit systems, using light effects. annas kollektiv shows are often inscribed into the subterranean parkings, high-rise buildings or train stations. During the two weeks residency in Warsaw the Swiss artists will prepare a performance in the ex-communist X-Anniversary Stadium, built after the 2nd WW with the ruins of the city, which has now become a construction site for new Stadium for Euro 2012. Based on space, sound, light and movement the show will serve as artistic acupuncture showing the disappearing parts of the monumental sport place – such as historic slices of tribunes, tunnels entrance, lawn in flowers, points of pillaring. The Swiss collective, inspired by the architecture of the Stadium as a multilayered space of history, will offer its own interpretation of this outstanding and disappearing place, which have never been discussed as a valuable heritage of the social realism period.
With: Anna Bürgi, Martin Bölsterli, Boris Hitz, Katrin Oettli, Deborah Suhner
Music by: m.Bunio.s

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

        Project supported by City of Warsaw

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana i Fundacja Laury Palmer
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Szwajcarska Fundacja dla kultury Pro Helvetia, Narodowe Centrum Sportu, Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Orfi, BENQ, mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 31st May, 2008 10:00 p.m.
entrance next to the tunnel from Al. Zieleniecka

The graphic form of “notes.na.6.tygodni” (“6.Week.Notebook”) is a result of our principles of substance and our modest financial potential: maximum information, in the most up-to-date design form, on minimum space.
This all makes us the more happy to learn that “notes.na.6.tygodni” received a merit award at the prestigious graphic design contest, European Design Awards 2008.
The Notebook owes the award for layout to two outstanding graphic designers of the young generation: Małgorzata Gurowska, author of covers, and author of the layout, Grzegorz Laszuk.
The jury, which consisted of graphic designers and representatives of 12 graphic design magazines (inter alia “TYPO” / Czech Republic, “Etapes” / France, “Progetto grafico” / Italy, “Eye” / Great Britain, “2+3D” / Poland), judged works sent from all over Europe in several categories.
The awards were given during a gala event in Stockholm on May 18, which took place at the time of the ED-Conference. The conference, in which the most interesting and significant graphic designers from all over Europe took part, lasted a couple of days. The Notebook received merit in the “magazine” category for issues 30-38 published in 2007.
“notes.na.6.tygodni” has been published since 2003 as a project run by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation. It is available in over 100 spots nationwide. It has a circulation of 3000 copies. It is a two-times winner of the Chimera International Publication Design Contest in the category for best magazine (2004 and 2007).
“notes.na.6.tygodni” could not come out without the support from our readers (thank you!), grants and the generosity of our sponsors. We have been receiving partial funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage / “Promotion of Reading” Operational Programme for the last three years. We have also received a grant in the City of Warsaw City Hall’s Office of Culture contest for the years 2008-2010. In 2007 we received support from Orange; in 2008 from Plus. Since its first issue the Notebook has been receiving backing from Arctic Paper Poland.

www.ed-awards.com

On the market around Stadion Dziesięciolecia there is a system of loudspeakers used for giving opening hours, making announcements, and providing other administrative information. The RADIO STADION BROADCASTS project will transform this local public address system into a weekend radio station. Its programme will be drawn up based on suggestions by the vendors from all over the world who trade at the market, and will be broadcast in their own languages. The original inspiration for the project came from a piece by the Danish artist Jens HAANING, who broadcasted jokes in Turkish over a loudspeaker in the main square in Copenhagen. His installation created a community of laughter among Turkish emigrants, and temporarily inverted their situation by making the majority feel excluded for once.

The RADIO STADION BROADCASTS project uses an everyday means of communication to create an ephemeral participatory acoustic space blurring territorial, symbolic, and identity boundaries. The idea relies on the inability of the general public to understand programmes in the native languages of the vendors (sports commentary in Vietnamese, political manifestos in Arabic, news in Russian etc). Deriving from the concepts of radio art, the project will create a micro-society of listeners and performers made up of people who have been subtly enriching the homogenous landscape of the post-communist city since 1989.

The broadcasting will be prepared by Jacek Skolimowski and Adam Witkowski from Radio Simulator and Pit Schultz and Diana McCarty from Berlin backyardradio. Backyard Radio snatches the radio from tv towers and broadcasting agencies and instead of showering down on the city, the radio waves beam out of the districts and neighborhoods. The seat of backyardradio is now Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Project by: Jacek Skolimowski & Adam Witkowski
Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza
Coordination: Zuza Sikorska

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana i Fundacja Laury Palmer
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Chłodna 25, Fundacja Forum Różnorodności, Kontynent Warszawa, Mamastudio, ORFI

        Project supported by City of Warsaw

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 27th April, 2008 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
admission free, access from Rondo Waszyngtona

<<< poster by: MamaStudio www.mamastudio.pl

2007
Chimera International Publication Design Contest: Gold Chimera in the category Magazine, Silver Chimera in the category Table of Contents, and Bronze Chimera in the category Typography for “notes.na.6.tygodni” magazine (“6-week Notebook”);

“Gazeta Wyborcza” weekly supplement “Co Jest Grane” readers’ cultural award Wdecha 2007 in the category Event of the Year for “Boniek!” performance, the first part of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and Europe Market closing;

2006
Civis Polonicus Foundation’s merit award for achievements on the project “Searching for Warsaw Citizens’ Models”;

2004
“Gazeta Wyborcza” weekly supplement “Co Jest Grane” readers’ cultural award Wdecha 2004 in the category Event of the Year for Hanna Kokczyńska’s and Luiza Marklowska’s “Pink Glowing Deer” project carried out by the Vistula river;

Chimera International Publication Design Contest award in the category New Magazine Launch received for an innovative approach to magazine design for "notes.na.6.tygodni" magazine.

Is it true that the further away you stand, the more you see?
Can Warsaw be seen from far away? From how far?
What comes to mind when you think of Warsaw?
Invited by us curator and art critic Sebastian Cichocki, architect Jakub Szczęsny and urban planner Krzysztof Nawratek asked artists, atchitects and theorists from all over the world to make their own statements on Warsaw. We did not look for descriptions of reality or simple associations. We searched for intuitions, clouds of afterimages, traces of overheard news, echos.

Part 1 Warsaw Does Not Exist* (Sebastian Cichocki)
Bas van Beek, Daniela Brahm, Pavel Büchler, Caner Büyükgökmen, Yane Calovski, Lawrence English, Cevdet Erek, Bjorn Hegardt, Little Warsaw, Rainer Ganahl, Scott Hayes, Hristina Ivanoska, Wolfgang Mahler, Antje Majewski, Nikoleta Marković, Marko Mäetamm, Hatake Nakemura, Ahmet Ögüt, Anu Pennanen, Khaled D. Ramadan, Markku Peltola, Sean Snyder, Nedko Solakov, Franziska Wicke, Florian Zeyfang

Part 2 Capital  of the Universe (Krzysztof Nawratek)
Jacek Dukaj, Philippe Fayeton, Florian Koch

Part 3 SYNCHRONICITY 1: No Hear, No See (Jakub Szczęsny)
Dorell Ghotmeh Tane Architects, Ecosistema Urbano, Elegant Embellishments, Husos, IwamotoScott Architecture, JHG Jorge Hernandez de la Garza, Kokkugia, Mass Studies, O-S-A, R.A.M.A.D.O.W.N., StudioBasar, Fabio Schillaci, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

Looking for W? +CLICK

<<<Illustration: Bjorn Hegardt

Every hundredth citizen of Warsaw is originally from Vietnam. However, they are invisible in the city that is almost monocultural. The only place one can notice their existence is Vietnamese part of the Jarmark Europa Market. Students and educated people, quite often with their PhD, created this spot in early 90's so that they could work and at the same time were able to use the polish economic prosperity in order to become successful. Lately, many questions have arisen because of the idea of closing down the Jarmark Europa Market: What will happen with Vietnamese people after that? Is it truth that they decide to return to their homeland, because of the polish political situation? What do we know about the Vietnamese minority - the biggest minority in Poland?During the debate a short movie about Vietnamese, who are back to Hanoi was presented and conversation between Ton Van Anh (activist and journalist), Teresa Halik, PhD (Vietnam specialist), Paweł Boski, PhD (psychologist) and Joanna Warsza (curator of the project) was held.

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Fundacja Laury Palmer, Krytyka Polityczna
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Mamastudio        

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 16th December, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Place: Warsaw, REDakcja Krytyki Politycznej, Chmielna 26 apt. 19

Inspections of the site are usually held in the place where something important has happened, and afterwards eyewitnesses try to report this situation. The second episode of Finissage of the Stadium X was formed on the basis of the inspection of the site and on the idea of meeting people who have been connected to the Stadium: Stanisław Królak (remarkable cyclist of the Peace Race), Janusz Zaorski (film director and a sport fan), traders from the Jarmark Europa Market, Euro 2012 planners and Adam Roman (sculptor), to name a few.
The second part of the episode was the lecture about art and the public sphere by Stéphane Noël as well as presentation of “Boniek!” - movie by Marcin Latałło.

Curators of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza & Cezary Polak

Organizers: Fudacja Bec Zmiana, Fundacja Laury Palmer, Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego-Festiwal Niewinni Czarodzieje
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: CHD Stadion, Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, Szwajcarska Fundacja dla Kultury Pro Helvetia, Fundacja dla Wolności, klub Chłodna 25, mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 18th November 2007, Part I – 12 a.m. Stadium X entrance from Wybrzeże Szczecińskie // Part II – 7:00 p.m. Chłodna 25 Club, www.chlodna25.blog.pl

A report from border territories. A provocation toward the furniture business. An answer to the users’ unvoiced needs. A mass-production proposal. An invitation to consumption. Authors, artists and designers invited: Janusz Łukowicz, Tomek Rygalik, Hubert Czerepok, Bartosz Mucha, Gogo (Piotr Stolarski, Maria Makowska), Joanna Jurczak, Beza (Zofia Strumiłło, Anna Łoskiewicz), AZE (Anna Kotowicz, Artur Puszkarewicz), Massmix. The exhibition was shown during the Łódź Design International Festival, a first-time event of this kind in Poland dedicated to design in its broadest sense.

SIn the presence of hundreds of spectators Massimo Furlan, a Swiss performer (www.massimofurlan.com) made a one-man reconstruction of one of the most spectacular football matches in the history of the Polish team: Poland-Belgium (3:0) at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain. The artist brought back the famous game from the “choreographic” point of view of the key football player, Zbigniew Boniek. The match took place at 2:10 pm and was commented “live” by Tomasz Zimoch, a famed sport commentator, and was transmitted by Radio Kampus 97,1 FM.
The 10th-Anniversary Stadium, nowadays a devastated multifunctional sports stadium was always a place serving not only sports but also public shows and spectacular events. It is a piece of Polish history, memory and a witness of the transformation from communism to capitalism. The stadium is to be transformed for UEFA European Football Championship 2012, and a sports hall will be built in place of the football pitch.
25 years ago, on July 10, 1982 the Polish football team won third place at the World Cup in Spain. Coach Antoni Piechniczek’s team repeated the success of Kazimierz Górski’s team from 1974. Zbigniew Boniek enchanted (striking 3 goals) in the match with Belgium (3:0) in the second round of the World Cup. One of the newspapers in Brussels read the following day: “Boniek Butcher of Belgium Hearts!”.
Furlan’s projects often relate to childhood images and memories. The voice of the radio commentator getting out of open windows in a deserted city is one of such memories. Furlan lives in Lausanne, where he makes theatre plays (recently “Palo Alto” and “Les filles et les garcons”) and performance events.

Watch on You Tube: Akcja "Boniek!"

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Fundacja Laury Palmer, Radio Kampus, Stołeczna Estrada, Szwajcarska Fundacja dla Kultury Pro Helvetia
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: CHD Stadion, TVP Kultura, on board Public Relations, EURO RSCG,  Mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl 

Sunday, 14th October, 2007 4:15 p.m.
access from Wybrzeże Szczecińskie

It took us some time to renovate the Loop Bench. The project by Przemek Kaczkowski i Jacek Piotrowski was placed in Świętokrzyski Park beside The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw in June 2004 thanks to support from the Institute of Italian Culture. It was part of Bęc Zmiana New Urban Design Project.
Two times the look of the bench was changed: firstly, the seat was wooden; then, the loop disappeared; finally, the bench is more permanent and hopefully no one will try to destroy it.

<<< The Loop Bench by Przemek Kaczkowski i Jacek Piotrowski, 2004

<<< The Loop Bench, 2006

 <<< The Loop Bench, 2007

Support of Joanna Rajkowska’s “Dotleniacz” (“Oxygenator”) project, shown on Plac Grzybowski in Warsaw; seats constructed by designers of the young generation: K.Myk benches and urban sofas designed for the Urban Objects New Fair—the previous accomplishments of the Foundation in 2007—were handed over.

http://www.rajkowska.com/en/oxygenator.php

In Warsaw the best is often hidden behind the scenes.  We have put together this edition of Notes from Warsaw to bring you everything you won’t find in the conventional guide books. You need a good guide to appreciate fully the taste of this eclectic urban cocktail. Without a friend to take you to the clubs scattered in the most surprising of places, to the galleries in the private apartments, to the courtyards and backyards…you might end up a bit disappointed. The unfinished buildings and abandoned projects mean that Warsaw is one of the greenest cities in the world. You can walk across this city of 2 million without ever really leaving a park. Splitting the city in half is a lazily flowing unregulated river. In Warsaw you can find exclusive night clubs on the top floor of communist-era tower blocks, an Asian bazaar in a soccer stadium, a one-line underground that terminates in a forest, a faux-palm tree in the center of a downtown intersection, and a stock market in the former communist-party headquarters.
More on: notesfromwarsaw.blogspot.com


Publication was published thanks to the financial support of City of Warsaw.

The event is a presentation of designs made by leading architects and designers from all over the country: GOGO, BEZA, PUFF PUFF, as well as db2_architekci, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Dariusz Sirojć, Tamizo and Tomasz Zaleski, during the Wroclaw Non Stop Festival 2007. For the duration of the Festival the New Fair square was filled with a scene, info box, internet café, lounge area, bar, seats, and a viewing platform—all of their design. The project was carried out by The Bęc Zmiana Foundation together with The ReWritable Research Team (architects: Romek Rutkowski and Łukasz Wojciechowski), at the invitation of the Wroclaw Non Stop Festival. The project was carried out thanks to the help of the Municipality of Wroclaw City Promotion Office.

<<< Urban Sofa by GOGO (Piotr Stolarski & Maria Makowska) www.gogo.com.pl

Designed by Michał Kwasieborski (Department of Industrial Design, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts) K.MYK benches received 2nd prize in the Warsaw Chief Architect’s Office park bench student contest in 2006. The benches were placed in Pole Mokotowskie.

The project was carried out thanks to the help of the City of Warsaw.

Sponsors: NESTEA, AMS.

<<< P.BBLE on a billboard, project: Kobas Laksa

<<< P.BBLE  in a pond, photo: Marta Zasępa

BĘC IN ACTION >>> 2002-2006

Photonotes.for.6.weeks /August 2006/, cover photo by Kobas Laksa >>>www.kbx.pl

Design contest rganised together with the City of Warsaw Promotion Office and the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Department of Industrial Design. “Squeezes from Warsaw”, symbols of the capital designed by Maja Kaczyńska in the shape of relaxing latex “squeezes”, received an award and, as well as a number of other projects made for that contest, were produced and used to promote the city during national and international fairs, conferences etc.

The outcome of the contest was exhibited at Czuły Barbarzyńca in Warsaw from April to June 2007.

Organizers: Biuro Promocji Urzędu Miasta st. Warszawy, Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Wydział Wzornictwa Przemysłowego ASP w Warszawie

<<<Maja Kaczyńska: Uściski z Warszawy / Squeezes from Warsaw

Kino.Lab Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Red Bull: outdoor furniture for the summer cinema; Collegium Civitas: postcard advertising the university; Museum of the History of Polish Jews: temporary installation announcing the construction of the Museum building, open since September 2006.

<<< furniture for the summer cinema by Lech Rowiński

Exhibition of designs made by the youngest generation of architects, designers and artists as part of the Warsaw of the Future project, under the patronage of the City of Warsaw Chief Architect’s Office. The exhibition was shown near the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw; it was accompanied by a series of free postcards distributed in cafés and galleries.

<<Project by Witek Wyczański

Presentation of designs from the New Urban Design Project-Beach series, new architecture/design/art at the interface of city-water. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of free postcards distributed in cafés and galleries. Clear Channel was partner in the exhibition.

Publication of the book “Warsaw, Time and Space” presenting statements of eminent scholars (inter alia Halina Taborska, Jerzy Bralczyk, Roch Sulima, Wiesław Godzic) on Warsaw’s space; the book was illustrated with designs made by the youngest generation of architects, designers and artists.

Organizers: Biuro Naczelnego Architekta Miasta, Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana
Cooperation: Wydział Wzornictwa Przemysłowego ASP, Pracownia Sztuki w Przestrzeni Publicznej ASP, Katedra Projektowania Architektury Przemysłowej i Wielkoprzemysłowej Politechniki Warszawskiej, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej

Hanna Kokczyńska and Luiza Marklowska study design in Warsaw. A year ago (2003), they came up with two projects originally commissioned for the Warsaw Metro: the Glowing Pink Deer, as well as Blue Birds (the latter together with Przemysław Matuszak). - Both visions were meant to jazz up the moody, dull-gray city space of Warsaw - the authors say. - In either project we combined sharp colors with light; either one flirts with kitsch.
Since August 2004, the flock of pink deer found its abode by the Wisła river, not far from the University Library complex. The deer were awarded “Gazeta Wyborcza” readers’ prize for the coolest artistic event in Warsaw in 2004.
The two designers seriously admire the deer lifestyle: 7 hours per day for eating; 7 hours for chewing; 3 hours’ sleep; and the balance for personal life is disturbingly similar to their own daily Schedule : )
A redeemer-deer endowed with a human voice is the staple of European Christian lore, and miraculous savings are its strongest suit. In many mythologies, the deer is a middleman between heaven and earth. It stands for speed and longevity. “In the Chinese tradition, the deer is the only creature able to find the immortality mushroom; when the deer enters its 1000th year of life, it becomes blue. At 1500 years of age, it becomes white; black at 2000”, Władysław Kopaliński notes in his Dictionary of Symbols.
Meanwhile, young deer are pink. They watch closely what the future holds for them, and they are filled with the light of the rising sun.
Sculptoral assistance with the Pink Deer project: Edyta Makaruk

Pink Glowing Deer are sponsored by: Vattenfall Poland

<<<Photo by: Kobas Laksa / www.kbx.pl

Bęc Zmiana Foundation was founded in 2002 as an independent, not for profit, and non governmental organisation. Our main aim is to explore, provoke and promote emerging culture by introducing artistic and research projects/actions: among others Free/Slow University of Warsaw, www.wuw-warszawa.pl; Disappear at Vistula River, www.znikanie.pl; Dizajnwawa, www.dizajnwawa.pl; Expectative. Arts and Sciences, www.ekspektatywa.pl; Synchronicity. Projects for Future Cities, www.architekturaXXI.pl. We are also working as a publishing house issuing books and magazines devoted to arts and design, society and economy, critique of culture and sociology (among others non-profite magazine "Notes.na.6.tygodni" www.funbec.eu/notes experimental magazine in the humanities "Format P" www.format-p.pl, popular and academic books such as Visual Research in Action, To Photography! Towards a Radical Program of Visual Sociology, Reductions/Microspaces, Architecture of the 21st century.
www.funbec.eu