autoportret 36 uk

something was going to happen soon, some-thing completely new, and that it would be an impeccably white sheet of paper on which those young people would write.

In reality my luck was even greater. In the following years, I was an eyewitness to the slow changes in at least several countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Yet with time, it became clear that not everything was the way I and my peers from the Czech Republic, Slovakia (in the meantime, the federation had disintegrated), Poland, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus had imagined. Not only because each of these countries naturally developed in a different way (this issue par-tially explores this subject); not only because Russia chose a different route from the Central Europe (which wasn’t so obvious to us in the early nineties); but also because the

“The natural inconvenience of democracy is the fact that democracy ties the hands of those who approach it in an honest way, while it allows those who don’t take it seri-ously to do almost everything.” Václav Havel

I was lucky enough to visit Prague for the first time almost one year after the revolution. I call it luck not only because I managed to see Prague before the

American invasion and the mass buyout of the Old Town; not only because I could walk across Charles Bridge at night and during the day without the need to squeeze through the crowds of frantic tourists; finally, not only because I managed to go to the Slavia café when it was still attended by actors, artists,

writers and the elderly. But also and mostly because then, in 1990, there was something in the air, something I hadn’t known before and which was not repeated later on. It is impossible to describe it in a few sentences. You could sit on the Main Market Square for hours and watch everything that was happe-ning there for free. They performed mime on improvised stages made of wooden planks, they played amateur jazz concerts, and they even let balloons up in the air. I particularly remember one September dusk when a ballo-on was hovering over the city. The movement of the people on the Main Market Square had something organic about it – it looked more like a natural phenomenon than human activity, just like bubbles forming on the surface of a mountain creek, or how after heavy rain suddenly out of nowhere a whole colony of mushrooms appears. It seemed that

Emiliano Ranocchi

FROM A VANTAGE POINT OF TWO DECADES ON

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 4 autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 5

notional frames which we had used to define the horizons of our expectations turned out to be powerless, if not erroneous. I will only mention the two most likely ideas from that period which we had to abandon.

The first idea which was presented to us in the mass media almost as a kind of biological law (it was derived from the language of biology), and which later kept coming up in conversa-tions with people was that the market is a homeostatic system, that is, a self-regulating system. At the time, nobody was questioning this. Nobody realised that this transfer had a function of a certain metaphor and that it had a relatively limited descriptive value. The unquestioned acceptance of this premise con-tributed to the fact that on both sides of the newly fallen Iron Curtain it was silently (but also loudly) assumed that, although differ-

ent in each country, there would be a similar development towards democracy and the free market in the younger Europe. It was doubtful how to make the transition the least painful and most effective (is it better to do it faster and radically, or on the contrary, gradually and slowly?) Yeltsin’s Russia was compared to the USA of the 1930s. Yes – chaos, yes – crime and mafia, but they will overcome it and eve-rything will be normal. It will be the way it is meant to be. Just like everywhere else.

I believed in the second idea in a particular way – naively and without reflection, I admit, but to justify myself – I wasn’t the only one. The conviction was more or less that the newly regained other half, the second lung of Europe, would infuse the old part with new life, that the West would share its experience, the East would add its energy, its belief in the future, its vitality – just like two equal parts of one whole. And even if, at the beginning, the Western investors become rife in the Eastern Europe, it is only necessary for the well-understood common good, so that the market, the self-regulating system flourishes. At the time, I associated the word “colonial-ism” with straw hats, Casablanca and Fascist architecture.

After twenty years, this great project seems – to put it mildly – to be undergoing a serious crisis. Clearly, the market isn’t a homeostatic system; Central Europe (now it is appropriate to refer to it in this way because the real East-ern Europe is behind another, this time glass, curtain) is not any equal partner, but a poor relative who, partially out of pity and more often for business reasons, is invited (and not always) to the table where the rich – who

today are not so rich anymore – make deci-sions. Tsarism has returned to Russia, or even: a mixture of tsarism with communism.

In this context, a symbolic dimension is acquired by the departure of a man who em-bodied – perhaps as very few did – everything that this part of Europe could bring to the joint project – the president of a small nation, the poet, the dramatist, the thinker – the visionary. Here lies the crux of the problem: Václav Havel’s good manners, education and intelligence were his chief assets, but at the same time his weakest points, because – as he himself admitted during a public speech: “The natural inconvenience of democracy is the fact that democracy ties the hands of those who approach it in an honest way, while it allows those who don’t take it seriously to do almost everything.” To put it simply, between the honest and the dishonest, the latter usu-ally wins.

My account has no punch-line. The aim of this issue is to attempt to look back at the previous two decades and think about what was good and what was worse in the last twenty years, to think if there is anything else that we can do because – again following Havel’s words – “Hope doesn’t mean that everything will be all right, but it implies a certainty that some-thing makes sense regardless of the outcome.” Sometimes a sharp perspective is worth more than a hasty conclusion. The current issue also brings many lights of hope. “You just have to look around to see them” (so said Václav Havel when receiving his honorary degree from the University of Bucharest in 1994).

translated into english by agata masłowska

fot.

: k. c

ud

lín


Elżbieta Rybicka

Ilustracje: Anna Zabdyrska

Global and localSpatial Experience in Polish literature after 2000

a new cartography Thinking about space in Polish literature evolved greatly after 1989. The first phase of this evolution, back in the 1990s, may be described as the discovery of a new map. This was no longer the old political map, on which the whole country was marked in one colour, but a map of multi-ethnicity and multi-nationality, in which various tints overlapped in various areas, blending into multicolour patches. The second significant process happening in the 1990s was the crea-tion of a new, symbolic geography – decen-tralised, and openly endorsing peripheral, trans-border spaces. With the new cartogra-phy came new ideas, and perhaps the most important of these was the concept of open regionalism, proposed in the circles of the “Borussia” Cultural Community in Olsztyn. First and foremost, it suggested a new spatial model and identity related thereto – not a national, but a multinational identity, which at the same time focused on relationships between different nationalities. This process of decentralisation and endorsement had its

counterpart in the literature of the period: the literature of what is known as “little homelands”.

The decade that followed, however, brought some important transformations. It seems that the key, decisive element was thorough and downright criticism of “little home-lands” literature, on the part of both writers and literary critics. Why was it criticised? Mostly for its escapism – a departure from the chaotic and confusing present into the nostalgically evoked past, but also for my-thologizing the community of “neighbours”, and finally, for assuming that a person’s place of birth, of origin, determines his or her identity, and the stability thereof. In the contemporary literary and critical con-sciousness the category of “little homeland” received a lasting connotation with regres-sive, closed regionalism, based on essentialist identity, bound to the land, and rooted in it.

The change in thinking about space was nevertheless also related to the new cohorts

of writers born in the 1970s joining literary circulation. These young literati experienced space differently. They opted for the uni-versal rather than the local, and certainly against “little homelands” and the idea of roots. All these notions came to be associated with the provincial, the parochial, and above all, with an anachronous model of both literature and identity. Perhaps the strongest derogatory voice sounded in the 2006 novel Niehalo (Uncool) by Ignacy Karpowicz, which presented a grotesque picture of Białystok, no longer as a multi-cultural, trans-border space, but rather as a battlefield between Po-lish catholic gangs versus Euro-enthusiasts.

Seeing that the model based on the narrative formula of roots had played out, and familial places proved to be not so much a multi-cul-tural utopia as an oppressive limitation, the situation required the quest to be continued. The new decade brought several plots – by Joanna Bator, Grzegorz Kopaczewski, Ignacy Karpowicz, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki – written from a patently different perspec-


tive. The young writers were taking off into the world.

cosmopolis The protagonist of Kobieta (A Woman) by Joanna Bator is living in a cosmopolis. Whether she is in New York or in Warsaw her world is filled with the props of an intellectual, with A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, with écriture féminine, with melancholy and psychoanalysis. Her living space is devoid of obvious local landmarks, whilst the descrip-tions of New York are little different from those of Warsaw. What is essential here is not place or places, but the potentiality of free movement and travel. The protagonist’s friend, on learning of another planned trip, offers a revealing diagnosis: “You have no roots […], only a spiritual pseudopod, like an amoeba, by which you attach yourself to the surface for a while.”1 The metaphor of tempo-rary pseudopodia, which replace the former roots, is the best expression of the new atti-tude towards space, which is associated not with belonging, but with a temporary place of residence. Significantly, uprooting is in no way linked to a sense of loss.

The protagonists of Grzegorz Kopaczewski’s novel entitled Global Nation. Obrazki z czasów popkultury (Global Nation. A Scrapbook of Pop Culture) live in a similar world, London being a cosmopolis in which near-identical young people meet, listen to the same music, watch the same TV series. The city in this case is primarily a space of flow; twenty-somethings from all over the world drop by here on the way to somewhere, running

1 J. Bator, Kobieta, Warszawa 2002, p. 232.

away from a job in a corporation, or procra-stinating and postponing the definition of their lifetime projects. Young people come to London for a year or longer, and then they move on; they are not tourists, and they do not engage in sightseeing rituals, they all live in the rhythm of work in fast-food joints and the rhythm of rewinding.

Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, who debuted in 2003 with a collection of stories Stacja Bielawa Zachodnia (Bielawa West Station) describing a Lower Silesian, post-German little town, in his second book, a diptych entitled Dom Róży. Krysuvik (Róża’s House. Krýsuvík), [tu chyba powinny być znaki diakrytyczne: Krýsuvík] moved the setting to Iceland. The narrator does not see much difference between north Reykjavik, and the Lower Silesian hamlet, with the same concrete architecture tower-ing over both.

The spaces of cosmopolis featured in these novels are not only global cities but also, even mostly, the spaces of transit and flow: of people, cultural phenomena, objects and commodities, ideas and concepts since, cha-racteristically, the novels’ protagonists inha-bit mostly the space of culture. In the case of Bator, this is a sophisticated, intellectual culture: Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes, Iri-garey; the post-modern canon. The heroine does not have a language of her own, instead she speaks a trans-national, if feminised, pid-gin. In the global nation, this is the language of popular culture, TV series, music, video clips, MTV; the common, trans-national idiom of the global world. This does not signify accep-tance thereof, as the novel is plainly critical, even anti-global. All the same, it proves that the most cosmopolitan space today is the space of pop culture, which inspires identi-cal reactions in its recipients throughout the


world – reactions of either mindless absorp-tion, or conscious protestation.

It would seem, therefore, that rootlessness is not an issue for the new generation of writers. The space through which they build their “identity” is that of a cosmopolitan, multicultural, global city; alternatively, it merely covers the experience of travel and mobility itself. Yet it is worth asking what kind of “identity” that is. The inverted commas here signal doubt and point to the changes in the self-creation model. If the living space of writers and their protagonists is the cosmopolis, the city of flow, then this fact is of great consequence for the change in the way of thinking about identity: it is no longer focused on genealogy, on the place of origin, on the search for sameness and continuity. I would argue that the outline of “identity” which emerges in these circum-stances is more akin to a non-place, the space of flow, as defined by Marc Augé.2 It is trans-itive in character, and it has less to do with settling down; it is a space where different languages, cultures, and places meet and mix. Therefore in the cosmopolis, a new type of transitive identity develops, while natio-nality is replaced with the global nation, the

2 M. Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropol-ogy of Supermodernity, New York 1995.

new cosmopolitism. Cosmopolitism of either the fast-food or the critical kind.

Therefore, whereas the first stage of re-formulating identity was marked by the discovery of the multi-national, in seemingly homogenous national spaces, the second – emblematic for the youngest generation of writers – revealed the open-endedness of space and the discovery of the trans-natio-nal, which are characteristic of the travel experience.

returns? And yet the years 2008 and 2009 saw several unexpected returns. In her book Piaskowa Góra (Sandy Hill), Joanna Bator returned to her hometown of Wałbrzych, a city of the displaced, of people arriving voluntarily from all over Poland, of Greek immigrants who received the status of political refugees in Poland, and last but not least, a city upon which its former German inhabitants left their mark. She returned in order to create an epic, slightly grotesque saga portraying the confused and intertwined fortunes of the town’s people. Grzegorz Kopaczewski moves from the cosmopolitan London to Katowice for his second novel – Huta (Foundry) – in which he describes a futurist, social dysto-pia, albeit firmly set in the Silesian reality.

Ignacy Karpowicz, following the sneering satire on his hometown in Niehalo, and a post-tourist chronicle of a trip to Ethiopia, returns to Białystok in the novel titled Gesty (Gestures), to take stock of his protagonist’s life. After the Icelandic Dom Róży, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki publishes Rzeczy pierwsze (First Things), a fictional autobiography in which he returns to the city whence he had formerly escaped. Inga Iwasiów, in her Bambino, constructs a multidimensional local narrative telling the story of traumatic deportations and forced relocations from post-war Szczecin. Nearly every one of these books speaks of a peculiar, atopic experience – the concurrent feeling of not-being-there, not belonging, and of the sheer inability to leave the place. In this new, external perspective, the hometowns of Wałbrzych, Białystok, Bielawa, and Poland as a whole, must again be recounted, accounted for, and verified. They bring home the realisation of distance, and at the same time they are a constant reminder of one’s point of origin. Joanna Bator may have expressed it best when she admitted in an interview:

Virginia Woolf once said that, as a woman, she has no need for a home country – be-cause the whole world may be her country. It was no problem for me to make myself


at home in the world, while this original homeland: Piaskowa Góra, Wałbrzych, Poland – this felt uncomfortable. […] My home country is my challenge; I have this love-hate mindset about it. It took living outside Poland for seven years for me to feel that this is where I came from. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and I am from Wałbrzych. This is my beginning; this is whe-re my lineage came from.3

This ambivalent experience once again provokes questions as to a formula for the relationship between identity and space, especially that the return to the place of ori-gin was only momentary – both the writers, and their protagonists took off again very soon, on another journey. In her 2010 novel called Chmurdalia (Cloudalia), Joanna Bator provides a contemporary, feminine rein-terpretation of the Odyssey, whose heroines – Dominika and Sara from Piaskowa Góra, sub-sequent incarnations of a Hottentot Venus – are living the lives of eternal wanderers. Characteristically, Bator turns the Homeric version around: the women are not longing for a return to the symbolic Ithaca, but their energy is fuelled by the desire to escape their family home, to run away from clearly defined life projects, from the determination of provenance. Bator’s novel lists a collec-tion of diverse types of 20th-century wande-rers – from Jewish exiles like Icek Kac and Eulalia Barron, who live in New York solely on memories of the past, to Polish econo-mic emigrants. Also, it makes an important distinction between floating adrift without

3 http://www.repka.pl/Czytelnia/Kultura/-Piaskowa-Gora-.aspx (accessed: 8 April 2010).

purpose versus intentional choice of life in a never-ending journey. Dominika does not want to have a home, because she does not want to belong or to be clearly defined, she does not want to be set in social and family frames, does not want to plan her future and its goals. Towards the end of the novel, however, she becomes aware that you do not escape your home country while “dragging it behind you like a cat drags a tin stuck to its tail.”4

nomadism How, therefore, to describe the relationship between people and place/space? The tradi-tional version would use the perspective of roots: in that case, identity is firmly linked to the place we come from and in which we live – place understood in both geographic and socio-cultural terms. Note, however: that version had already been questioned by contemporary culture, with its identifying marks of modernisation, of migrations both internal (from the countryside and peri-phery to the cities) and external (political and economic). Modern man, after all, was a man displaced. The 20th century brought with it a version of uprooted identity akin to alienation, nostalgically reminiscing upon the lost ties with place. The latest trends, on the other hand – present in literature, but also elsewhere, in other areas – would speak of a new way of experiencing places, and identities attached to them. Probably the most apt term for this is “the nomadic subject” as defined by Rosi Braidotti.5 Noma-

4 J. Bator, Chmurdalia, Warszawa 2010, p. 406.5 R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Chicago 1994.

dism is an existential situation, and more: it is a particular kind of critical sensibility, which objects to being locked within clearly demarcated borders – either territorial or social. The nomad’s identity is never bound to a particular location; instead, it is a chart on which particular destinations have been marked, while the trajectory of life they delineate is a succession of displacements and differences. As a result, the nomadic experience creates an identity in constant flux, an unfinished, open identity of trans-gression, that is an identity forever directed at crossing borders; finally, an identity with no particular aim or goal.

Unlike the modern “homeless” man, the no-mad carries his makeshift “home” along with him, and therefore he does not suffer from the nostalgic syndrome so typical of the for-mer experience of migrants or exiles. What seems essential, particularly in relation to the work by young Polish writers, is the fact that local and global spaces are not mutual-ly exclusive. One can be a nomad, carrying one’s local experiences like a tent all around the world. Locality therefore becomes a component of the cosmopolitan identity. An important component, since it adds the difference necessary to provide an alternati-ve to the process of global unification. And although the nomadic identity is born in the world of globalisation, it does not replicate homogeneity – most importantly because it builds a specific sort of tension and connec-tion between the local and the global.

translated into english by dorota wąsik


The city as a social and spatial whole is more of a process than a structure. Our concern here is not the division into the dynamic and the static in the

city, but the basis of its existence and function-ing, that is, the social production and repro-duction of space. In terms of the spatial, social or cultural aspects, a characteristic of the city is its long-lasting quality, and it is clear that its current appearance and way of operating are the result of long-lasting, complex and multi-dimensional transformations. Hence, the main field of the analysis of the city should not be “the transformations of space”, but rather “the space of transformations”. As Henri Lefeb-vre said, “‘The object’ of attention must be changed from an object in space into the typi-cal production of space.”1 This implies that we perceive specific locations as places where the social negotiation of changes is practised and where the current forms and functions of the city are established. The city should be under-stood as a socially active space that provides

1 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Malden−Oxford−Victoria 2010, p. 37.

us with opportunities which are different from the ones defined by transformation understood in linear terms – that is, by means of categories that break away from the determinist concept of social and political change characteristic of historicism. At the same time, it is important to be aware of the fact that the social produc-tion of urban space is not an abstract process, but a material, bodily one, and that it is associ-ated with the practices which take place within this space. In other words, the city changes not only through giving names or introduc-ing symbols, but also and above all through a specific human activity in the social sphere. This is important because a reflexive relation is established here: the society produces its city, and the city consolidates its own existence by producing its users and citizens. Therefore, it is necessary to recognise the relationship between at least several elements which are crucial in the process of the space production/reproduc-tion: ideology, practice and power.

Ideology constitutes a notion whose meaning is not only debatable, but also, by and large, un-defined. Terry Eagleton lists at least 16 various

definitions of ideology2 and, similarly to other researchers, draws attention to two fundamen-tal trends of understanding this concept. The first one is ideology as “false consciousness”, derived mostly from the Marxist tradition – “false consciousness” as a certain illusion of the autonomous activity in which an individual or a social group live. The second cultural or anthropological trend defines ideology as a so-cial representation of reality.3 Neither of these interpretations fully corresponds with the perspective which might be useful in the analy-sis of the social production of space in the city, and therefore this term will have to be defined further for the sake of our discussion.

The issue is complicated inasmuch as, for example, the post-socialist transformation cur-rently tends to be represented as a departure from (bad) ideologies and subordination to

2 See T. Eagleton, Ideology. An Introduction, London−New York 1991, pp. 1−2.3 See J. Decker, Ideology, New York−London 2004, p. 7, and E. Chiapello, Reconciling the Two Principal Meanings of the Notion of Ideology. The Example of the Concept of the “Spirit of Capitalism”, “European Journal of Social Theory” 2003, Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 159.

Karol Kurnicki

Ideology and power In a post-socIalIst cIty


an appropriate “objective” authority like, for example, modernisation, a market economy or capitalism. The main hypothesis I would like to propose is as follows: the social production of urban space assumes a specific use of ideol-ogy. This means that the distinction between “the ideological socialist city” and “the post-ideological post-socialist city” is not justifiable. This question becomes part of a wider context in the discussion about the end of ideologies; although we cannot summarise this here, it is worth pointing out – referring to Slavoj Žižek – that ultimately the discussion about the “false” or “true” status of any ideology is by and large irrelevant, as ideology is not as much associated with the issue of representation as it is with the social relationships of domination. The more “non-ideological” a given situation seems, the more likely it is that some hidden ideologies are at play, while their impact is simply more effective.4 The more the post-socialist city is de-picted as operating in the “natural” context of capitalism, globalisation or social changes, the greater the suspicion that this image is shaped by the ideologies operating within it. As Žižek emphasises, “any economic mechanisms or legal regulations [...] put into effect certain proposi-tions and values which are profoundly ideologi-cal,” as indeed “the post-ideological society [...] is associated with a series of ideological assump-tions that are vital to reproducing existing so-cial relationships.”5 My hypothesis assumes that ideologies which operate in cities can be found in the spaces produced by the society.

This hypothesis needs to be explained in at least several aspects. First of all, the key aspect

4 See S. Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology, London−New York 1994, pp. 1−32.5 Ibid, p. 7.

is the question of the “ideological space” itself. The ideology I have in mind is, to a great ex-tent, characterised in reference to the theory formulated by Louis Althusser in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (2010).6 Althusser modified the previous definitions of ideology and combined them with the logic of the reproduction of the national capitalist system, while concentrating in particular on the immaterial (ideological) bases of the repro-duction of the material production measures and manufacturing forces (here mainly work-ers). In accordance with this concept, ideol-ogy – as “lacking history” – is present in all social forms, and can be observed in material artefacts and social devices, and therefore also in the city. It becomes impossible to overes-timate the possibility of the critical analysis of ideology in the city if we take into account Lefebvre’s statement in which he claims that the city is the most important “field” of social transformation.7

Simultaneously, space as a product of various interactions constitutes “the sphere in which the existence of variety, in the sense of co-existing plurality, is possible”;8 it is constantly constructed; it continuously finds itself in the process of creation. The definition of the ideological quality of space results from the combination of Althusser’s material theory of ideology and the relational interpretation of space proposed by Doreen B. Massey. Space is ideological because it is malleable and is sub-ject – to a great indirect and direct degree – to

6 See L. Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Appa-ratuses.7 Cf. H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis−London 2003, pp. 156−180.8 D. Massey, For Space, London 2005, p. 9.

the revealed and hidden activities of individu-als and social groups that, in turn, always use the pronounced or implied ideology. Addition-ally, as Kanishka Goonewardena points out in her concept of Urban Sensorium, (urban) space “is a vital element and determinant of human sensual life”9 which can be perceived as an area of ideological mediation or the produc-tion of hegemony.

Another issue needing an explanation is the fact that the ideological social production of urban spaces is carried out through the prac-tices of individuals and groups. The existence of certain representations and a group of val-ues and attitudes associated with them or the dominant external and internalised discourses is not enough. To talk about the actual produc-tion of space, ideology has to be combined with practice, that is, with the everyday physical (bodily) actualisation and modification of the current situation. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have rightly pointed out (in refer-ence to “the spirit of capitalism”), a given form of social organisation requires authorisation by the society itself, that is, its engagement in the process of reproduction and authori-sation.10 The city cannot be maintained only by an existing material substance or domi-nating discourses; it needs to be supported by its inhabitants through their activities and behaviours. The change of dominating principles and material changes in the city alone cannot determine whether or not the city transformation is complete – it has to be

9 K. Goonewardena, The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideolo-gy and the Aestheticization of Politics, “Antipode” 2005, Vol. 37, No. 1, p. 47.10 See L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capi-talism, London−New York 2005, pp. 12−16.

fot.

: a. z

abdy

rsk

aautoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 34 autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 35

carried out through the ideologically justified social practice. For example, the transformation of a factory into an office-commercial centre will have no significance unless there are people who decide to use it. Society creates space ideo-logically, and ideological space influences social practice: if the factory was still there instead of the office-commercial centre, in the space we would meet workers, and not consumers or customer service assistants.

Discussing the “intrinsic logic of cities”, Martina Löw proposes a thesis that in every city specific constellations of coherent resources of knowled-ge and forms of expression are developed:

Cities [...] are crystallised in the contexts of meaning which diversely affect people’s prac-tices, that is, their identities, emotions, attitudes and thinking. Simultaneously and reflexively, these practices reproduce the intrinsic logic of the given city.11

Löw does not mention ideologies existing in the city; nonetheless – while preserving all the dif-ferences – my proposed interpretation has some analogical features in relation to the concept proposed by the author of The Intrinsic Logic of Cities: instead of the intrinsic logic of the city I propose the analysis of dominant city ideologies which simultaneously co-create a unique quality of a given location; I also assume that the very use of the term “ideology” implies a specific po-tential of activity. It is crucial in the discussion on the transformation of the city because in the light of the adopted assumptions it is impossible to talk about one recognised transformation, but

11 M. Löw, “The Intrinsic Logic of Cities. Towards a New Theory on Urbanism”, 2010, p. 6 (unpublished conference article).

rather about a group of various local and speci-fic transformations. Each location undergoing general system changes is unique; it has its own multidimensional “intrinsic logic”, or it also possesses – according to the proposed hypothesis – its own set of practised ideologies, its own spe-cific social production of space. Of course, it is possible to define a common group of characte-ristics for different cities and establish a certain model or type – yet, without emphasising that different cities “co-react” with the changes in different ways because their intrinsic ideolo-gical determinants are different, our analysis will always bring limited results. Besides, it is of great political importance – the introduction of uniform solutions in the cities of a given country or region can bring different results: for example, the situation of historical capitals of post-socialist countries will be different from that of industrial cities whose foundation and development took place in the post-war period.

It is worth mentioning two examples showing social practice as a category within which the post-socialist transformation brought about im-portant changes. This does not directly refer to the ideology in the city, but to a certain extent it is connected with the issue of space transfor-mation. Allison Stenning and other researchers have used the category of domestication12 in their research on post-socialist cities. They paid attention to the fact that the domestication of neoliberalism took place in two main spheres: among the social elite that perceived the new system as suitable for implementation in their country, but also in the everyday practice of in-

12 See A. Stenning, A. Smith, A. Rochovská, D. Świątek, Do-mesticating Neo-liberalism. Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-socialist Cities, Malden−Oxford 2010.

dividuals, households and communities. In the second case, which is more important from the point of view of our analysis, their objective was to show how the new economic and social sys-tem is assimilated and negotiated in everyday life and in what way these everyday practices change the system itself in the researched locations. Elizabeth Dunn, who analysed the transformations of management and work practices in the post-socialist industrial factory, points out that a very important aim of a new Western factory owner was to create a new type of worker or consumer. As Dunn demonstrated using the example of the factory’s manage-ment staff, this took place not only through the change of job titles (“senior officials” became “managers”) – that is, through changes in the current discourse – but mostly through activi-ties which permeated the sphere of everyday social practice (fashion, ways of expressing, dis-played behaviours) and which tended towards modifying an individual as such.13

These examples show how certain consolida-ted social (and also – consequently – material) structures, especially the physically understood urban and architectonic structure, behave during the transformation period. This space must also be perceived as active, as it retains its social in-fluence. In this sense, each city is determined by two factors: on the one hand, relatively constant space relationships shaped by history, and on the other, changeable systems of ideology – partially shared and partially specific to a given location. In other words: the urban system and architec-ture inherited from the previous period – for

13 See E. Dunn, Prywatyzując Polskę. O bobofrutach, biznesie i restrukturyzacji pracy [Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labour], Warsza-wa 2008, pp. 89−95.


example, the existence of a given type of housing estate, the system of zones, the transport system – would be as important a factor as the political, economic and social system changes. The reason for this is that, despite the change in the social context, the materially existing city (created in a process of social space production) retains its functions and ways of influence to a considerable degree. Global changes are essentially very fast, whereas ideologies that guarantee and maintain them are capable not only of transforming the systems of power, economy etc. quickly, but also of transforming people as individuals and groups. The structure of the cities, however, despite the equally conspicuous fast changes, is much more permanent and still has an impact on social prac-tices which use and reproduce this structure. The social city production takes place in the current space which – although transformed as well – actively participates in the production.

The question of power in the city is closely asso-ciated with the question of ideology. Ideological constellations, created and reproduced in the city, are not by and large neutral and “natural”. Although ideologies are practised in specific social spaces, they do not only come down to mental constructs or units of representation, as they can still create nodal points and be translated into hegemonic structures. In this instance, the hegemonic quality should not be understood as a cultural hegemony based on the relationship between the basis and the exten-sion as proposed by Antonio Gramsci, but rather in a relational way – as suggested by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.14 The city is shaped

14 See E. Laclau, C. Mouffe, Hegemonia i socjalistyczna strategia. Przyczynek do projektu radykalnej polityki demokratyczne [Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics], Wrocław 2007.

by many ideologies (both – in terms of space – internal and external), but in specific social-spatial conditions, the relationships between these ideologies have to be established in such a way that they become efficient in the space practice. Such a relationship can be constituted by, for example, the combination of national ideology with the ideology of a certain model of capitalism which supports the local (national) social city system removed from any external influences – while assuming that this kind of space will be socially practised and reproduced. From this perspective, the city cannot be deter-mined in an essentialistic way, but it becomes a collection of some specific relationships, within which more general ideologies (for example, of the free market, private property) acquire dominant significance, both in the discourse and in practice, in particular. Also the space is dominated (and dominant) as it is transformed and mediated through practice.15

In this space it is not only power relation-ships that are at play, but also violence; every permanent materialisation of ideology within the space (mainly but not only in the construc-tion industry) means that its influence on the city is stabilised. Obviously, to a certain degree this influence can be modified by practice, but in spite of this – as a permanent structure – it retains its power. Here we can refer to Michel Foucault,16 who paid particular attention to the questions of devices or spaces determined by authorities. The space is no longer perceived as neutral, but it is included in the order of power

15 See H. Lefebvre, op. cit., p. 164.16 See M. Foucault, Trzeba bronić społeczeństwa. Wykłady w Collège de France 1976 [In Defence of Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1976], Warszawa 1998, p. 42; D. Haw-kes, Ideology, London−New York 1996, pp. 160−168.

as a place in which a game of domination and submission is enacted.17 From this perspective, any decisions on organisation of space (especial-ly those founded on “knowledge” or “expertise”) comprise elements of power and violence, which influences social practice. In other words, such or another way of shaping the city space implies support, that is, the operationalisation of ideology which gains practical social support in a given time and place. For example, in a post-socialist city it is not surprising to see the devel-opment of supermarkets or shopping centres, which can be perceived here as non-neutral de-vices of power realised through supporting and focusing on specific social practices. The public space of cities, considered highly important from the declarative (discursive) point of view, does not become a social or socialised space – that is, the space that allows indefiniteness, an encounter or a conflict – but it is colonised through commercial activity. The neoliberal ideology in the city is not directed towards the engagement of citizens, but more towards the creation of new capitalist people – employees and consumers. Therefore, it is not surprising that within this ideological and spatial system the practice of civic life is hindered. Power and violence in the cities are located in the space and in the practised ideology – all the more so because this distinction is critical and analytical in nature, as in reality these two elements are closely interconnected. In this sense, both ideol-ogy and ideologically produced social space are political questions.


17 See M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, New York 1980 and R. West-Pavlov, Space in Theory. Kristeva, Deleuze, Foucault, Amsterdam−New York 2009, pp. 143−169.


Anna Rumińska

Urban identity? the townie

vs. the city dweller

We don’t want to move out at all, we don’t want anything to change, and what for, we don’t want any strangers here – I want peace, I want to drink vodka in front of my house in the evening, I want to chat to my neighbours, and then I want to go to work as usual and I want my children to be healthy. And I want those snots from X street to stop coming here and breaking our windows and entry phones. This is our backyard; those snots are always coming here. The police don’t give a shit about us.1

What don’t the police do about them? What can the police do about them? Who can the police do something about? In other words, how do the police iden-tify them, and how do they identify themselves? What is more, how do we, anthropologists – researchers and commentators – identify them and us in this conversation? The above example is an extract from the field interview I carried out in the city centre housing estates in Wrocław. Giving informa-tion to an anthropologist who researches (not only urban) everyday life is associated with denunciation on an ethical level; yet the aim of anthropolo-gists is to research the relationships by engaging in the discovery of the obscure, the invisible and unrealised, in the deconstruction of what only seems to be clear and comprehensible. In spite of great (and often learnt) attempts to remain detached and objective and to search dense descriptions of reality, the anthropologist too finds herself in an ethically fragile position of an engaged listener, transforming her own I towards a specific conflict, step by step. Geertz’s dense description, from which anthropologists are no longer able to escape,2 requires them to adopt an ambivalent attitude in the process of approaching a native – all the more so when he is a subject of the research in the culture whose participants are constituted to a small degree by us. Today, the anthropological research of an urban local identity is based on a methodological perspective understood in this way. The very term is an oxymoron, because the indicator of the urban quality, as defined by Jacek Gyurkovich and followed by many architects, is the existence of public spaces,3 but it does not seem to be a category which refers to a semi-public

1 This statement comes from the materials collected during anthropological fieldwork on the perception of space which was carried out by the author of the article in 2010 and 2011 among the residents of the Nadodrze housing estate. The research was conducted as part of the “eMSA Kulturka Podwórka” [“eMSA Culture of the Backyard”] project. 2 C. Geertz, Interpretacja kultur. Wybrane eseje [The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays], Kraków 2005.3 See J. Gyurkowich, Miejskość miasta [The Urban Quality of the City], “Czasopismo Tech-niczne Politechniki Krakowskiej” 2007, Issue 2-A, p. 111.


space which in the city includes particularly native (i.e. tamed) backyards. To use administrative language, inter-housing interiors are an indicator of strong territorialism for the natives, which makes the interiors devoid of public features. The opposition between the private and the public is greatly determined by the context and the scale of perception/reception: what is public for the researcher is private for the native. On the scale of the city, the backyard can be seen as a (semi-)public space only by its non-users, but on the scale of the housing estate and the local community, it will also be a private space in the sense of collective privacy, which is starkly visible in the behaviour of the users – the tenants of the tenement houses which surround the backyard. If you go there, you will immediately be recognised as an intruder. Should we then draw the conclusion that the existence of such a phenomenon in a settlement unit proves its non-urban quality? Does it make the city become a non-city?

From Gyurkovich’s perspective, the privacy of the backyard can deprive the city of urban features – such a treatment of urban indicators is difficult to defend as, on the perceptive local scale, the space acquires features which are analogical with those that characterise the local life described as territo-rial, familiar, private, or simply rustic. “The Duchy of Leśnica” – this is what some of the residents (“townies”) call their housing estate, situated about 13km from the market square in Wrocław. On a local scale of one building or one backyard, the difference between the urban and the rustic start to fade: everyone here is both a peasant and a townie (I use these expressions in a non-judgemental sense). The urban quality is in effect only a rhetorical de-vice devoid of any significance in the local context, but the townie identity becomes a similar device when we attempt to ascribe an urban scale to it. In this context, the urban identity should be perceived, on the one hand, as a fluctuating and heterogeneous construct, and on the other, as a strongly equivalent and relatively permanent category which is attributed to a local group or an individual. However, the dialectic of the notion of identity does not call for equivalence: according to Wolfgang Welsch’s interpretation, the pluralism of mutually complementing descriptions is dominant here.4

A townie is not a city dweller; this distinction seems to be necessary. I will leave the well-known term “burgher” to researchers who use a sociological or

4 W. Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyczna moderna [Our Postmodern Modern], Warszawa 1998.

demographic perspective: an anthropologist is more attracted by the nuances and connotations of colloquial terms. A townie observes, that is, feels; a city dweller observes, that is, researches. When the former starts to research, he becomes a city dweller. By entering the zone of townies, an anthropologist-city-dweller has to suspend her urban quality and open up to the townie’s interpretation by not becoming one at all. Giving a voice to townies seems necessary in the analysis of the urban reality. The world of ruined residen-tial cubbyholes, squalid staircases, conflict-generating garages, vandalised benches and sprayed gates is a world which is constantly being discovered. It is a world of subtly preserved traditions, family and residential rituals, the elimination of distance, the narrative of bread and milk purchases, the significance of artificial flowers and other types of quasi-kitsch, a wealth of balconies and loggias, the alertness of dog-observers sitting lethargically on window sills, the seeming banality of hair bands, the anti-rubbish quality of an empty packet of crisps, the feast of dry Chinese soup, the community of spitting, the symbolism of entrance door and window accessories, the reflec-tion on the disappearance of beer kiosks, the micro-mythologisation of local supermarkets, the macro-mythologisation of freedom and maturity. It is the world of the townie, the inhabitant of the city centre building development – the system of cooperating elements which is no less complex than the Hopi or Inuit culture. It is a real culture of the backyard which a townie decodes perfectly and which, following the definition of Christopher Alexander,5 con-stitutes a part of a greater whole – the city which (as highlighted by Kevin Lynch) cannot be grasped or managed by either a townie nor a city dweller.6 The structures of that world cannot be verbalised by the townie – the city dweller can do it, if he wants to decode it.

The language of the townie, which is perceived through the prism of the model of the city-dweller language and which creates reality,7 tends to be excluded from a range of the research subjects; more often it is considered as an irrelevant element of the destination culture which can be elimi-nated. Michael Fleischer, a specialist on social communication, claims: “a district has to be cleared of the people whom we don’t want. I have nothing

5 See C. Alexander, A City is Not a Tree, in: Human Identity in the Urban Environment, eds G. Bell, J. Tyrwhitt, New York 1992.6 See K. Lynch, Obraz miasta [The Image of the City], Kraków 2011.7 See E. Hall, Ukryty wymiar [The Hidden Dimension], Warszawa 2009.


against them, they are just like me, but they are not suitable for cultivating such places like Nadodrze”. “Just like me”? Certainly not. Fleischer8 is not the only one who proposes the objectification of the people who don’t fit in with a top-down vision. This world is not granted the right to be an element which constitutes a group or place identity (the genius loci which all traditional architects long for) – all the more so because it undergoes gradual destruction and elimination. The spirit of a place IS still there, but it remains decipher-able only for the chosen. The mind implosion dictates a dense description – the descent from the pedestal of “high culture” to the seemingly flat plain of “low culture”. In the reality of the housing estate there is no room for the question “Can I join you?” – it will only be asked by a stranger: the researcher who enters the slippery ground of strangers. By taking a seat at the unfamil-iar table we face a challenge of taking on the “table” identity or retaining our own – no matter whether or not you are an anthropologist, another specialist, or someone who “hasn’t even completed high school.”9 The permanent status of the first option is an illusion for the researcher, but for the culture partici-pant – the so-called informer or native – it is a necessity. Local identity, this metaphorical table, defends itself against a larger crowd. Everyone can sit at the table, but only a city dweller will ask if he may, whereas a townie will sit down ready to give an unplanned answer to that question.

The city, as an industrial and commercial centre, offers a lot, but its expan-sion is only decipherable and attainable for city dwellers, while townies stay in the microcosm of more narrow needs, resources and opportunities. The world of the townie is the world of an eternal traditional order, a night is a night, rubbish is rubbish, a stench is a stench, an idiot is an idiot, a pork chop is a pork chop, and those who try to change the order are lunatics. Here such clusters as a chemical connector are not created – there is either a connector (a metal tool) or a chemical (a non-tool, substance), and to describe this thing you can even use a good traditional word: glue. The mind of the city dweller easily absorbs postmodernist oxymora, for example, a chemical connector, biodegradable plastic, a soya cutlet, cold ice cream or non-alcoholic beer; from the townie’s point of view, this is utter chaos. Therefore, the connec-

8 “What lives here starts to dominate in the whole district”: M. Fleischer used this expression during an event called “The Breakfast of Champions” at the Infopunkt at 5 Łokietka Street in the Nadodrze housing estate.9 This is a statement of one of the informers of the fieldwork carried out during the “eMSA Kulturka Podwórka” project.

tor is absolutely steel, glue – absolutely strong, plastic – absolutely perma-nent, new material (cornastik?) – absolutely degradable (it is not artificial because derived from nature), a pork chop, vegetable soya, a warm foam, cold ice cream, alcoholic beer, and other drinks – non-alcoholic (which you can get your “kid” to buy). The townie doesn’t reject nasty smells; he tolerates them without any drama. Just like the city dweller, he dreams about scents – pleasant fragrances, as he constructs models of fragrance on the basis of the surrounding reality and the messages, mainly commercial, coming from that reality. Unlike his children, the townie looks for order, position and tradition – even when making an acquaintance. In this case, the ritual of getting onto first-name terms with someone during the night carousal doesn’t end with becoming sober again and returning to the order of the day (the characteristic mode of city dwellers). The young generation of townies is undoubtedly more similar to city dwellers; as long as they don’t define their identity as the iden-tity of city dwellers, they see nothing inappropriate in oxymora and mixing orders. They eat mushroom potatoes, chew blueberry plastic, wipe themselves with strawberries, they want their floor to smell of the sea breeze and they use rose rubbers in their notebooks. There is no room for ordinariness, order, traditional divisions – life has to be modern, filled with multiple tasks and re-

fot.

: a. r

um

ińsk

a

Kondycję ulicy można ocenić na podstawie potencjału splotu, a nie nasycenia tranzytu pieszych lub podmiotów handlu. Na zdjęciu ul. Szewska we Wrocławiu w czasie wydarzenia Splot Szewska 2


moved from nature. Several years ago some hypermarkets (supported by news-papers) in Wrocław reacted drastically and jointly by protesting against the sale of so-called stinkers – fascinating dolls which balanced scents and stench and which were decidedly rejected by ambitious Parents of All Polite Chil-dren.10 Olfactory education was therefore prevented. You could only purchase Perfumella, a doll “for girls” which smells beautiful. The stinkers – a version for boys – brought the lost harmony to the falsified reality of scent: a child could find out the smell of a rotten egg, an old sock, cowpats – and the stink was decoded through such nomenclatures as: Kamil Cowpat, Poldek Mouldek, Gienio Dungheap, Garlic Czaruś (i.e. Charmer, trans.), Puking Walduś. Contem-porary life prevents children from the possibility of knowing the smell of a rotten egg, just like knowing the origin of a bowl of cereal, dumplings or a pork chop. Children-townies, submerged in the postmodern mix of orders, reject even the contemporary understanding of rubbish. What I don’t want can’t be what I dream about: an empty packet of crisps or old hair bands are not pieces of rubbish, they are microtexts of culture, narrative carriers.

Sayings like “my home is my castle” or “old trees shouldn’t be replanted” con-tain as much love as the marriage vow “to have and to hold… till death us do part”. Identity is coherent with the love of Place which is an anthropological place for the townie;11 it is burdened with the territorial affection. The townie, just like the peasant, will not leave the Place (his ordinary place) – he will com-plain, moan, grumble, fight, argue, but he will not leave it. Taking non-places for Places in inscribed within the townie’s identity. The identity of the city dweller fluctuates, it is changeable, non-territorial, fluid, it provides more and more new opportunities to change the territory, social circles, the status or life-style, it provokes and encourages changes, it constantly reminds you that you “don’t have to be tormented here” – you don’t have to have precisely THIS iden-tity.” It is the identity of a hotel guest where a hotel is constituted by a housing estate or a city. An urban wanderer, an architect or an urbanista moves past other people’s territories from the car’s perspective and strives for the non-stop changing aim. The city dweller is like a taxi driver – he never knows where he has to pick up his customer. He is in constant movement, and in the meantime, the townie sits and “rolls silver wrapping”... he observes, absorbs, feels, sees,

10 It is a specific, separate type of urban culture.11 See M. Augé, Nie-miejsce. Wstęp do antropologii hipernowoczesności [Non-Places: Introduc-tion to an Anthropology of Supermodernity], Warszawa 2010.

listens, smells, hears – he constructs his own I. He ignores the feeling of the far, the distance from his aims, if they are within his reach. For him there ex-ists neither “the end of history” nor “the end of man”, as they always exist in the local and cyclic time. Children up to the age of ten are not allowed to walk about the city without supervision – therefore, city children are supervised, while townie children move beyond the district and residential housing area even when they are six years old. The city dweller will say: “a child without supervision, poor child”, and the townie: “an independent child, let him learn how to cope”. Sometimes the child doesn’t cope, sometimes it even tries to com-mit suicide,12 but it certainly learns this peculiar concept of anti-education.13 The range of his wandering grows along with him – according to the law, after the child’s tenth birthday, he can independently move through the public space, but this moment of initiation is rarely noticed by city dwellers.

For the child, and also for every townie and city dweller, the Home, the district, the street are always the reference points. Along with the increase of the scale and level of perception, the reference point expands and acquires a form which is proportional to the expansion of the zone or spatial point. On the scale of a

12 This situation took place several times at schools in city-centre housing estates in Wrocław.13 See H. von Schoenebeck, Antypedagogika. Być i wspierać zamiast wychowywać [Anti-educa-tion. Being and supporting rather than educating], Warszawa 2007.

fot.

: a. r

um

ińsk

a

Od- i do-społeczne ławki są doskonałym narzędziem trwałego i taniego badania relacji w miejskiej przestrzeni publicznej oraz skali kapitału i zaufania społecznego.


mouse (a house), a flat or a room is the heart of the cosmos; on the scale of a sparrow (a district or a housing estate), it is a house (a tenement, a block of flat, a villa); on the scale of a stork (a city), it is a district or a housing estate. The animal species are a differentiating metaphor which refers to different zones of their existence which is researched by the ethnologists mentioned by Edward Hall.14 The Plac Grunwaldzki housing estate and its surroundings, researched from this perspective in several projects of mine, shows a vast divergence between the macro perception and the local one, while the contextual mapping used in this research leads to conclusions displaying the divergence in percep-tions which operate on different scales.15 The perception of Szewska Street, which was diagnosed in the place-making activity16 and in the field research by means of a mental model method, allows for definition of the mode of coding space by city dwellers and townies as well as the mode of reading the signs of that space. The mental model, which is surprising for many, but easier and more attractive to prepare than a map, displays the semiotics of space in a three-dimensional way.17 On that basis, many narratives can be conceived: we have lived until many Histories are created – the History of Wrocław, Lithua-nia, Poland, yet there is also the History of Szewska Street. What would the history of Nadodrze be like? Of Ołbin? The History of Plac Grunwaldzki? The History of the Housing Estate? These histories should be written by townies using city dwellers’ pens, but it seems to be a utopia due to the divergence of orders and narratives which depend, among others, on the scale of perception.18

In the author’s description of Jean-Luc Godard’s films, Łukasz Ziomek quotes a statement from the film Made in USA and uses it as a motto for his text: “The drama of my consciousness consists in the fact that I have lost the world and

14 See E. Hall, op. cit.15 See the field research by the author as part of the following projects: PR.PRL.12.13.14. Man-hattan, PR.PRL.Interpretacje, Przestrzeń dla ludzi, ludzie dla przestrzeni [Space for people, people for space], Kulturka Podwórka [The Culture of the Backyard] etc. carried out in 2006.16 See the Splot Szewska project, splotszewskawro.pl and other publications on this subject, e.g. <http://issuu.com/emsa.relacje/docs/szewska_badania_ter_ruminska_2009-2010> and <http://issuu.com/emsa.relacje/docs/pytania_splot>. 17 See unpublished research of the author regarding the perception and reception of public space on Szewska Street, which was carried out by means of the mental model method, available on the website: https://picasaweb.google.com/105259009233878765810/MentalMo-delMaquetteSzewskaStreet#18 It is particularly conspicuous when the field interviews and the notes from “The Study of the conditions and directions of space development in Wrocław” are juxtaposed. See http://wrosystem.um.wroc.pl/beta_4/webdisk/61529/3249ru04z01-Tom1.pdf.

I want to find myself by losing myself in it.”19 This motto applies to all of us, from the moment we become aware of the lack of our own I, the moment we strive to construct our own and group identity. Being in the city, as in every other settlement unit, is based on the process of oxymoronisation, the crea-tion of contradictions, even if (as shown in a more profound analysis) they are ostensible. The process of creating a conflict and the simultaneous deter-mined attempts to eliminate it accompanies the city life (and not only), and it also plays an important part in the construction of identity – also based on the dichotomy, the dialectics, and the contradiction. “Urban identity” implies a lack of identity in terms of the local – claiming that a given person has an urban identity may mean that he/she doesn’t feel connected with any local Place, but with a city as a model of life/being. By claiming that the person has an urban identity, he/she says that they don’t have a local iden-tity, but that they have a non-local identity, the macro-identity – and this itself is a dichotomy as the macro-identity comprises many local identities with which the carrier of the macro-identity doesn’t identify himself/her-self, without denying their existence. The term “urban identity” is there-fore a simple and closed (seemingly) oxymoron and a complex construct of personality and the model of being.

19 See Ł. Ziomek, Godard. W poszukiwaniu straconych tożsamości, [Godard. In search of lost identities] “Kino” 2011, Issue 10.

Osiedlowe podwórka wrocławskiego Ołbina – terytorium życia i walki mieszczuchów oraz badań miastowych

fot.

: a. r

um

ińsk

a


Can something like an “urban local identity” exist, since the urban quality (freedom, liberty, extensiveness, fluctuation, changeability) imposes a non-local quality, and the non-local quality (limitation, attachment, tradition, custom, cyclical nature) generates a non-urban quality? If we decide to look closer at the dialectics of these categories, we will notice that the adjectives used in this notion refer to two separate orders. If the term “urban” refers to a territory, and the adjective “local” to consciousness, then the construction becomes acceptable. In other words, through “the urban local identity” we can express the awareness of being in local conditions included in the wide collection of macro conditions. The notion of “think globally, act locally” is similar – another oxymoron of a way of living in the urban (or even metro-politan) and rustic space which is a popular part of the terminology of public administrative units and EU funding programmes.

In city-centre tenements, there are tribes consisting of around fifty mem-bers, but they are not considered the basis of the modern urban, national and European identity by city dwellers. It is not this local identity that Bronisław Geremek had in mind during his interview with Philippe Nicolet in 2008, when he identified the joint projects of people from different

regions with common identity, whereas he saw the rejection of the national country as a necessary condition of European integration.20 The EU/national country opposition corresponds structurally with the discussed city/hous-ing estate (or even the district) opposition. The NIMBY21 formula can be referred to at various levels of analysis and interpretation. Similarly to what Bronisław Geremek said about the European community, “the true Europe is the Europe of many identities”, we can say – on an overall city scale – that “the true city is a city of many identities”. Yet does it have its own identity?

In the interview, Professor Geremek only highlighted the role of a citizen – the inhabitant discussed here – to whom he attributed the function of a be-ing that constitutes a community. The “European citizenship” leads straight to the local citizen attitude, and is not only a game of nouns with adjectives, but a reference to the hierarchical model of identity interpretation. Some co-herence can be provided by the slightly journalistic theory of local globalisa-tion of Thomas Friedman.22

Friedman’s theory of the flattening of the world, realised through the Internet and the subcontracting system (which had been discussed one year earlier, but in a less categorical way, by Benjamin Barber23), is based on a global perception which loses its significance on a local scale. The local globalisation, according to Friedman, “shows its own culture to the world”. In the analysis of music and cuisine products, Friedman concludes that “the fact that educated people in developing countries can work in their own profession, without the need to emigrate, contributes to greater chances of saving local cultures.”24 It is evidence that Poland is not a developing coun-try, as many well-educated and very talented people – for example architects – emigrate to the West in search of ambitious and creative jobs. The system of academic education supports them through the Erasmus programme, which allows them to go abroad, but they often do not come back, complet-

20 See B. Geremek, Głos w Europie [European Voice], Kraków 2010.21 The abbreviation NIMBY stands for Not In My Backyard, and constitutes a symbol of parti-cularism in the identity discourse. 22 This expression is borrowed from a globalisation and cultural identity expert born in In-dia, Indrajita Banerjee. See T.L. Friedman, Świat jest płaski. Krótka historia XXI wieku [The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century], Poznań 2006.23 See B. Barber, Dżihad kontra McŚwiat [Jihad vs. McWorld], Warszawa 2005.24 T. L. Friedman, op. cit., p. ???

Znakowanie/ozdabianie ciała to praktyki dobrze znane w grupie młodych wrocławianek z osiedla Ołbin. Szczególnie ważne są więzy przyjaźni i siostrzeństwa najbardziej rozwinięte wśród dziewcząt starających się wzmocnić swoją wciąż wątłą tożsamość.

fot.

: a. n

owel

-śm

igaj


ing their studies in the West or working without completing their studies, which cease to be their objective.25

Furthermore, Friedman claims that “cultures are set within the environ-ment” – and perhaps also identity, set in cultures, is based on the local envi-ronment, owing to the flattening of the world not being endangered. I agree with him, but only in the context of the townie identity, the resident of the tenement house on X Street. In the case of the city dweller, whose identity fluctuates between territories, cultures are set in the consciousness of an individual who changes territories and introduces them to a new region – how strongly and effectively is another matter. Young architects living in the West assimilate to a limited degree with the local identity of a place or a group. It happens that in spite of global activities, they still think locally, following the criteria of their own group which they have left out of neces-sity that limits the freedom of choice. The distinction between a townie and a city dweller is a tool of description – it is good if it achieves the appropri-ate profundity and displays its own complexity. Friedman also notices this, claiming that the abovementioned architects “can use the flattening of the world not to lose touch with their own culture.”26

Finally, the author gets to the coherence which I longed for: “the differentia-ting forces are today almost equivalent to the forces that unify the world.” Therefore, the force of impact of the book title may also seem a commercial technique which is otherwise really effective. The aforementioned townie does not seem affected by dilemmas, as his local quality certainly never becomes global. The townie lives through the mass media fiction which he spontane-ously uses to construct his identity – he is filled with myths about potential models of his own life, about the city as his land of happiness, and finally abo-ut happiness at all costs, which he often blindly strives for. At the same time, he performs activities which are described as mundane and which constitute his local I in the strongest way that he is not aware of – he buys bread and milk (rolls are too expensive and seem the least efficient), he drinks beer on a bench or vodka shots with other natives, he talks about the hopeless activities of politicians and officials who constantly prevent him from achieving the

25 See A. Rumińska, MEA Odjechani?, Wrocław 2009; see also http://issuu.com/emsa.relacje/docs/mea_odjechani/1.26 T. L. Friedman, op. cit., p. ???

imagined happiness – the mythical happiness he is conscious of. On the other hand, the abovementioned fiction is fully an identity construct as it con-structs the local culture of a townie. If the fiction wasn’t there, he would have nothing to strive after. This dichotomy endows the townie’s everyday life with a tragic dimension, the dimension of constant dissatisfaction, of striving for a Better Life. In this respect, the townie is no different from the city dweller, who sees fiction as a feasible plan, and not a distant, unreal, Arcadian aim.

The awareness of finding one’s own I has no right to be fully realised; the greater the awareness, the greater inability of finding the I – just like in Godard’s dilemma of identity and subjectivity. The townie’s identity is like an animist unawareness of one’s own human life, the conviction that one exists in the spirit of an animal, a cloud, wind, a tree or a rock. The townie is mostly a person who desperately tries to be a city dweller whose awareness of living in the city comes down to the structure of zones (districts) and the network of routes (streets) between them. The awareness of what the city offers carries with it an immediate transformation from townie into city dweller, a dichoto-mous distance from the city as the identity territory and moving closer to the city as the hyper-atom full of electron-offers. A tragic fate, but also a dialectic fate. Two scholars writing about glocalisation, Roland Robertson27 and Walde-mar Kuligowski,28 refer to Friedman’s interpretation of locality.

Thinking about the macro and global identity in the research of urban identity, it is necessary to refer to the scale of the territorially expansive city – I refer to this scale metaphorically as the scale of a stork. Only on the scale of a mouse, that is, in the perception on the level of an object, can we see the identity nuances which are impossible to discover using the first approach. The tenement communities constitute a strongly integrated group and have a strong local identity (based on a specific building, point, object29),

27 See R. Robertson, The Conceptual Promise of Glocalization: Commonality and Diversity, http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a04/lang_en/theory_robertson_en.htm.28 See W. Kuligowski, Gdzie coca-cola ożywia zmarłych [The place where coca-cola resurrects the dead], “Polityka” magazine 25.09.2006, Issue 30; http://www.polityka.pl/spoleczenstwo/niezbednikinteligenta/193087,1,czy-uzasadniona-jest-teza-o-rozrastajacej-sie-zachodniej-monokulturze.read.29 For this reason local (so-called residential) communities fight for the tenement renovation regardless of the value that these buildings have from the art history perspective. The con-tradiction of these two orders was proved by mental maps used in the research of the Plac Grunwaldzki area which was carried out by the author in 2008-2011.


perhaps even stronger than a large group of the residents of the so-called block of flats. The sociology of high-rises provides examples showing that a block of flats does not have to be a synonym of disintegration.30 However, not all the residents of a block of flats are conscious members of the commu-nity. One good example is a tenement house at 5 Rejtana Street in Wrocław, where the Kochel family have lived for 58 years, and which was described by Magdalena Piekarska in July 2009 in the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.31 A statement by one of the residents, quoted by the author of the text, saying “we will not admit strangers”, presents a known anthropological opposition on which local identity is based. The number of residents living in farm la-bourer quarters or in big tenement buildings seems too small to form a basis for the integration and construction of the group local identity. In view of a conspicuous (due to a low number) conflict of interest it is difficult to reach an agreement or to get a considerable majority of votes necessary to make a potential final decision. Therefore, not much has changed – we live in a tribal structure, only with slightly different forms and masks.

Discussing the issue of retribalisation, Marshall McLuhan was several years faster than the MP Anna Mucha, who mentioned – facing sorry consequ-ences – elderly people who go to the doctor not to get treatment, but “for entertainment”. This is not politically correct if a politician says so, but this is not the case for an anthropologist. Anna Mucha is right – GP’s practices, pharmacies, post offices and greengrocers are the largely underestimated centres that shape the local identity, the centres of diversion for townies in which gender, social status or appearance divisions become blurred. It cannot be said that the last category is not important, however... but that’s another story.

My thanks go to my friend DD for all our conversations about identity and consultation on this article.


30 The Superjednostka building in Katowice is an interesting example in this context.31 See M. Piekarska, Na Rejtana chce się żyć [You feel like living on Rejtana Street], “Gazeta Wyborcza” daily, 10.07.2009.


The Velvet Revolution of 1989, along with the transition from the totali-tarian to the democratic system, also brought about basic changes in Czech

architecture. At the beginning, people would turn to the past rather than to the future. Not only the general public, but also special-ists paid tribute to the image of the “First Republic”, that is to the inter-war Czecho-slovakia as the last culturally and socially authentic epoch in the history of the country. The renewal of the modernist country in the post-modern world was impossible, but no one was aware of this in the early 1990s. Life under communism, especially in the period of normalisation,1 went on as if in a frozen time; any movement in the society was frozen, and due to the different politico-social

1 The term “normalisation” is used in reference to the pe-riod of the 1970s and 1980s which followed futile attempts to introduce reforms during the Prague Spring and after the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact had entered the territory of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

reality and the lack of information, it was very difficult to form an opinion about the changes which took place in Western Europe at the time. Even with its best achievements, the architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, maintained in the styles of late modernism and brutalism, was often associated with the political ideology of normalisation, and for this reason it was rejected particularly by the general public. The quality of building construction was a widely discussed subject in the post-revolution period of the 1990s. As a reaction to a low level of performance and material poverty of the socialist construction industry, solidity, resistance and quality of traditional materials were appreciated. The architectonic and construction production of the First Czechoslovak Republic was consid-ered a standard which everyone was supposed to refer to.

In inter-war Czechoslovakia, modernist archi-tecture held a strong position and expressed

the aspirations of emancipation among the cultural elite. Apart from the post-war delight and optimism, there was a desire to break off the relationships with Austria, to be released from the Central European context, and enter the Western – French and English – cultural circle. Katerina Ruedi, an American historian of architecture of Czech and Swiss origin, demonstrated that the First Czechoslovak Republic of the 1920s and 1930s used modernist architecture as an expres-sion of national ideology, the purpose of which was to explicitly distinguish between the institutions of the new republic which was geopolitically oriented towards Western Europe and the United States of America and the Austro-Hungarian institutions.2 New offices, schools, hospitals and other buildings

2 See K. Ruedi, A Unique Form of Blindness: Internatio-nalism in Czech Modernism, “Daidalos”, March 1991. In this text, the author aptly identifies the dangers which threatened the young democracy towards the end of the 20th century in the otherwise unfortunately situated region of Central Europe.

Jana Tichá

The enTerprising baroque

and The praise of visual weaknessContemporary Czech architecture

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 53

of public use were built in the modernist style. Thus, they expressed not only the efficiency of the new country, but most of all the will to depart from the past and the faith in the future. This optimistic ethos turned out to be valid again in the 1990s, when neo-modernist architecture became the desired symbol of the society’s revival. However, as we will see in the following part of this essay, the symbolic functions of this architecture were revealed in a specialist debate taking place among a group of experts, whereas in the sphere of construc-tion of buildings itself they were much less visible.

The revival of social life after 1989 found its expression most of all in the architecture of singular representative buildings, and rarely in the design of the public space or urban planning. Unlike in the well-known case of the First Republic, here neither the country nor the districts, cities, local authorities were investors any more – and even if they were, then it would only concern a one-off order of specific buildings rather than projects of entire architectonic or urban complexes. At the beginning, the most visible investors were private companies who provided buildings to

meet their own needs; gradually, more or less from the mid-1990s onwards, they were also followed by development companies. From 1989 the country in symbiosis with “the natio-nal party” was ubiquitous, and therefore no-body wanted to see it play the part of a strong actor in social life. According to a universal belief in the power of the “invisible hand” of the market and money as credible measures of quality, in the 1990s the first important in-vestors were banks and insurance companies, which continued to appear with incredible speed throughout the country. In most cases, they would refurbish the already existing buil-dings: the important aspects were the pace of the realisation of the project and the “formal” appearance, which would far too often mani-fest itself through decorative elements using materials and colours that were normally unavailable and employing a style of classical origin that was not entirely comprehensible within the context of Czech postmodernism. The exposition of these simulacra of success apparently matched the taste of the majority. To describe the buildings stylised following the prefabricated aesthetics of postmodernism (no matter whether they were office buildings or houses), in the Czech linguistic circle the

term of the “enterprising baroque” was soon adopted, referring to the motley of colours and the exuberance of decorative elements on the façade and inside these buildings.

Practically throughout the 1990s in the Czech Republic, building construction developed on a small scale, while the financial turnover on the market and the availability of mature financial products, in particular long-term credit loans, changed very slowly. The scale of investment, and therefore the size of build-ings and architectonic complexes, started to increase around the year 2000 due to the growing presence of strong investors. Access to technology and materials also improved. By 2000, the Czech construction industry was essentially meeting all European standards. During the construction of big buildings with strict financial management, complying with norms was more important than the previ-ously cherished skill of improvisation. The anonymous office buildings and massive shop-ping centres which a few decades earlier had flooded the developed countries of Europe and the USA were created on a mass scale. As Rue-di says, “The built product of modernisation

Vinohrady Office Center przy ulicy Rimskiej w Pradze, proj. Pracownia ADNS, 1995

Budynek banku IPB w Brnie, proj. Aleš Burian i Gustav Křivinka, 1995

fot.

: arc

hiw

um

au

tork

i

fot.

: mat

eria

ły p

raso

we

mie

s va

n d

er r

ohe

awar

d

is not modern architecture but Junkspace.”3 The dream of the revival of solid modernism which the Czech architects had in the 1990s dissolved among the ex-urbanisation of the private building development that spread along the highways on the outskirts of Prague, Brno, Ostrava and other cities.

The unique buildings that stand out against the background of those erected in the 1990s are the reserved neo-modernist houses desi-gned mostly by architects from Prague and Brno. Among the most characteristic buildings of the first post-revolutionary decade are the Prague projects executed by Václav Alda, Petr Dvořák, Martin Němec and Ján Stempel, who worked together at the ADNS atelier. They succeeded in reviving the style of the inter-war modernism and in creating a distinct trademark distinguished by a reserved formal modernist code. Their office buildings in the centre of Prague still number among the best achievements of the city architecture after 1989: the building of the Czechoslovakian Com-mercial Bank (ČSOB) on Anglická Street (1996), Vinohrady Office Centre on Římská Street (1995) – they are highly regarded for their neo-functional style authenticated through perfect technical execution. At this point in time, it is difficult to imagine a speculative office building which is completely covered by shiny Brazilian granite inlays, with the window frames made of Scandinavian pine with wooden blinds and in which the ma-terials as well as the interior design are the embodiment of solidity. The peculiar hybrid of the old and the new world is embodied by

3 Ibid., p. (“The built product of modernisation is not modern architecture but Junkspace.”)

the corner building of the Generali Insurance Group which is situated in Prague’s Vinohrady neighbourhood (1994) and designed by Martin Kotík. The façade of the building on Bělehrad-ská Street was covered by stone inlays, and through its size corresponds with the adjacent tenement houses of the 1930s, whereas the second elevation – through its aerodynamic shape – reflects the traffic flow in the busy city centre street: it reveals the time of its creation well, an even its impeccable surface announces the near future when the stone neo-modernism as an aesthetic norm will give way to the charm of the super-modern glass façades of the digital era.

An original variety of neo-modernist archi-tecture was created by the group of young architects from the “Obecní Dům” (“Town House”) association in Brno, the Czech Repu-blic’s second largest city, which is famous for its strong modernist tradition of architecture where the “white” modernism meets the more conservative line of modern aesthetics. From the very beginning, the Brno architects have attempted to refer to the tradition of solid building construction in a modern spirit and have continued the line of “conservative mo-dernism” based on the contextual approach to design, reserved proportions, solid materials and a high quality of building construction. Looking back, it becomes clearer that the re-sidential and commercial house on the corner of Josefská and Novobranská Streets (2003) designed by Petr Pelčák and the “Kapitol” house (2000) by Ludvík Grym, Jan Sapák and Jindřich Škrabal have a high urban quality. Their work has also been recognised interna-tionally: in 1997 a prestigious international jury awarded the building of the IPB bank in

Brno (1995), the creation of Aleš Burian and Gustav Křivinka, by shortlisting it along with 33 other finalists of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – the Mies van der Rohe Award.

The new image of Prague and Brno is enhan-ced mostly by the buildings of private inve-stors. National institutions did not turn out to be suitable for the role of investor in the construction industry: apparently the need for representative presence is not one of the features of the current post-modernist (and post-totalitarian) democracy. As far as publicly funded buildings are concerned, contempora-ry architecture of good quality is surprisingly doing better in the country than in big cities. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the deci-sion process is usually shorter, while the scope

Budynek Czechosłowackiego Banku Handlowego przy ulicy Anglickiej w Pradze, proj. Pracownia ADNS, 1996

fot.

: arc

hiw

um

au

tork

i

of investment is smaller; but perhaps it is due to the presence of strong visionary personali-ties who lead the city or the region. Litomyšl, a small town in the eastern part of the Czech Republic, has a unique history and abounds in monuments of architecture which were enhanced with a group of high-quality mo-dern buildings erected at the turn of the 21st century. The first post-revolution town mayor, Miroslav Brýdl, displayed a forward-looking approach when he realised that the society co-uld not be rebuilt without reconstructing the common space and buildings of public use. He therefore initiated a range of projects which were also continued by his successor. The town of 10,000 inhabitants obtained many modern buildings designed mostly by architects from Brno belonging to the circle of the Town House (i.e. a sports hall and a primary school, Aleš Burian and Gustav Křivinka, 1998; a winter

stadium, designed by the same architects, 2005; the reconstruction and expansion of the swimming pool, Petr Hrůša and Petr Pelčák, 1995), but also by other leading Czech archi-tects (the transformation of a brewery into a training and culture centre, Josef Pleskot / AP Atelier, 2006; a city swimming pool, Antonín Novák i Petr Valenta / DRNH, 2010), not to mention the transformation of the monastery garden (Zdeněk Sendler, 2000), the square and other public spaces in the historical city centre.

Characteristic is the fact that the modern Litomyšl is renowned most of all for its sport and recreation buildings and less for its na-tional administration buildings. As we have already mentioned, among the new buildings which have been erected in the Czech Republic within the last 20 years and which are worth

attention there are hardly any town halls, offi-ce buildings or any important cultural institu-tions, like museums, galleries or concert halls. There are so few interesting architecture pieces funded by public money that there is no point creating further topological categories. Hence, it is surprising and comforting that the prototypical public building in the Czech Republic after 1989 is a library. We can quickly find several examples, like the buildings constructed from scratch in big cities as well as interesting revitalisation projects of older buildings that meet the needs of local libra-ries. The characteristic feature of the contem-porary situation is that these public buildings which – as education centres – dominated municipal spaces are now in various compli-cated urban situations or they become the revitalisation projects of the former industrial or technical buildings.

The most characteristic projects of recent years are two libraries which were designed by a young group called Projektil architekti (Roman Brychta, Adam Halíř, Petr Lešek and Ondřej Hofmeister) and which draw our attention to their “non-architectonic” form. They take a cri-tical stance neither towards mass taste nor to-wards neo-modernist architecture by referring to its modernist origin in a free way. Their sty-le is mostly guided by direct circumstances, by the place and the demands of use rather than by any a priori aesthetic ideas. The contrast be-tween the select neo-modernist form of muni-cipal buildings recognised with awards in the 1990s and the contemporary lonely buildings aptly reflects the metamorphosis of the social mood in the Czech Republic: it symbolises the moment of transition from a strong feeling of belonging and responsibility for maintaining

Budynek Towarzystwa Ubezpieczeniowego Generali na praskich Vinohradach, proj. Martin Kotik, 1994

fot.

: arc

hiw

um

au

tork

i

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 56

the historical continuity to the perspective which is typical of the individualist society that does not turn to the future or create great visions, but tends to react to the current situ-ation in a calm and pragmatic way.

The library building in Hradec Králové (2008), which is situated on the bank of the Orlice river, acquired an individual and easily recognisable form due to its characteristic plan – in the shape of the letter X. This form was not designed for effect, but it has its own urban-creative dimension. It is situated in the exposed but undefined place between the inner and the outer city district. Its definite character works as “urban acupuncture,” in the spirit of Manuel de Solà-Morales:4 as a discreet interference into urban tissues, which carries with itself the potential of initiating changes in a wider environment; it consti-tutes more a robust urban-creative tool in the chaotic contemporary world rather than a rigid design. The National Technical Library in Prague (2009) is situated on the grounds of a high school of technology, next to the campus and student accommodation. It is a

4 The term “urban acupuncture” was introduced by M. de Sola-Morales in the book A Matter of Things, Nai Publi-shers, Rotterdam 2008.

public building of a new kind which is devoid of any hierarchy: the building on a rounded square plan is “the same everywhere,” it has four entrances on four sides, although they are not visible at first sight. You need to come up very close, and only when you stop seeing the whole façade can you find an entrance. The ground floor of the library is a sheltered extension of the university campus; it is a free space where you can find shops, cafés, a lecture hall and a public branch of the city

library – in a nutshell, it is a space open to everyone. The heterogenic environment of the contemporary city (or network) corresponds with the interior aesthetics of the building, which is as unclean and fragmentary as the contemporary public space. The half-transpar-ent façade coat made of Gorilla glass panels gives an impression of waves, and blurs the physical borders of the building whose space identity is blurred, but still distinct. Perhaps, this visually poor architecture is the most appropriate expression of our times: the epoch in which identity is constantly undermined through the processes of virtualisation and through being created anew in the network of current relationships.


Gmach biblioteki w Hradcu Králové, proj. pracownia Projektil, 2008

Gmach Narodowej Biblioteki Technicznej w Pradze, proj. pracownia Projektil, 2009

fot.

: arc

hiw

um

au

tork

i

pan

oram

io

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 56

The political transformations of the late 1980s initiated changes on the maps. In some cases these only entered mental maps, while in others they also altered

the geopolitical maps. To some extent, this con-cerns all post-communist countries; Slovakia is among those on which the transformations left their strongest marks.

The Velvet Revolution in the autumn of 1989 brought Slovakia its political and civic freedoms, but it also opened up old wounds. The Prague Spring of 1968 heralded hope for a new society, promising socialism with a human face – in other words, something between the West European variety of capitalism and the post-Stalinist reality. Western intellectuals also observed these developments with interest. Yet

21 years later, nobody was still dreaming of a new utopia, not any more. Society, tired of real socialism, had ceased to pursue any ideals, least of all those of the Velvet Revolution; all we wanted was to have the same things that our “western” neighbours had, while the handful of those who criticised the consumer society and the power of political parties and of money were soon silenced by the builders of the new capitalism. All of Czechoslovak society shared the sense of being at a dead end; in Slovakia this was further compounded by the fact that all key decisions were naturally made not in Bratislava, but in Prague. This aggravated one of the old wounds: in the conditions of dictatorship under one centralised communist party, the principles of federal rule in Czecho-slovakia were impossible to realise.

The search for (also) the Slovak identity led, two years later, to the dissolution of Czecho-slovakia, which, however, did not solve all the problems. Slovak nationalism defined itself in particular relative to the only politically significant, organised minority – that is, the Hungarian minority that had remained in Slovakian territory after all the wartime and post-war forced migrations. A certain perma-nent sense of threat came to the surface now and again, fuelled by nationalist politicians in Slovakia and in Hungary, and old fears were ex-pressed, related to the possible revision of the Peace Treaty of Trianon (1920), which regulated the state borders in the region. It turned out that the memory of the shifting frontiers dur-ing World War II was still very much alive – as was the memory of the Slovak Republic losing

Damas Gruska

In Search

of SlovakIa


a sizeable chunk of its territory to Hungary. People fought (even in the streets), above all for a language legislation that would legitimise the use of minority languages in official circula-tion. We should also note the voices calling for autonomy (cultural or otherwise), demanding Hungarian citizenship for Hungarians living in Slovakia, and voting rights for people of Hungar-ian ethnicity living outside Hungary. All this was sometimes perceived, in extreme instances, as preparation of a sort for changes to the state borders with Hungary. On the other hand, iden-tity based on national frontiers turned out to be insufficiently strong – although after the war Czechoslovakia had lost large parts of Carpathian Ruthenia to the USSR, there were no significant voices demanding the return of those territories either then or later. Those lands had been as Slo-

vak as some other regions of southern Slovakia, inhabited almost exclusively by a Hungarian-speaking population.

In spite of their particular over-sensitivity on the subject of language legislation, the Slovaks’ linguistic identity does not seem overly strong either. Slovakia experienced three waves of post-war emigration: the first as early as 1945, when representatives of the popular regime fled the country, fearing persecution; the second after 1948, when they were escaping the encroaching communist regime; and finally the third, after 1968, when after several months of political lib-eration (and the partial opening of the borders) people were fleeing “normalisation”, which had just begun. Official Czechoslovakian state policy characteristically assumed a hostile stance

towards those who participated in all these waves of emigration. Illegal migration from the country was considered a crime, and was punished, among other things, with confiscation of property. Any contact with emigrants was stigmatised. To make matters worse, most Slovak emigrants in the second or third generation lose their native language, and with it the bonds with their country of origin. After 1989, the of-ficial policy changed, of course, and yet the old blight of negative attitudes towards emigrants survived in society, in a dormant state. As a consequence, the country has lost and continues to lose valuable social capital. Immigration is no better: for a long time now, Slovakia has been one of the lowest ranked countries in terms of political asylum granted.

In principle, a negative, nationalistic self-defini-tion has become ingrained in the Slovak political reality over the last two decades, and this has played a part in the shaping of the national identity. This is compounded by an idiosyncratic account of history, which is presented either as a millennium of Hungarian oppression (forced Magyarisation in the last years of the monarchy notwithstanding), or as the Slovaks’ thousand-year-long struggle for their own state. Generally speaking, the Slovaks remain in the chapter of development, which for other national states closed with the end of the 19th century. Recently, inventing one’s national history has come back in vogue: the theory of the so-called ‘old Slovaks’ has been revived. This term is used to describe the ancient inhabitants of what is also the present-day territory of Slovakia, some one thousand years ago (in this context, the name ‘Slovaks’ is used to replace the term ‘western Slavic people’, or simply, ‘Slavs’). Also in this period a monument was erected in the Bratislava

wsz

ystk

ie f

ot. w

art

.: d

. gru

ška


theless, claiming the heritage of Austro-Hungari-an ancestors is out of the question: the notion of Slovaks as “successors of shepherds,” coined by Vladimír Mináč, remains too strong as yet. The theory, which claimed that Slovaks never, not once in their existence, possessed an elite, fitted perfectly into the Marxist, class-based vision of history.

Political identity, by contrast, is among the strongest facets of the Slovak self-image. It defines itself mainly through attitudes towards important 20th-century events, such as the First Slovak Republic, the Slovak national upris-ing, the communist regime of 1948–1989, and, relatively less significant, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. This identity shows great dura-bility; it is passed from generation to generation

castle compound to the 9th-century Great Mora-vian ruler Svatopluk. Both issues aroused much controversy, particularly among historians, heightened by the fact that the statue’s author was a prominent sculptor under the previous re-gime. We should add that the force behind both initiatives is currently the strongest and most popular Slovakian political party, which feeds abundantly on post-communist sentiment while consistently applying a well-known paradigm: from communist internationalists to capitalist nationalists. The non-nationalist swathe of soci-ety remain defensive yet vigilant, as witnessed by the results of the general elections, and by publications, such as a recent one on “Our Slovak Myths” (Mýty naše slovenské, ed. Eduard Krekovič, Elena Mannová, Eva Krekovičová, AEPress, 2005), which features a number of excellent

“demythologising” texts, and which gained un-precedented recognition throughout the country.

Concurrently, another “monumental” dispute continues in contemporary Bratislava, in rela-tion to attempts at partial renovation work on the statue of Maria Theresa, damaged in 1920. A fairly numerous group of artists opposed the initiative – as they did not condone the erection of a replica; but the issue of its location met with an even bigger and more widespread protest – as it required the removal to another location of a 19th-century monument to a Slovak autono-mist. Then again, the initiative was backed by a financial lobby, one of the most powerful at present, which probably attempted to improve its otherwise controversial image by using this historical ornament in Carrera marble. Never-


within families, and is very slow to change. For instance, research conducted by sociologist Vladimír Krivy demonstrated numerous cor-relations between the preferences of Hlinka’s people’s party electorate (1925−1945) and the followers of Mečiar’s movement for a democratic Slovakia (1991− ).

In communist Slovakia, collectivisation of farm-ing was effected nationwide; as a rule, the only farms that were spared were the most remote, run-down, and least productive. Persecution of the Church and its followers also reached incon-ceivable proportions, and was felt particularly acutely in Christian Slovakia, where approxi-mately 70% of inhabitants count themselves among the followers of the Roman Catholic Church. By 1989 the private sector, including

small businesses, had been decimated, so the freshly regained liberties opened the field to brand new professions (such as small industrial-ist or entrepreneur). The changes also brought the revival of religious activity. Among the most prominent and rich businesspeople there are still representatives of the past anti-capitalist regime and their relations. I personally know more than one person who made their career in the past by lecturing to youth gatherings on the rotten, exploitative capitalist society, while directly after the revolution they turned into notorious new-fangled capitalists, ruthlessly fleecing their employees. Although the Church as such never gained a direct influence upon poli-tics, most politicians tried to maintain amicable relations in those quarters, while the adjective “Christian” became almost indispensable in the

name of any political party, and avowed atheists of the past regime turned into obedient chil-dren of the Church. One thing changed for sure: religious identity. At one time, Slovakia was subdivided in terms of religious confession into Catholics and Lutherans (and to some extent also Jews), whereas today this model, present until the mid-20th century and essential in terms of identity, is a thing of the past. Finally, a handful of enthusiasts, particularly Russophiles, favour the pan-Slavic identity, whose popularity peaked in the 19th century and today has negligible im-pact. This group, which believes in the concept of “mutually beneficial” collaboration with Russia, comes out into the open every time the Slavic world is discussed: wars in the Balkans, or recognising Kosovo’s independence.


In the 1990s, Slovakia found itself in isolation from the international community, having been gradually excluded from (western) integration processes (such as NATO and EU membership). The American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called Slovakia “a black hole in the heart of Europe”, and only the general elections of 1998 turned the situation around. It was then that the team of the state’s founders – the com-position of which was one of the main reasons for the initial reluctance, or, in the best case, the less than enthusiastic attitude towards the young country on the part of most political and cultural elites – stepped down from the political stage. The lost years were made up, the country became integrated with western institutions, the Slovaks converted into ardent Europhiles, and they implemented the common European

currency as the second post-communist state to do so, after Slovenia. They are living proof of the theory which states that countries whose citi-zens trust their political representation the least are also are the most eager to support European integration. A reason for potential frustration, however, lies in the fact that we achieved “ful-filled” membership of prestigious international institutions at the time when these same institu-tions were reaching their crisis threshold (the European Community, the European currency, and also, to an extent, NATO).

Initial forecasts after the new independent state was proclaimed predicted rapid bankruptcy. Economic success not only increased the Slovaks’ national awareness, but also brought about stronger identification with their own state.

Economic depression, however, may change this Slovak-Europhile identity. In the autumn of 2011, the Slovakian government fell apart precisely during the vote on the EFSF (European Finan-cial Stability Facility), deciding how to help EU members in debt. This was linked to a vote of confidence for the government. Recent public opinion polls indicate a rise in the following of the populist anti-European option, which is a relatively new phenomenon.

In this context, it is interesting to compare the Slovak situation with that observed in the Czech Republic. After Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918, one of the fundamental internal tensions sprang from the contrast between the then liberal, secularised, industrialised and modern-ist Bohemia on the one hand, and the rural,


conservative, Christian Slovakia on the other. This tension marked the whole period of the first Czech Republic – a period which for Slovakia meant a great leap in development, as the Nové Slovensko exhibition, currently on at the Slovak National Gallery, so capably presents. In the third millennium the situation seems to have been reversed. The Czech Republic is becoming one of the most conservative, if still secular, countries of Europe. Reserve towards Brussels and its (and other international) institutions, towards the common currency, and towards a transnational agenda (from global warming through to the smoking ban and gender equal-ity) not only became a flagship programme of the popular head of State, but also enjoys a widespread following and support. Not so in Slovakia: during Dzurinda’s first two terms in

office, a great number of reforms were imple-mented, at a pace which probably went a little beyond the mental capacities of the citizens, but which made Slovakia one of the most progres-sive countries in Central Europe – a state whose western neighbour really strained to catch up with the reforms. The younger brother has grown up, and the elder often turns to him, if only for inspiration. The road that used to lead via Prague – which for many years had been the only road to the world at large – now became but one of many.

The Slovak contribution to contemporary culture is meagre. There is not a single Slovak Nobel laureate, the presence of Slovak stars in the realms of art, sports, or entertainment is negligible, and not one Slovak university has

made it onto the TOP 500 list. Hence the infe-riority sentiment (and complex) pervading the still unknown and unrecognised Slovakia – a country which is difficult to find on the world map. Paradoxically, the greatest value Slovakia has achieved is the fact of its existence, the fact that it persevered through all the attempts at its assimilation, and that towards the end of the 20th century it even accomplished its own, independent State. The question remains whether Slovakian identity is at all present in the thoughts of the young generation of Slovaks who left their country to go abroad, in every conceivable direction, after 1989.



“The generation who grow up here will surely have bonds with Újpalota. They will have memories. Our generation of this housing estate is yet without memories.” Tamás Lipp, Conquest in Újpalota

Újpalota is a housing estate that is symbolic in several ways: fol-lowing the experimental decade of the 1960s it was the largest

industrialised housing programme to date and also the first greenfield development without immediate urban surroundings on the periphery of Budapest. Among its inhab-itants, intellectuals were for the first time in the minority compared to workers’ families moving in from substandard tenement blocks and temporary housing barracks. There was

also an explicit requirement to design an “urbane” housing estate that went beyond bedroom communities with complex infra-structures of education, health care and serv-ices, often exceeding the technological limits of industrialised housing factories. Moreo-ver, this large-scale project has been closely followed since its first steps by in-depth re-search about the accommodation processes of new settlers, the emergence of communities and their problems. This evolution has been documented through ethnographic meth-ods, interviews and sociographical analysis until the changes of 1989 and the subsequent period up to today.

The viewpoints provided by past and contem-porary sources help to construct insider and outsider descriptions of the housing estate as well as the process in which these changing

and often conflicting perspectives and value sets competed and interfered in shaping the images and understanding of Újpalota. My questions intend to investigate the shared frameworks that evolved during the 42-year history of Újpalota and which could provide a basis for future generations’ identities, as well as the degree to which these frameworks could be relevant for other housing estates. The changes of the following decades have overwritten the narrative of founding-as-conquest in several ways, and I believe that following these enables us to extend the analysis of the housing estate as a cultural phenomenon and understand some of its future potential too.

Beyond bedroom communities The Újpalota housing estate is one of the first housing projects in Hungary that was a

Samu Szemerey

IdentItIes of a housIng estate– narratives in the history of Újpalota

greenfield development on previously unbuilt land. The planning process was led by Tibor Tenke, starting in 1964 in the Institute for Ty-pological Planning, and construction started in 1969. The plans followed the principles of the 15-year housing programme and its pre-scribed numbers on apartments and services with the involvement of the Budapest Housing Plant No. 3.1 At the same time, however, it was an explicit goal to prove that prefabricated housing technologies are capable of creating a colourful and diverse urban environment. The importance of this issue was probably due to the insulated, peripheral nature of the site which lacked urban surroundings (it was originally designated as forested land in the city’s General Development Plan) and partly to the rigid architecture of the otherwise popular housing programmes of the previ-ous decade.2 This turn, however, also marks the beginning of the era when the industry’s priorities gradually overrode all aspects of urban planning and architectural design in the following decade – Újpalota provided a preview of the coming changes and the compromises between the design and the built

1 The approved numbers by the Executive Committee of the Budapest Municipal Council on their August 6 1969 session were: 14,105 apartment units, 700 nursery units, 1400 kindergarten units, 140 classrooms, 2500 sq m me-dical services, 18,340 sq m commerce, 4900 sq m cultural facilities. See: E. Szepes, Újpalota - egy városrész regénye (Újpalota - the novel of a district), Budapest: XV. kerület Önkormányzata, 2002.2 G. Preisich, Budapest városépítésének története 1945-1990 [“The history of Budapest’s urban development 1945−1990”], Budapest: M szaki könyvkiadó, 1998.

results became integral, defining elements of the community’s life and self-image.

The master plans developed under the direc-tion of Tibor Tenke and Árpád Mester show the influence of Team 10’s contextual critique of modernist planning. Services and com-merce are organised along promenade-like axes with separate traffic lanes and multiple types and scales of housing which create a diverse system and an overall unified profile.3 In an interview by Tamás Lipp4 after the completion in 1977, Tenke was asked not only about his original ideas, but also about their realisation and afterlife. The promenades along the axes were significantly transformed – the original scheme of vertically separated traffic lanes was cancelled and the commer-cial zones at street level were also replaced by apartments. The schools and public facili-ties of the low-rise sub-centres behind the multilane promenades and their high-rise buildings were partly built, but the culture hall and community centre, providing the effective centre of the housing estate, were entirely missing. The sole construction of the centre was an 18-storey housing tower with a water tower on top, which due to its height and unique shape, differing from factory-built

3 Z. Körner, M. Nagy, Az európai és a magyar telepszer lakásépítés története 1945- t l napjainkig [“The history of European and Hungarian housing estates from 1945 to today”], Budapest: Terc kiadó kft., 20064 T. Lipp, Honfoglalás Újpalotán [“The conquest of Újpa-lota”], Budapest: Kossuth könyvkiadó, 1978.

units, instantly became a sort of symbol of the housing estate.

However, the architects participating in the design of Újpalota and its environment de-scribed the process as liberating and creative, taking place in the foreground of the New Eco-nomic Mechanism, highlighting the diverse use of industrialised housing technologies and especially non-standard solutions.5 The uniqueness of the housing tower for instance also materialised in its structural constraints (monolithic concrete due to the weight of the water tower) – and it seems almost symbolic that even Tenke, despite all his requests, could never get an apartment in the building.

What, then, was the sort of utopia that Újpalota presented? Post-war planning and its faith in technology led to a peculiar loss of meaning in architectural forms: diverse spa-tial structures created as assemblies of identi-cal or similar elements, especially if they lacked public functions, ultimately always represented the same function. The scale of architecture faded out between urban and in-terior spaces, only maintained by the grid of prefabricated elements and by community life which was forced to operate in open spaces. An architect who moved to the housing estate saw this to symbolise the permanence of compromises: the interviews of 1978 contained

5 Zoltán Csorba, in: T. Lipp, Álom szocreál kivitelben [“Breakfast at Khrushchev’s”], Budapest: Újpalotai szaba-did központ, 2009.

pan

oram

io

The use and enrichment of the tabula rasa urban environment through linguistic tools and imprints of memories starts with moving in, for individuals and communities alike. The word “conquest” which appears in the title of a 1978 sociography symbolises the founding act of the first-generation communities, also remem-bered in several interviews. From 1971 onwards the sense of belonging and shared experience among the migrants to the housing estate, both physically and metaphorically incomplete, was embodied by moving in and bringing the apart-ments to an acceptable level.6

The lack of spaces designated for community

6 See: Lipp (1978), Szepes (2002).

life had consequences from the very beginning. As cultural life had to be based on local private action, the norms that emerged for organising culture have regularly highlighted the ten-sions between civil initiatives and narratives of power. On the other hand, initiatives such as clubs, apartment-nurseries or the Újpalota Szabadid Központ (Újpalota Recreational Centre), which operated from 1977 without a venue, were extraordinarily adept at using the institutional and open-air spaces of the hous-ing estate on a temporary basis, also forming a network of regular collaborations among diverse organisations.7 These events provided their new venues with meanings and inter-pretations, consequently establishing tools for expressing individual and shared identities

7 A. Kelemen et al. (eds.), 30 év krónikája: Szemelvény-ek az Újpalotai Szabadid Központ három évtizedének történetéb l [“The chronicle of 30 years: Excerpts from the three-decade history of the Újpalota Community Centre”], Budapest: Újpalotai Szabadid Központ, 2010.

both the basic themes of criticism (monotony, unfinishedness) and the appraisal of the plan’s virtues, taking a kind of anticipatory position with regard to the future of Újpalota.

Spatial stories The lack of public facilities and the monotony of industrialised architecture are present all the way through the following decades, as the efforts and goals of civil society and local anecdotes narrating the environment both use these two themes as their basis. It is also re-markable that the interpretations of key topics such as alienation, monotony, apartment sizes and the uses or status of public spaces always change and occasionally even contradict each other.

Wieżowce mieszkalne − jedna z dominant krajobrazu Újpalota

pan

oram

io

pan

oram

io

Symbol osiedla – wieżowiec mieszkalny z wieżą ciśnień umieszczoną na dachu

in the public space and quickly accumulating a local mental geography of users besides the bird’s-eye perspective of the planners.8

Such roles of narratives associated with spaces can be read from the histories of street names. There are multiple versions about the dates – some first-generation stories are taking place on nameless streets, despite the fact that the choice of names which also connect to local history is linked to a television quiz show that was airing at the time when construc-tion began in Újpalota.9 The local history quiz show entitled Black-White Yes-No featured teams from Óbuda and Rákospalota, and the latter, in preparation for the second round after winning, prepared an in-depth study of the district, listing, among others, the old names of roads and vineyards from vintage maps that eventually provided the street names of the housing estate.

This is how the metaphorical-historical and actual discovery of spaces is transformed into spatial narratives. The same process can be seen in another dimension in the youth novels of Mihály Padisák which take place in Újpalota, where kids moving to the housing estate become explorers of “Indian” tribes and public spaces and construction sites become their unconquered hunting territory.10 That this was an actual pastime activity is revealed

8 On the relationship of the two perspectives and the emancipation of urban space through walking see M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley CA: Uni-versity of California Press, 1984. The use and subversive interpretations of socialist public spaces offer a special reading to de Certeau’s critique of power. 9 See: Szepes (2002).10 See the Kanóc series (1984, 1987) and Csipisz prevails (M. Padisák, Csipisz mégis gy z [“Csipisz prevails”], Buda-pest: Móra, 1979).

by the works of Balázs Beöthy. This artist, who spent his childhood in Újpalota, reconstructed the layers of meanings they had created over the area in a 2006 installation entitled In search of the spiral.11 The piece involves his childhood companion of “Indian” games, juxtaposing their experiences from movies and fiction with texts on critical social theory secretly written at home by his father and the context of the housing estate which inspired and contained both activities. An earlier photo installation, entitled This song means nothing, creates an audiovisual environment in which the Wild West romanticism of Native American movies meets the Wild East environment of Eastern

11 See: www.bk.hu/spiral.html.

Koncert zespołu Piramis na dachu osiedlowego przedszkola

Wejście do Centrum Kultury Újpalotafo

t.: a

rch

iwu

m a

uto

ra

fot.

: s. s

zem

erey

European housing estates, and narratives of heroism and wayfinding in the wilderness rewrite the landscape which opens up from the high-rise rooftops.

The territorial fight for public space is re-flected in the relationship of political power and services without venues, decentralising their operations. While Újpalota had 60,000 inhabitants at its demographic peak, several basic services such as medical or childcare facilities had to find informal solutions to operate (i.e. working out of apartments). Groups of youths lacking clubs and spending time on streets and squares quickly became the source of numerous conflicts that went beyond

police and social policy issues and also affected the dynamics of conquest in the developing “Újpalota identity”. Architects refused ideas to convert unused spaces by staircases into clubs on the grounds explained earlier, but the existence of uncontrolled social organisations concerned party officials as well. Street gangs in the neighbouring Rákospalota reasoned that the behaviour of their Újpalota counterparts was explainable by the lack of street codes they themselves adhered to, which could also be seen as a civil reflection of the political rivalry playing out on the district level. Rákospalota, which had grown from a village into an under-developed town, was competing for resources with the “modern” and much larger Újpalota,

which on the other hand lacked infrastruc-ture and political power in decision making. Outside viewers often living in significantly worse apartments found it hard to accept the growing demands of the inhabitants of new housing estates, while from this perspective they seemed arid, monofunctional and unin-teresting as urban environments.

The reason behind the founding of the Újpalota Recreational Centre was partly to mediate this situation and to fill the void with schemes. Its three decades of operation could also be described as the continuous reinterpre-tation of the spaces of the housing estate:12 the programmes organised for the first Újpalota Days in 1978 are key elements of the local folk-lore to this day. A concert by the band Piramis on the rooftop of the kindergarten, tower music in the tower house as well as chamber music events and a free annual open-air ice-skating rink worked as a détournement opening up not only public spaces but buildings and interiors as well for free association – as long as they stayed within the limits of cultural politics.

The strained relationship of the municipality and the organisation clearly appears in the management of participatory projects and the communication of development concepts. The main square, currently a park, originally the site of the Cultural Centre, was the object of several debates regarding the proposed new cultural and community functions, with much criticism going towards the programme, the

12 According to one of the organisers, since they had no building they regularly looked all over the map of the estate for programme venues. See Kelemen (2010).

Fontanna na głównym placu osiedla

fot.

: s. s

zem

erey

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 68

proposed site of a new church and the in-transparency of the design process. A former Party office building had been host to cultural schemes even before 1990, and since then it has been used as a community hall operated by the Újpalota Recreation Centre.

New public spaces have been created in the environs of the housing estate by a church built in 2008 on an adjacent site and by one of the flagship commercial developments of the transitional era, the Pólus Centre shopping mall. The small forested area once occupied by “Indians” and later used as recreational park, its neighbouring allotment gardens and the adjacent shopping mall with its sister Asia Cen-tre fulfil most needs for commercial and other services, somewhat overwriting the original urban layout of Újpalota. The central prom-enade designed by Tibor Tenke is still unbuilt and empty, except for the tower block in the middle and the market hall and the main square with its transit hub and cultural venue at each end.

The symbolic central role of the main square is reinforced by the foundation stone located here and a sculpture donated by the twin towns movement of the 1980s. These, the later erected memorial of Tenke and the most recent fountain lead the viewer back to the stories constructing and connecting young towns. The first movers live in a strong community made of personal stories and memories where the creation of the urban context lives as a direct experience. The fragile process which might elevate these from a personal dimension to a shared knowledge of the community that can pass on to latecomers and today’s genera-tions can be understood on the main square.

The sculpture donated by Ózd is supposed to symbolically fill the void of the missing cultural centre, but the piece depicting the unity of the capital’s districts, also known as Three-legged Lizzy, does not seem to withstand the passage of time in either its forms or in its material.13 It has nevertheless become a fixture of the square, partly since it was built upon the foundation stone, so much so that a 2011 design competition for the new main square required that it remain untouched – contrary to the memorial to Tibor Tenke, which can be freely moved around. A less directly legible but much more personal and dramatic memorial, connected to the construction of the hous-ing estate, has recently disappeared from the square. The housing block on the Nyírpalota street side was also known as The block with the black attic, since its unique black top panels commemorated a young construction worker

13 See: Szepes (2002).

who had fallen off the scaffolding during a night shift.14 That is, until its façade renova-tion. The newly insulated building was painted with abstract geometric patterns that have no relation to any locality; their main role is to break down the scale of the façade into smaller units after the original panel grid patterns disappeared. I find the block with the black attic’s case an inspiring example of public art reflecting on the discursivity and sharing of memories. In order to keep the heritage of the first generations functional and transmissible, the renewal of squares and façades needs to focus on the archaeology of stories native to Újpalota.

Apartment by apartment Working to improve unfinished, deficient apartments as a force that creates communi-ties is a key element of several reminiscences,

14 See: Lipp (2009).

Widok na Główny Plac osiedla, w tle jeden z wielopiętrowych bloków mieszkalnych

fot.

: s. s

zem

erey

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 68

just as the shock of change in lifestyle for the workers who arrived in masses for the first time.15 For those moving in from transitional housing, dilapidated sublets, store-front apart-ments or shared units the first experiences of spaciousness are instantly followed by the often emotionally and culturally extreme challenges of settling in, furnishing and

15 See: Lipp (1978 and 2009).

maintaining a place called home. Apartments of relatively larger sizes were often inhab-ited by multi-generation families where high occupation densities led to inevitable con-flicts. It is remarkable, though, how previous living conditions and the frustrations of new apartments are juxtaposed in the interviews. Schematic floor plans, overcrowded living and nosy neighbours knowing everything about everyone appear in a neutral or nostalgic tone in remembering eclectic tenement blocks, whereas in the case of the housing estate their perception is clearly negative. The shifting scales probably affected the scales of commu-nities and spatial structures as well beyond the personal environment, as several former neighbours moving in together reported fading friendships and isolation as families gradually turned inwards. This process was enhanced not only by the often-mentioned lack or uselessness of semi-private zones, but also by social factors such as the embarrassment of having to take off shoes on carpet flooring.

The patterns of alienation were likely different in each building and staircase unit – younger children who grew up here remembered stair-cases as “the basic units of community life” with open and traversable apartments, possi-bly much more so for children than for adults.

The dissolution and gradual silence of the first settler communities coincided with the wear-ing out of the increasingly hopeless battle for public spaces as well as the unfolding of the culture shock of migration and the economic recession of the 1980s. The detailed sociological surveys of 1978 and 1985 predicted the demo-graphic trends further accelerated by the later political transitions in which the number of

inhabitants dropped to 40,000, dominated by elderly, single, poorly educated and impover-ishing households. Community organisations have consequently shifted the focus of their activities to maintaining social services and programmes which serve techniques of sur-vival beyond cultural content.

Private spaces appear in the life of the com-munity through their owners, too. Although Újpalota was never considered an elite hous-ing estate, public personalities or otherwise noteworthy characters moving here became important elements on the cultural map of the neighbourhood. The artist studio apartments, for instance, which were built on top of the tower block as a result of tough local lobbying through political connections, explicitly used the artists living there and their ties to the community as a communication tool.

The local history volume by Erika Szepes is, however, strongly critical towards opinions stressing alienation and the dissolution of communities as dominant trends. Her text, beyond being a personal testimony, sees the changes of 1990 and the radical transformation of financial situations as the main influences on turning inwards, but she clearly puts the power of decade-long neighbourly relation-ships above this. A critical perspective is also developed on the allegedly identical-looking apartments forcing their inhabitants to perform the same movements and actions in all buildings, offering a slideshow tour of apartments with occupants of different backgrounds, showing how their similar begin-nings three decades before led to completely personal and unique careers and environ-ments.

Od góry: wejścia do Polus Center i Asia Center znajdujących się na osiedlu

pan

oram

iopa

nor

amio


Conclusion The image of a housing estate is created not only by the buildings (or the lack thereof) and the seemingly clear slate provided by the architects, but rather by the set of possibili-ties and constraints as well as coded meanings embedded in the plans and the evolving lives of their inhabitants. This situation, fragile and uncertain compared to the historical city, has spawned a set of negative images about housing estates, the narrow horizons they of-fer for living, the lifestyles of poorly educated inhabitants and the architectural language associated with totalitarian regimes.

In the case of Újpalota I see a mixture of concepts much more open and traversable than elsewhere, visions on the possibility of change and getting things done, and an environment with tight constraints for the entrepreneurial spirit. The young age of housing estates, their abundance of spaces and dilapidated green-ery, hold the promise of much more radical transformation beyond the immediate need for renewal than the traditional city.

A new development programme launched in 2011 through competitions and interven-tions sets out with goals of stability instead of temporality, career paths instead of survival and cooperation with civil society to renew the public spaces of Újpalota and its communi-ties that reach the size of the city of Eger. The brochure, which adapts green city policies to the special needs to housing estates, offers a vision of these structures as laboratories of green innovation and lifestyles based on flex-

ible work.16

In order to avoid another tabula rasa situation, it would be of critical importance to uncover potentials now relegated to the background, like the shared optimism of the founding period or the personal memories and traces of forty years, and treat the housing estate as a surface where these can appear and become tools of continuity, which is the basis of all urban history.

16 A. Novák, Újpalota − Zöldváros: Az élhet város és a fenntart-ható városfejlesztés építész szemmel [“Újpalota - Green city: an architectural view on the liveable city and sustainable urban development”], Budapest, 2004.

Rzeźba zwana Trójnogą Lizzy podarowana mieszkańcom Újpaloty przez mieszkańców Ózdu, Główny Plac osiedla

fot.

: s. s

zem

erey


Valentina Gulin Zrnić

InstItute of ethnology and folklore research, Zagreb

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 73

Once upon a time,” a twelve-year old girl from the Travno neighborhood told me, “mammoths lived here: their remnants could be seen a

long time ago, but today there are none left”; nevertheless, in Travno, she continued, “there is a huge building called Mamutica, and it got its name after those mammoths.1

This is a story I have heard many times while doing research on urban identification in Za-greb.2 The site of this prehistoric imagination is Travno, a neighborhood which is actually quite contemporary, no older than some thirty-five years. It is one of the neighborhoods in the southern part of the city of Zagreb built under socialism after the Second World War. It was a period of rapid industrialization and urbaniza-tion, when the city was expanding on a grand scale by building new settlements on the fringes of the existing city. A group of ten new “housing communities”3 were built between the end of the 1950s and the mid-1980s on what had once been large tracts of agricultural land, and this urban entity was given the symbolic name of “Novi (New) Zagreb”. Travno is part of it, built in the mid-1970s. Housing communities were planned according to modernist town-planning and architectural principles: functionally they were planned as residential parts of the city,

1 The word “mamutica” means female mammoth, following the female gender of the Croatian word for “building”. The original name for this building will be used throughout the text.2 The text is based on the research published in the book Kvartovska spika: značenja grada i urbani lokalizmi u Novom Zagrebu [Talk of the Neighborhood: Meanings of City and Urban Localisms in New Zagreb], Zagreb 2009.3 In the 1950s they were called “microraions”; since the 1960s other terms have been used (housing community, residential community, new housing estate).

providing qualitative life in apartments (with the full infrastructure, enough sunlight, etc.) and for everyday modern family life with all the amenities (a primary school, kindergartens, medical and dental centers, shops, restaurants, service outlets, and sport and recreational facilities) shared within walking distance of a given neighborhood. Each housing community was planned for approximately 10,000 residents in large, high-rise buildings constructed over an area of 30-50 hectares. And this is where Mamutica enters the story.

No one could tell me how Mamutica got its col-loquial name; but everyone could tell me that it is the biggest residential building on the Balkans/in the former socialist Yugoslavia/in southeastern Europe. It is a building – actually a complex of two buildings called the big and the small Mamutica – comprising some 1,200 flats and housing more than 4,500 residents. This huge building is known by almost everyone in Zagreb: it is the most visible landmark in the

space of New Zagreb and it is the identity of the Travno neighborhood; moreover, as an ele-ment of the built environment it has become an inseparable part of the experience of people living in the neighborhood. Here I would like to focus on this very interior-ization of the building (or built environment in general) into one’s own lived experience in space. The building, and the built space, is not only the backdrop to urban life in the neighborhood and a receptacle of everyday culture, but also a constitutive element of an individual process of urban local identification. In anthropologi-cal terms the focus is on the transformation of built, material, physical space (a particular building or neighborhood) into a meaningful and symbolic place. Both of these perspectives will be sketched out further in order to ques-tion identities of and in space: the first (the production of space) through the vision of the architect who designed the neighborhood, and the second (the construction of place) through the narratives of its inhabitants. The first

Valentina Gulin Zrnić

InstItute of ethnology and folklore research, Zagreb

pan

oram

io

Zaspół bloków Mamutica − widok ogólny

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 73

perspective is an intention, an effort to master identity from above and to shape the identity of space that people presumably would only adopt as a ready-made product; the second perspective implies a process issuing from below, an appropriation and interiorization of the built environment through practical exploitation of the neighborhood, social interactions in the space, corporeal, emotional, lived experiences, growing up, memories, etc., through which the produced space becomes charged with symbolic meaning. By this, I set the stage for talking about identities in/of space in terms of conti-nuity; however, these were challenged by the changes in the political, economic and social components in post-socialist times.

Shaping the identity of space Many neighborhoods built under socialism have been criticized for lacking a human touch due to the size, height or rigid geometric

shape of the buildings, which resulted “in a cold and alienated atmosphere”.4 However the urban plan and building design of the Travno neighborhood in the mid-1970s reveals that the architect speculated on the relationship between man and space in other terms. Beside mere buildings the architect Miroslav Kollenz5 also wanted to design “the neighborhood experience”: this experience, he explained, might be provoked by introducing variations in the buildings’ morphology and by creative design of the “heart of the neighborhood”, i.e. the center of the neighborhood. Moreover, he gave the buildings floral names as proposals for their symbols, in order to facilitate orientation

4 Mirko Maretić, “Izgradnja stambenih naselja u Zagre-bu”, Arhitektura no. 24, 1970, pp. 107-108.5 Urbanistički projekt Travno [Urban project Travno], Zagreb 1974. Author: Miroslav Kollenz; Zavod za urba-nizam Arhitektonskog fakutleta [Department of Urban Planning of the Architecture Faculty].

as well as residents’ identification with them: the big and small Mamutica were inscribed in the project as “daisies”, and the other buildings as “primrose”, “dandelion”, “cornflower”, etc.6 So the architect proposes that the creativity of shapes and the poetic and symbolic inspiration, together with the functionality designed into the neighborhood, “strengthen the resident’s feeling of belonging in the neighborhood” which would further “arouse in him love for his lived environment”.7 The determinism of form and shape is evident in this pan-planning concept, which aimed to foresee everything from standard everyday “needs” to engende-ring feelings.

Each neighborhood planning project started with two given values: the territorial size (30-50 hectares) and the number of residents (10,000). In Travno, the architect Kollenz implemented a novelty which would signi-ficantly influence the identity of the space and the neighborhood: instead of the regular geometric arrangement of the buildings across the designated territory, the architect designed a large park in the center of the neighborhood. However, he still had the same demographic given: to leave a considerable part of the territory for the park (i.e. with no residen-tial buildings) meant that he had to design a building that would accommodate some 30% of the planned number of residents. The park and Mamutica are two sides of the same “coin”, of an urban vision fettered by demographic and ter-

6 The planned names for the buildings were never formally bestowed; indeed, hardly anyone is even aware of them; but the buildings have acquired colloquial sym-bolic names – they are called Mamutica, Kineski zid (the Chinese Wall), Slušalica (the Earphones), etc. 7 Miroslav Kollenz, “Urbanistički plan naselja u južnom Zagrebu”, Glasilo Arhitektonskog fakulteta 1, 1975, p. 8.

fot.

: arc

hiw

um

au

tork

i

Mamutica − widok z oddali, lata 70. XX wieku (?)

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 74

ritorial defaults. Just as Mamutica got its name due to its main characteristic (size), people say that the whole neighborhood got its name from its other main characteristic – the grassy park: the name Travno is derived from the Croatian world trava meaning “grass”. It is not surpri-sing, then, that in the architect’s vision the buildings springing up in this grassy, meado-w-like neighborhood symbolically carried the names of wild flowers!

Both the neighborhood and the building are urban artifacts according to the architect and urban theoretician Aldo Rossi8: an urban artifact cannot be approached only through classification systems of functions or forms – it is bare description, not the interpretation of it. For this it has to be approached through lived experience – this is what makes it not only different from other urban artifacts but also characteristic, special. Furthermore, this special experience is recognizable only to those who have been there or lived there. Following Rossi-’s argument mentioned above, we will move on further from the intentionally shaped identity of space towards that “specific experience” which would result in construction of identi-ties in space.

Constructing identities in space “... anyone who sees Mamutica – and I thought that myself – would think that people do not know each other here, and that to live here must be dreadful... everything seemed vast and horrible to me... in the evening there were lights on the windows like in cartoons; ‘poor people,’ I thought, ‘who live there’… but ultimately it proved to be quite different.”

8 Aldo Rossi, Arhitektura grada, 1999, pp.30-32 [orig. L’architettura della città, 1966].

My thirty-year-old interlocutor continued this impression by talking about her family moving into Mamutica and her complete revision of this opinion to the opposite extreme: open-hearted, communicative, nice people actually live in the building, she concluded. What this fragment shows is what Rossi (ibid.) would describe as the double perception of an urban artifact since “the notion of the particular urban artifact one has will always be different from the notion of one who ‘lives’ that same artifact.” In other words, the material and built merge with social and emotional percep-tion into an insider’s experience. That is not to say that people glorify the building: many criticize the “gigantic stairwells”, each with 150 flats; problems with the building’s structure; everyday hassle with elevators or problems with poor water pressure on high stories; some remark that the building “is not gauged to fit human measures”, and generally it is described as alienating. However, this “common sense”

knowledge on the determination of form to sociability is almost paradoxically questioned by an inhabitant:

“I really do not understand how a large buil-ding could cause the alienation of people. The family house is a more antisocial type of living, having a private yard where no one can enter. Here you simply cannot escape social contacts – when you enter the elevator, greeting people, talking to them – if you want to, of course; if you are not willing you don’t have to, but you are still doomed to meet people and to see them.”

This man lived in Mamutica for 25 years; he is now living in another building in Travno neighborhood, but still wants to come back. He claims that he could not live anywhere except in Travno and he sees himself as a “true native of the neighborhood” and he “loves it truly”. He moved in when he was a child, and grew up

pan

oram

io

Widok ogólny na teren zielony sąsiadujący z kompleksem Mamutica

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 74

in the neighborhood, in a very compact peer group which is still active today. He also likes the feeling that in the building, as well as in the neighborhood, people are “all the same”. Many people share that impression, and the bu-ilt and the social overlap charging the identity process through time.

What does it mean that people are “all the same”? Mamutica was often referred to as “Yugoslavia in miniature”: at the time of the “great moving-in”, as one informant called the period of the mid-1970s, its ethnic and social heterogeneity was nurtured. This was a period of socialism which made ideological and practi-cal efforts to ensure this, particularly through “apartment policy” or “flat allocation”. People say that “it was a kind of mix”; there were resi-dents from all over Yugoslavia, and of all social statuses from very poor people to “professors, doctors, educated people”. On the one hand, the insiders are aware of and seem to like the social heterogeneity inherited by socialism, which, paradoxically, is described as being “all the same” (an impression of homogeneous heterogeneity, one could say). On the other, the general view of large buildings is that they are inhabited by social losers and are nests of social

pathology and crime.9 This is usually an outside image, which has been recently, for example, screened (and eventually fortified) in a TV serial called “Mamutica”: the building (and even the whole neighborhood) is the backdrop to a C.S.I. – crime scene investigation – and is depicted as inhabited by characters such as troublesome families, people of questionable past, divorced women, alcoholics, drug dealers, youth prone to crime, unemployed people, etc. In a way, the serial has generated an identity for the neighborhood as a social ghetto, and it has “incarcerated” the real inhabitants, as Arjun Appadurai10 would say, referring to native communities, meaning that their spatial framework (in our case the building and the neighborhood) has also become the mental framework that is their confinement for their mode of thinking and living.

People’s narratives of their experience always integrate space. Many people remember how they moved into the building, when “the elevators still were not in operation”: the atmosphere of helping each other and sha-red enthusiasm is a common topos in their

9 Here I would like to recall that the abovementioned connection of large buildings generating social patho-logical behavior influenced the intentional demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972. Charles Jenks sees this as the end of modernist architecture, which was believed to be the root cause of an increase in social pathology and crime among its residents. However, it is questionable whether the reason lies in the bare form of the building or in US public residential policy which populates such buildings with already socially and politically deprived poor and black residents (see D.P. Doordan, Twentieth-Century Architecture, 2001, pp. 158-160). Still, the image that large building form determines troublesome behavior is widespread.10 Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place”, Cultural Anthropology 3/1, 1988, pp. 36-49.

memories; children played in the neighbor-hood, which was still partially a building site – they caught frogs, hid in garages, “sailed” on puddles or conquered hills of left-over building materials – childhood memories do not value the space, they interiorize it. This fact is more boldly evident while not yet filtrated through memories, but described in the actual experien-ce of children growing up in the neighborhood now:11 Mamutica is “dear and lovely”, appropria-ted by friends living there (“The Mamutica is quite good since all my friends live there”); it is appropriated as “ the one and only, victorio-usly praised by the smaller-looking buildings around it.” In one child’s description Mamutica appears also in the context of warmth and safety, where “all these buildings, especially my building, Mamutica, invoke the feeling that all this is my home.” And the home itself, the notion of it, is that symbolic place that the buil-ding/the neighborhood becomes out of the phy-sical space inscribed with meanings. This now constitutes the platform on which a new level of identity of the space, as well as personal identities in that space, might be constructed. The citation of a fifteen-year-old youngster also underlines this very subtle interweaving of the built environment into living experiences eventually charging the identity in/of space:

“in all my troubles Mamutica stands confidently and safely in its place, reminding me that everything will turn out well. That it will continue to stand, and I will continue to live.”

Post-socialist challenges to identity in/of spaceMamutica, of course, does continue to stand,

11 The study in Travno also covered children from nine to fifteen years old.


not only metaphorically, encouraging indivi-duals in their troubles, but also “surviving” the collective hardships and ruptures of the whole system after 1991. The dissolution of Yugoslavia was followed by the war in the first part of the 1990s: when air raid warnings were given that Zagreb was under attack, tenants of Mamutica gathered in the atomic shelters which, like many other “needs” for everyday life, had also been constructed in the newly built socia-list neighborhoods. Many people remember playing and hiding around their entrances as children, sledging from the small hill built over the shelters, or even using some rooms for rock band rehearsals during the peaceful time of socialism; in the wartime of the early 1990s four and a half thousand people spent hours in this Mammoth underground.

When people from Travno refer to change, they usually talk about the great time divide betwe-en “then” (the socialist time) and “now” (the transitional period of the last two decades). Then, they say, “everything was different”, pe-ople “cared more about each other”, there was “a solidarity among people and neighbors”; now “everything is faster”, “less secure”, and “valu-es have changed”. This is a kind of a nostalgic lament for past times which are recollected and appraised as better; new times brought the war, unemployment for some and faster working pressure for others, strong social dif-ferentiation, and overall uncertainty. It is part of the general picture of commenting on the post-socialist period; from the local neighbor-hood perspective this picture might be seen in snapshots of groups of young unemployed men gathering on corners or early retired people spending their time bowling or playing cards

on park benches.12 One image of Travno – or the narrative of its identity – that survived the gre-at change is the “homogeneous heterogeneity” mentioned above, although this heterogeneity was seriously shaken in both ethnic and social terms. At the beginning of the 1990s the multie-thnic Mamutica (“Yugoslavia in miniature”) lost some of its tenants due to the establishment of the new national state13; the next decade brought greater social diversification, and some families moved out to more attractive parts of the city. However, these trends in population change did not endanger the dominant hetero-geneous image of the neighborhood: moreover, some people appreciate such a local social atmosphere, and gauge it as a positive quality of this particular urban setting.

But the event that caused the identity both of and in the space to be most questioned and negotiated during the last decade was the construction of the church building. The only “need” that had been omitted from the concept of the modern socialist neighborhood was – not surprisingly – the religious need.14 In the new democratic society many neighborhoods got church buildings; it was not an issue. But

12 “Early retirement” was an option for people who were more or less close to regular retirement but had lost their jobs due to the restructuring of the economy in the 1990s; this resulted in a significant number of still vital people being pensioners, and such groups became more visible in the neighborhood space.13 Most, though not all people of Serbian origin moved to Serbia.14 However, Catholic parishes were founded in every neighborhood by metropolitan decrees, but religious practices took place in apartments: usually one or two rooms were adapted for religious services; the priest li-ved in such an apartment as well. My interlocutors who upheld religious practices under socialism talked about the atmosphere of secrecy involved in being members of neighborhood parishes.

in Travno it became contested ground because the church was planned in the park which was regarded by many as a significant marker of the neighborhood. The debate was conducted around the identity of the local space: would the church building alter the most distinctive characteristic of the neighborhood? A man who debated the issue on an internet message board (in 2004) said that the new church building would “change not only the appearance but the very character of the central space of our neighborhood”. Another man replied that the church building would be “a visual sign of belonging to Western civilization and the Christian culture”. Another proposed that the neighborhood should be renamed from Travno (trava = grass) to Crkveno (crkva = church), since its crucial attribute would be altered. The produced identity of the space was threatened. Moreover, constructed identities in space were also challenged. People from Mamutica mostly advocated the park as their “living room”, and referred to arguments such as having “been born here”, “grown up here”, spent decades living here, etc., to express how much they felt rooted in Travno. With such claims they constituted the community whose identity was symbolically and meaningfully connected to the very local urban space – the park, Mamutica, and the neighborhood.

The church was built (2006–2008) in one part of the central park and the passion of the de-bate died down. But the open internet message board for debate and the civic neighborhood organization founded at that time contributed to the construction of the civil society of post-socialist times. But that is another mammoth story...

fot.

: arc

hiw

um

au

tork

i


“Food is a social justice issue and a public health issue; it’s also an economic development issue, it’s a transportation issue, it’s a regional planning issue, it’s an ecological issue.”1

“Open-air markets are symbols of poverty,” declared the former deputy mayor of Buda-pest in a recent interview. This statement reveals the Budapest City Hall’s formerly dominant policy on urban public spaces: open-air markets have been closed down and market halls have been turned into super-markets because of their uncontrollable nature; they serve as magnets for loiterers, the jobless and the homeless. As disorderly reminders of how the “other half” lives, they are intolerable from the viewpoint of a certa-

1 Nevin Cohen at Foodprint NYC, February 27, 2010, Studio-X, New York City.

in kind of economic development: no hotels, restaurants, or other businesses in need of a sterile, optimistic environment will move into the vicinity of open-air markets, goes the argument.

However, among actors in the civil society, there is an increasing acknowledgement of markets as vehicles of specific values. Open-air markets are genuine public spaces of a particular kind: while functioning as meeting places for local communities, they also offer contexts for intergenerational encounters and for the exchange of non-primary information, such as jobs, sales and possibilities. Open-air markets may be analyzed from a multiplicity of viewpoints: they offer affordable fresh food, they are central to public health, biodiversity and fair trade; and they open up access to commercial

activities with a very low profit margin for people often at the peripheries of society.

Markets between function and image In April 2010 Imre Ikvay-Szabó, then deputy mayor of Budapest, told journalists at a press conference: “The urban landscape is negati-vely affected by fruit and vegetable stalls.”2 He went on to propose to withhold permits to sell food in public spaces in central parts of the city. The use of the word “landscape” by Ikvay-Szabó is telling: in its reference to seeing, “landscape” suggests a relationship to public space that is based on spectatorship

2 Kata Janecskó, “A külvárosba űzné a pultozó zöld-ségárusokat a főpolgármester-helyettes” (The deputy mayor would push vegetable stalls into the suburbs), Origo, April 23, 2010, http://www.origo.hu/itthon/20100423-a-fopolgarmesterhelyettes-megtiltana-a-zoldes-es-gyumolcs-arulast-budapest-belso.html.

Levente Polyák

ExchangE in thE strEEtrethinking open-air markets in post-socialist Budapest

more than on agency. Landscape is what is given only to the eye: instead of being a terrain of activities, the urban landscape is a set of images.

To look at public spaces as images instead of terrains of activities is hardly an invention of Budapest City Hall. In recent years an increasing number of theorists have descri-bed the process by which the urban land-scape has gradually lost its materiality and has turned into the city’s foremost visual representation. As the American sociologist Sharon Zukin wrote in 1995: “The develop-ment of visual media in the 20th century made photography and movies the most important cultural means of framing urban space, at least until the 1970s. Since then, as the surrealism of King Kong shifted to that of Blade Runner and redevelopment came to focus on consumption activities, the material landscape itself – the buildings, parks and streets – has become the city’s most impor-tant visual representation.”3

If, in the sense of architectural postmo-dernism, buildings are reduced to their façades, in conjunction with this, securiti-zing and sterilizing policies aim to reduce urban streets to postcards, embodying diverse ideals of the civic order customized from a variety of 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century elements. Urban regeneration based on beautified public spaces looks at markets as mere aesthetic phenomena, ignoring their social, economic and ecological dimensions. When neo-liberal urban planning envisions

3 Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Oxford: Blac-kwell, 1995), 16.

the creation of public goods markets, these are circumscribed, well-targeted markets for an affluent clientele, exclusive to both vendors and customers.

Regulating markets If today’s markets bother City Halls officials in their very appearance, this is by no means a newly emerging conflict: markets have been seen as disturbing elements by generations of legislators; regulating mar-kets has been on the agenda for the past 150 years. In parallel with the eastward spread of Haussmann’s hygienist ideas of urban systematization, and inspired by Napoleon’s taxable market halls, concepts of reorgani-zing food distribution also traveled signifi-cant geographical distances. The complex and chaotic food infrastructure developed by the first half of the 19th century was judged to not match the requirements of the modern metropolis: in the 1870s, city leaders agreed upon the need for restricted regulations for food markets. They esti-mated that there were too many markets in Budapest (44 open-air markets and over 10,000 mobile vendors in the mid-1890s)4, without the necessary control, and with medieval standards of hygiene. In response to this “public food supply crisis”, a special commission was established in 1879 to over-see the creation of a market hall system, based on Western models.5

4 András Gerő, “Piac a csarnokban (Market in the Hall),” in Lehel: Tér-piac-vásár-csarnok, ed. Judit Rajk (Pécs: Jelenkor, 2003), 39.5 Ferenc Vadas, “A Surviving Building Type in Budapest,” in Market Hall. Expiration Date: To Be Determined, ed. Allan Siegel (Budapest: Ernst Múzeum, 2005), 133-139.

Market halls were not simply covert ver-sions of the previously functioning open-air food markets: they were institutions in themselves, sophisticated tools in the muni-cipality’s hand to respond to the challenges of modern urbanization. Through price control, quality assurance and hygiene standards, market halls helped municipal institutions become mediators of urban food consumption, constituting an unsur-passable link in the food chain between farmers and consumers. Municipal control over the food infrastructure aimed at totali-ty: legislation following the construction of market halls proposed that in the districts where new market halls were built the existing markets be prohibited.

Modern market halls consist of clearly distinguishable (and taxable) vending units, and they serve as architectural frames for the rational organization of the traffic of goods and bodies. The spatial arrangement of market halls corresponds to the discipli-nary practices of the modern state, described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: “Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed.”6 Through their architectural design and the management of goods, market halls exemplify the changing nature of the relationship between the state and the individual that Foucault describes as bio-politics: where food distribution becomes an instrument by which to manage and sha-pe individual bodies and behavior.

6 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books 1995), 142.

Stragany na targowisku przy placu Hunyadiego w Budapeszcie

pan

oram

io

Supermarkets, market halls and infor-mal street commerce The decades under communist leadership in Hungary had their definitive impact not only on politics and the economy, but also on commerce, people’s routines, and their use of the city. Following that in the late 19th century, another wave of “modernization” reached markets in the 1980s: in efforts to further centralize commerce, many of Budapest’s market halls were converted into supermar-kets, further rationalizing food distribution by imposing standards upon agricultural asso-ciations and consumers, thus eliminating the link between the latter and food producers.

Similar evolutions took place in the urban pu-blic space, another arena of efforts to moder-nize and control everyday life from the 1950s on. The restructuring of the urban fabric by new housing estates went hand in hand with the transformation of its principal public spa-

ces: residents, discouraged from assembling in squares by perpetual police control, gradually withdrew into private apartments turned into semi-public meeting places. However, formali-zation and control was not the only direction of change: like places of public assembly, markets also found alternative locations. In parallel with the increasingly controlled and monopolized interior spaces of food commer-ce, the emerging market economy of the 1980s, together with a blossoming second economy, transformed public spaces into temporary, informal markets where everybody seemed to have something to sell.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, several new market concepts emerged in Hungarian cities. In the early 1990s, “Polish markets”, popping up for half or entire days at regular loca-tions in towns of various sizes, offered cheap clothes, household utensils, and technical equipment, sold from mobile stalls or from

the ground by (not only Polish) vendors with hardly any form of certification. In parallel, “MDF markets”, initiated by the leading poli-tical party of the first democratically elected government and proliferating on sidewalks and in parking lots, provided affordable vegetables and fruits to those impoverished by the recession of the transition years. In an atmosphere where informal markets were to-lerated as complementary to formal chains of food and goods distribution, improvised stalls on sidewalks and in parking lots all supported an ambience of libertinism in the market, re-latively uncontrolled, where one could barter and bargain.7

The importance of semi-informal market arrangements persists today, as food distri-bution increasingly takes place in supermar-kets, and market halls have virtually become the only official alternative. While some of today’s market halls in Budapest are inter-nationally renowned as examples of well-functioning markets, they hardly constitute the same network they did over a hundred years ago. Besides the numerous market halls whose renovation was only affordable with the monopolization of the commerce space (by introducing supermarkets dominating the halls’ space), there are only a handful of market halls which are still structured around individual vendors’ kiosks and stalls. But even “market-like” market halls present significant obstacles to those unable to pay the rental fee for stalls or kiosks inside the hall.

7 András Szalai, “The Changing World of the Market and Market Hall,” in Market Hall. Expiration Date: To Be Determined, ed. Allan Siegel (Budapest: Ernst Múzeum, 2005), 150.

Hala targowa przy placu Széna w Budapeszcie − między wnętrzem a zewnętrzem

fot.

: a. s

iege

l


Between regulations and practices

At a recent conference about street markets, participants agreed that the key to well-func-tioning markets is good regulation.8 Openness to public food markets and street vending is best manifested in tolerant regulations. Changing the regulatory framework to allow street markets to take place implies diversifi-cation of the rules and addition of progressive measures and incentives to them. Rules need to be “adaptable to the needs of distinct types of vendors and take into account different reasons for vending.”9

Serving as economic incubators, markets can be laboratories of self-employment and enter-prise creation, as the Brussels-based activist group City Mine(d) demonstrated in its Micro-nomics project: as a result of negotiations with City Hall, City Mine(d) arranged artist status for members of an immigrant community so that they could sell their goods tax- and per-mit-free at specific markets, learning vending skills, experiencing demand and supply, and moving on to create their own enterprises.10

However, regulations are not necessarily tools of repression and control; they are also in pla-ce to protect consumers as well as residents of a city or neighborhood. Eased regulations can only be reassuring if they function in tandem with reinforced self-control of vendors. As architect László Rajk underlined at the above-mentioned conference in Budapest, vendors must be organized and led by representatives

8 A market for every district: food, consumption, urbanism. A conference organized by the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre, on March 19, 2011, in Budapest. For details, see http://kek.org.hu/piac/en.9 Morales, ibid., 428. 10 For details, see http://www.citymined.org/.

who can guarantee the quality of food and thus exclude any undesired consequences of food consumption.11

A market at Hunyadi Square Economic viability, community cohesion, and access to healthy food and to self-employment in the only remaining open-air food market in Budapest’s inner districts; these were the main arguments activists of the civil orga-nization KAP-HT (Our Treasure, the Market – Hunyadi Square) emphasized when its members entered the fight to protect the mar-ket from demolition. KAP-HT was founded by Gabó Bartha in May 2007, when she heard the news that the district’s municipal commission had voted to eliminate the open-air market at

11 László Rajk at the “A market for every district: food, consumption, urbanism” conference, March 19, 2011, Budapest.

Hunyadi Square in order to create an under-ground parking garage serving the “House of Europe”, a vaguely defined cultural centre to be built in the subsequent years to replace the adjoining market hall. Linking the luxurious Andrássy Avenue to the rapidly gentrifying Király Street area, the Hunyadi Square market has become an indicator of the changing demographics, value systems and consump-tion patterns of the city as well as of political attitudes towards food markets.

After long negotiations and interventions by the KAP-HT group, the local government took into account the importance of involving local residents in the decision-making process. Meanwhile, they also decided to apply for EU funds together for the renovation of the site. Various participatory exercises were intro-duced to collect views and opinions on the

Sprzedawczyni na targowisku przy placu Hunyadiego w Budapeszcie

fot.

: htt

p://

lmv.

hu

/nod

e/60

65


planned development, while the impact of the community on the final plans still remained strongly compromised. The proposed plan for the market square envisioned a 500-car parking garage under the square, which went against the agreement of the participating re-sidents. Following an unsuccessful bid to raise EU funding for the planned car park, the local government shifted its focus to smaller inte-rventions like renovating the park, creating a new playground, redesigning the market stalls and turning parts of the square into a modera-ted traffic zone, thus allowing for more space for the Friday and Saturday markets.

Nevertheless, the conflict was renewed by the local government’s plans to clear from the square a significant number of trees, considered unsafe and a danger to public use of the square. KAP-HT’s call for independent expertise contributed to a deepening of the disagreement between supporters of the com-peting plans. Trees thus became crucial in the district’s heritage preservation strategy: once the trees are removed, plans for the garage may gain momentum and the existence of the farmers’ market may be cast into question. Close cooperation with the district’s chief ar-chitect did not prevent the market remaining on precarious ground: municipal attempts to reduce its hours of business and to increase the stall rental fee may result in a more exclu-sive market structure.12

The KAP-HT project, in the beginning, con-sisted of researching the municipality’s files

12 Gabó Bartha, “Rethinking the Marketplace: A Story of Resistance and Proactivity,” in Anatomy of a Street, ed. Eszter Steierhoffer and Levente Polyák (London: Art Network Agency, 2010), 33.

and launching campaigns to raise awareness of the plans related to the market and the hall. Later, however, the focus of the organiza-tion shifted towards less political, more com-munity- and local economy-oriented activities: group activists got involved in the life of the market, elaborating strategies for improving services and product variety (by introducing new herbs and vegetables, extending the se-lection of goods and foods) as well as opening up alternative channels of communication between the market traders, the wider public, visitors to and customers of the market, and the local authorities.

In praise of markets The polemic around the Hunyadi Square market highlights conceptual differences when it comes to food markets and the use of public space. While the KAP-HT’s activities exem-plify how an activist group may move from a resistant position to become a project incuba-tor promoting more livable and sustainable neighborhoods and cities, the position of the district’s municipal commission fell in line with the city government’s repressive public space policy of recent years. If the deputy may-ors were unwelcoming toward the phenomenon of street commerce, community activists like Gabó Bartha, in contrast, applauded it: “I find it senseless that municipalities want to erase a market in the name of modernization. Let’s modernize the market by renovating the stalls, to make the market cleaner, but its oblitera-tion cannot be justified. It is enough to look at the contemporary European scene of outdoor markets to realize the importance of markets in communities, commerce and food security.”13

13 Interview with Gabó Bartha, September 22, 2007.

Researchers of food markets and urban scholars tend to agree with these remarks. Plans to ban open-air vending are all the more bemusing that open-air markets are enjoying increasing popularity worldwide. The proli-feration of public market guides for tourists and special issues of gastronomic magazines are evidence of the emergence of a new idea of markets: in the tourism industry’s quest for authenticity, open-air markets are often appreciated as public spaces par excellence that by being local and global at the same time transmit a sense of familiarity, and where rare encounters with local people and local products are made possible.14 Food enthusia-sts emphasize that the experience of food consumption is intensified at markets: the sensory dimensions of buying food at markets transforms the practice of shopping.15 In ad-dition to this, markets may play a number of crucial roles in urban neighborhoods.

In the scholarly and popular literature, mar-kets are often described as genuine public spaces of a particular kind: while functio-ning as meeting places for local communities, they also offer contexts for intergenerational encounters and for the exchange of non-pri-mary information, such as jobs, sales and possibilities.16 Furthermore, they can be con-sidered pillars of public health, by providing affordable fresh food, supporting biodiver-

14 Shira Brand, “Markets and the City, Traditional Spaces of Commerce for a Global Society,” in Market Hall… op. cit., 156.15 Allan Siegel, “Introduction,” in Market Hall… op. cit., 105-107. 16 Allan Siegel at the “A market for every district: food, consumption, urbanism” conference, March 19, 2011, Budapest.

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 82

sity, promoting fair trade, and enhancing the access to commercial activities of people with a very low profit margin, often at the peripheries of society.17 In another perspec-tive, by serving multiple constituencies, from low-income city residents to gourmets, markets may enhance social and ethnic integration.18 These dimensions all highlight the public interest in maintaining markets: by turning markets into schools and health centers, the Barcelona municipality projects seem to exemplify the concept of the market as a public institution.19

Conclusion Various historical periods added their own regulatory systems to markets and halls, thus further complicating the selling and buying processes at open-air food markets. In this history, regulations are of crucial importance: regulations can be used as pretexts to elimina-te street markets, but they can also engender market activities, thus creating thriving mar-kets, and better public health and employ-ment possibilities.

There is a striking difference between con-flicting understandings of “order” in public spaces. If in the Middle Ages and in the early modern age, official documents, chronicles and descriptions used the terms “mixed-use” and “prosperity” as synonyms, this was an expression of the concern that “establishing useful (physical and legal) boundaries might also provoke a diminution of ‘disorder’ which

17 Steven Balkin, Self-employment for low-income people, (New York: Praeger, 1989) 18 Brand, ibid., 154. 19 Jordi Tolra at the “A market for every district: food, consumption, urbanism” conference, March 19, 2011, Budapest.

might be interpreted as a sign of economic decline.”20

In contrast, “disorder” and “prosperity” are seen today by many in municipal governments as mutually exclusive. If urban policymakers in many cities (including Budapest) have not acknowledged the opportunities markets offer, activists and civil organizations have reco-gnized many of the findings of researchers studying markets. The success of KAP-HT exemplifies the ways in which conflicts rela-ted to markets are intertwined with dilemmas of public space design and regulations, of local economy and employment, of public health and affordable fresh food, of community cohe-sion and sociability, and of corruption, among others. Faithful to their tradition, markets may prove to be important tools for urban

20 Donatella Calabi, The Market and the City: Square, Stre-et and Architecture in Early Modern Europe (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 95.

planning, and highly instrumental in creating sustainable cities: to really understand their influence on urban processes, we have no choice but to conceive them at the intersection of all the domains they belong to.

Nieformalne targowisko w pobliżu hali targowej przy placu Hunyadiego

fot.

: g. b

arth

a

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 82

I had a happy childhood; I had a happy youth too. When I was sixteen I started asking myself serious questions and rebelling against stubbornness, naivety

and blind faith in progress. My experiences were such that whenever I wanted to change or achieve something, I was successful. Today I am not able to say to what extent this was caused by my naive blindness. Yet I felt at home in the country which – in tune with my most profound nature – wanted to improve the world and which believed that people sho-uld have the same rights and duties, regar-dless of their social background. In principle, the country was supporting the right cause in the controversy over ideology and forms of social life. Consequently, I had to get used to the thought that I couldn’t immediately have everything that young people were interested in at the time: jeans, records, a four-stroke

motorcycle, a journey across the Atlantic.

1987 Dessau – East Germany As a young man who was curious about the world, I was often in conflict with the stub-bornness and political fatalism of the official political authorities. However, I discovered a place for myself – in Dessau, in Bauhaus: the institution which was subordinate to the Ministry of Infrastructure in East Germany and in which I was allowed to ask uncomfor-table questions and find untypical answers. Bauhaus, renewed in 1986, was supposed to support the expansion of the limited possi-bilities for architecture, construction and design in East Germany. For this reason, we were regularly visited by creative minds from within the country, from friendly countries (Comecon), and from the West, in order to conduct seminars and exchange experiences.

All this gave rise to a creative place which was radiating with independence, while for me – the collaborator – it represented the idea of freedom. Identity as a space of activity.

Following the breakthrough year of 1989, Bauhaus had to redefine itself. Its top-down decreed function was no longer valid. Work-ing on independent, autonomous subjects, which had earlier become the focus of my work, was increasingly coming to the fore. In 1990 a group of young, politically sensi-tive people from Dessau wanted to own a house. They didn’t know how to do it, so they turned to Bauhaus for help. We asked them to show us the desired house and along with my students we broke into it and started occupying it. The residents of Dessau were afraid to enter the house: they stood in the

Jens R. Fischer

IdentIty at a turnIng poInt – personal fragments


street and we stayed in the house. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but it would have been a pity if we hadn’t used the opportu-nity of taking over the space. For the first five years, the house was a place of intense confrontations with new approaches, laws and duties as well as with new possibilities: the occupation of the house, paying the rent, setting up an association, the purchase of the house, funding applications... The process of adapting to the place started through letting out the rooms and defining and creating the possibility of the use of space. The house occupation became an opportunity to strike up new relationships and friendships. We defined the scope of experimentation which, at the best of times, attracted students of creative disciplines and allowed us to think collectively about the value and possibilities of public space, and – leaving the occupied house – to experiment in the urban spaces of the northern part of Dessau. We enjoyed the grey area between the East and the West. The old system no longer existed, while the new one had not been created yet. This situation gave us courage, inspired us and promised changes. In 1992, along with Ian Johnston (today http://www.ianjohnstonstudio.com/) and Stephen Kovats (today http://www.trans-mediale.de/de), I founded the “experimental studio dessau-north” (today http://www.jr-fischer.com) at the Bauhaus Dessau Academy. We worked with our students on three levels: material, media, and social contexts. As a result, we researched the urban space, made the residents sensitive to the need for change, and put forward specific proposals for waste recycling in urban areas. We recycled con-struction materials, buildings, parts of the city and tried to attend to the social contexts.

garden. The association still exists and is an important component of the cultural environ-ment for young people in Dessau. The website says: “KIEZ doesn’t stand for a district, but is a nominal abbreviation of the public associa-tion Kulturelles Informations- und Einwohn-erzentrum e.V. [The word “Kiez” in German is one used by residents meaning neighbour-hood. − editor’s note] Only the insiders know about it, but that doesn’t matter: since 1991, in Dessau, the association has become a real institution which develops both cultural and social initiatives. The outcomes of its activity are: the only film club in Dessau, an open youth space, tuition programmes for pupils (carried out by other pupils), artistic activi-ties in the public urban space, the activity of a youth theatre group, and special film programmes for pupils. A small café is the main, but not the only, meeting place for young people.”

KIEZ e.V. [Kulturelles Informations- und Einwohnerzentrum e.V., the Information and Accommodation Centre of Culture] was founded in 1991. Initially, the association consisted of only seven members. Its main of-fice was the occupied house in Dessau-Nord, and its aim to create a space of free culture for young people at the time of political changes. The association succeeded in writ-ing a programme and recruiting new members (over twenty at the best of times); after they had moved into the house, “they rented it, then bought it and received funding of over 2 million marks from the construction and culture fund which was part of the “Aufbau Ost” (Reconstruction East) initiative. For the first five years, the grants were to be used for refurbishment of the house, equipping it with a café for young people, a stage (which could also be used as a cinema), a carpenter’s workshop, a film laboratory, a youth club, an office, a living space, and a courtyard with a


To date, our work includes the occupied house KIEZ eV. (Kulturelles Informations- und Einwohnerzentrum e.V., http://kiez-ev.de).

And now? Twenty years later? Although I do-n’t live there anymore, Dessau is still a very interesting city. The nature of official poli-tics hasn’t changed. The politics of the city is still guided by the blind faith in progress now embodied by the great investor who will bring jobs and wealth to the community. Car lobbies build more and more new roads in places where there are increasingly fewer pe-ople. It is constantly mentioned that we need to be prepared for the arrival of “the great investor”, who somehow never arrives.

It prompted us to set up our own compa-ny (http://oststrand-dessau.de/) which in 2010 purchased a house along with the land situated in the centre of a controversial plan of road reorganisation and in a nature space which required protection. Unlike twen-ty years ago, we didn’t have to occupy the house, but were able to buy it. We organised a suitable group of friends who donated some money and made the purchase possible. This property allows us to take legal action against the planned construction of new roads. Without the property, we, the citizens, would be denied any rights. Therefore, the chances of preventing the road construction have increased considerably (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XAcc5Y2cMc).

The concept of our company “Oststrand GmbH” has developed further: we want to build a boarding house for cyclists on the land. The boarding house would create five

to eight jobs – a small economic enterprise which brings benefits to the region while be-ing supported by it, as it derives its identity from the region. The company will employ people associated with this place – those who see real value in working in Dessau and in the possibility of making the surroundings more attractive. They will be jobs of a local scope. Nothing artificial, nothing construc-ted.

What has changed for me within the last 20, 25 years? On the one hand, a great deal. I have understood how certain phenomena and processes function and how Western society operates. I don’t feel forced to pay tribute to a certain type of hyperactivity which ultimately only indulges one’s own vanity. I have learnt to wait, to allow things to mature, and then, at the right time, to make the best decision to the best of my abi-lities. There are more opportunities than in the past, the horizon has expanded, the tools have changed, and so people have occasional-ly become more effective...

What hasn’t changed is the fact that I can only rely on myself. If a certain idea is important for me, if I understand its inner strength, if I recognise its laws and behave in a consistent way, I might achieve some-thing good. If I am convinced about it, I can convince others and find partners with whom I can create something of our own. The frequency of lucky encounters hasn’t increased. The enemies haven’t changed either. They are the people who believe that they have understood everything and that they can live without knowledge as long as they have power. They are the people who

are too lazy or cowardly to allow unconven-tional questions, as the answer might be uncomfortable.

What hasn’t changed is the fact that I create my own space of activity identifying myself with places whose quality I take for a space of my own activity.


autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 86

The limited liability Oststrand GmbH (the East Beach) company was founded in 2010 by fourteen people. The same year the compa-ny bought the Wasserstadt 27 building in Dessau–Roßlau, and thus began to realise a small regional enterprise project. The projec-t’s objective is to build a boarding house for cyclists which will offer a variety of accom-modation and allow the promotion of a beautiful landscape between the Mulda River and the Elbe River as well as the city culture from Bauhaus to the legacy of Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt among the city visitors (both from abroad and within). It is estimated that the boarding house will provide twenty beds in two separate en suite shower rooms for men and women. In the new three-storey building there will be eighteen double en su-ite shower rooms with an option of cleaning services. Finally, six lofts can be arranged in the building, like in a boarding house,

Od góry: fasada loftów od strony ulicy

Żelbetonowa konstrukcja we wnętrzu – przestrzeń loftów

Planowane wejście do obiektu

wsz

ystk

ie f

ot. o

raz

il. w

art

.: j.

r. fi

sch

er

where guests including scholarship holders of the Anhalt University, guests of the city theatre or the city of Dessau–Roßlau and independent operators of the artistic and cultural scene can stay overnight. Moreover, the building will contain a bicycle workshop, sheltered bike racks, a dance hall with a kitchen, a design office with a kiosk, a sauna and club spaces. In the warm seasons the courtyard can be used as a meeting and party space. The garden behind the house and the meadow at the embankment along the river provide the opportunity to forget for a mo-ment about day-to-day problems.

Currently, the project is being stalled by an ongoing court case about the planned bypass road which precisely this project can help to prevent, and by the futile search for an investor.

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 86

Matej Jaššo

The ciTy as a personaliTy and iTs

projecTion in urban semioTics

(observaTions on spaTial idenTiTy)

Now the city, which had weighed and tasted and smelled them, which had used all its po-wers save one, prepared to use its final ability, the power of speech. It did not speak with the rage and hostility of its massed walls or to-wers, nor with the bulk of its cobbled avenues and fortresses of machinery. It spoke with the quiet voice of one man.Ray Bradbury, The City

fot.

d. g

rušk

a

Urbanity and urban semiotics The problems of urbanity, recurrent in di-scussions of urban planners, space planners, architects, economists and sociologists, may divide or unite these professionals, foresha-dowing future trends prevalent in social discourse. Approaches to these problems are characteristic and representative for the ways of thinking at the onset of the 21st century: systems are becoming increasingly complicated and paradigmatic limitations are disappearing, to be replaced by uncerta-inty of future developments. The old, still relevant definition of urbanity as the unique quality of the city which enables communi-cation and facilitates social contacts in the urban environment is constantly undergo-ing theoretical experiments. Is urbanity,

deprived of the ideological support it enjoyed in the first part of the 20th century, shatte-red by imperial conflicts, and degraded and fragmented, a concept we can still agree on? It is hard to say.

Post-modernist urban development is apt to create ‘representative spaces’, understood as areas of projection of values, thoughts, ideas or principles. Ugliness, paradox, deforma-tion and allusion have become legitimate narrative strategies for the creation and revitalisation of urban space. Traditional interpretations of urbanity, based on a socio-ecological foundation (urbanity as density and diversity of urban communities), on the diametric opposition of the public and the private, or on functionalist canons (urbanity

codes and websites. Shapeless, changeable or visually indiscernible elements are also regarded as signs.

One of the first attempts to formulate an urban ‘grammar’ was the famous concept of mental maps put forward by Kevin Lynch.4 His theory held that elements of the urban and architectural structure – paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks – are more than an isolated set of signs and physical elements. It was one of the most precise typologies that was applicable to any urban environment (including a virtual environ-ment); research has confirmed its intercultu-ral accuracy (it is likely to be culture free).

Lynch’s theory, however, was criticised for its alleged reductionism.5 Some critics (such as Gottdiener and Lagopoulos) claimed that urban space is not a text but a ‘pseudo-text’ in that it is created by barely separable

4 See K. Lynch, The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA 1960, and also P. Bakalář, Psychologický pruvodce Pra-hou, Praha 2006.5 Critics pointed out that the conception was based only on visual semiotics and relies on cognitive-behavioural categories, neglecting psychological data such as existen-tial value of a place, experiencability, emotionality or motivation. See M. Gottdiener, A. Lagopoulos, The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York 1986.

as a measure of the development of city-forming functions), have been supplanted by increasingly prominent interpretations of urbanity as an integrated chaos, space for spontaneous, informal and illegitimate activity. 1

An interesting platform for the study of urbanity is urban semiotics. This discipline explores the social significance of forms of space and the ways in which physical objects and spatial types communicate meaning through signs and symbols.2 Semiotics consi-ders the city to be a ‘text based on a grammar of spatial patterns and meaningful structu-res’.3 Society, community and an interaction framework are the main contexts for the interpretation of signs and sign registers – more significant than their purely physical and morphological order. Semiotics focuses not only on systems of way-finding, colours, signage, notices, arrows, pictograms, photos, streets, buildings or squares, but also on addresses, maps, telephone numbers, post

1 See K. Schmeidler, Sociologie pro urbanisty a archike-ty, Brno 2001.2 See S. Keller, “Review on: Gottdiener, M. Lagopoulos, A., The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986”, Contemporary Sociology 1988 (XVII), pp. 346-348.3 See T. Jachna, Cyburban Semiotics, Split 2004.

semiotic and non-semiotic processes. This revealed the need to revaluate urban semio-tics from the theoretical, methodological and research perspective.

Urban personality and its psycho-se-miotic analysis Let us imagine the city as a human persona-lity. Man’s personality, as well as – figura-tively – the personality of any other entity (company or city) is the foundation of iden-tity: it differentiates an individual from a multitude of others in an absolutely accurate and explicit way. As a rule, what is original is not particular features of character or personal qualities but their combination. As early as 1957 such a comparison was made by American writer Richard Powell during the launch of his novel The Philadelphian:

‘In order to stimulate writers, the persona-lity of a city or town need not be lovable. In fact, of the nine major cities which have personalities, only San Francisco has a really nice one. The other eight cities often annoy people who have not had the good fortune of being born there. I hope I am not revealing anything top secret when I say that, to many outsiders, Philadelphia and Boston have highly irritating personalities. To many out-siders, these two cities are rather like a pair of sheltered maiden ladies who have become crotchety and eccentric but who happen to be awfully well-heeled.’ 6

Obviously, the personality of the city arises from complex socio-historical processes, but

6 R. Powell, “Preface”, [in:] The Philadelphian: The Personality of Philadelphia, Medford 2007, p. 14.

Widok Nowego Mostu w Bratysławie

pan

oram

io

it is also affected by management and the deli-berate decisions of its authorities or residents. No city has an ultimately and immutably pro-filed personality; on the contrary, it is subject to change that can sometimes happen faster than the generational change.

The foundation of any personality, the mo-ment which defines it – not only in its current state but also in the previous stages of its deve-lopment – and which makes predictions about its future possible, is the hierarchy of values. The urban environment is a mosaic of values and pseudo-values whose influence on the formation of hierarchies of values of individu-al residents is unlimited. From the perspective of empirical observation another distinctive feature of the city’s personality is its face: the image of the city has a unique countenance and physiognomy made up of symbols, land-marks, accents and other elements of visual communication.

The language of the city speaks not only of the city itself but also of the society that inhabits it; the city’s visual language may be trivial, universal or unique. A less known category used to describe the city, derived from the psychological theory of personality, is its

temperament. This makes it possible to grasp the reactions and manifestations of the city, seeking to answer the question of how the city reacts to stimuli (does it tend to be phlegma-tic or choleric?). The temperament and the features of the city it involves translate into its atmosphere or ‘spirit’. The atmosphere can be analysed not only from the point of view of its emotional hue but also as regards its mu-tability in time and space (morning/evening, winter/summer, centre/outskirts).

A group of students of Spatial Development at the Slovak University of Technology was asked to do a laboratory project in visual socio-logy. Their task was to analyse a hypothetical personality of a chosen city with regard to its semiotic manifestations. Many students chose to focus on Bratislava or its individual, rela-tively independent (identity-wise) districts. Based on their findings, we shall take a closer look at the ‘personality’ of the Slovak capital.

Bratislava as a personality

Memory Every city’s historical memory is perhaps the crucial component of its identity. The events that shaped its appearance, and especially its hierarchy of values, social atmosphere and hy-

pothetical personality, mark the city for many years. The communist regime lasted slightly more than forty years in Slovakia (1948–1989) but the period left an indelible mark on the city with the abolition of the urban district of Vydrica, the splitting of the heart of the Old Town with the New Bridge, and the extension of the National Gallery. The aesthetics of this period was permeated with ideology – not only in the East but also in the West (though ad-mittedly to a lesser degree). In practice, many architectural solutions are evidence of the decline of functionalism as it created forms devoid of any content slavishly performing the same functions. It is not a coincidence that the height of functionalism was marked by early, isolated realisations doomed to become alien to users due to thoughtless, mechanical repetition.

The aesthetic ideology of organised modernity, which here took the degenerate form known as socialist realism, denied any values to the past and was generally oriented towards tech-nical progress (behind which the cultural and social revolution lagged). The word ‘progress’ was even used as a name for housing estates or cinemas built at the time, as a result of which the term fell victim to communist newspeak: these days it is hard to imagine a developer calling his design this. The aesthetics of this period was derived from the noble premise of the avant-garde that everyone should create; in reality it turned out that not everybody is capable of artistic creation of the same quali-ty. Architecture did not come close to people; conversely, it fostered social anomie.

Bratislava was the capital of the Socialist Re-public of Slovakia and from its beginning the

Nowa część Galerii Narodowej w Bratysławie

wik

imed

ia

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 91

intention was that it be redeveloped into ‘a modern capital of the Slovak part of the Socia-list Republic of Czechoslovakia’ –eradicating from public memory historic Pressburg, which was to remain ‘in exile’: in buildings such as Reduta and Manderlák, and partly also along the waterfront. Amusingly, socialism did not really know what to do with the centre of Bra-tislava as a whole: urban structures here were too immutable, untouched by the war and familiar in the residents’ imagination. Before November 1989 the communist regime satisfied itself with strong signs, such as the abovemen-tioned extension to the Slovak National Galle-ry, or else with superficial changes (covering the waterfront with concrete and building a new harbour). The then tycoons did not dare to demolish historic buildings so they conten-ted themselves with defiling and compromi-sing them in manifold ways so as to turn them into less attractive and less important points in the residents’ mental maps. Devaluation of important sights, rivalry between land-marks (New Bridge vs. the castle), restricted admission (St Martin’s Cathedral), aggressive chromatic and formal contrasts (the old bu-ilding of the Slovak National Gallery vs. the new extension) were intended to transform the city’s historical memory. Interestingly, however, although the Bratislava corso did suffer architecturally in the 1960s and 1970s, it retained its unique atmosphere. The city’s personality is not formed exclusively by archi-tectural structures, and the residents’ mental maps have enormous power to survive.

The face of the city The present face of Bratislava is largely an effect of the post-1989 political and social transformations. The city has grown young;

its face has lost the dull, exhausted, evasive expression it had in the 1970s and 1980s. The Old Town has been renovated and has gained the self-confident image of a Danubian me-tropolis. A variety of colours and shapes has emerged, the city has learned to put on diffe-rent faces in different circumstances. In the 1990s the face of the city was enriched with several new projects of relatively high quality.

Unfortunately, the face of the city was also partly marred by neoliberal stunts at the turn of the millennium. A symbol of these trans-formations is the ‘River Park’ complex, whose aggressive form explicitly confronts the river, as if it wanted to communicate that the city is here for the complex, or that it has won over the river. Semiotic analysis of the name ‘River Park’ itself reveals that the complex is neither a river nor a park, so it is in fact a semiotic expropriation of connotation to which the response of the target audience is positive (names like ‘Aquapark’, ‘Park One’ and others work in the same way). ‘River Park’ was unlucky, partly because it was constructed at a time when the public was already much more sensitive to such interference (back in the 1990s it would have gone virtually unnoticed). The authorities have also started to realise the historical value of sites which are to some extent connected with the past regime and whose value is considerable or for some reason unique. An example is the Park of Culture and Relaxation (PCR), where festivals and youth parties were held rather than party conven-tions. The atmosphere in such places enabled people to breathe more freely for a moment.

The face of the city was also transformed by the construction of the ‘Eurovea’ shopping

and leisure centre. Although the original concept of ‘Eurovea’ as a ‘natural extension’ of the city towards the river was not fully reali-sed, ‘Eurovea’ may be regarded as an example of successful redevelopment of a non-city – a neglected area of no particular emotional or ritual value to the residents. This was one of the reasons why it was well received by the public. In the environs of ‘Eurovea’ the city is learning tolerance; we can see that it has got wiser and that sometimes people with widely disparate views may (must) live in it side by side. ‘Eurovea’ does not go out of its way to be assertive as much as ‘River Park’ does – in fact there is a lot of ‘genuine plastic’ in its nooks and crannies – but it is trying to enter into an explicit dialogue with the river: it respects the morphology of the river bank and the area, introduces greenery, and turns towards the river through vantage points and piers,

Manderlák, pierwszy bratysławski wieżowiec zbudowany w 1935 roku

ww

w.e

arth

inpi

ctu

res.

com

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 91

and not with sheer violence. ‘Eurovea’ has a similar relationship with other buildings. The dualism of the past and the present (the new building of the Slovak National Theatre and ‘Eurovea Gallery’) was resolved in a much more mature way than in the case of ‘River Park’ and PCR, although even here the histori-cal part obviously fell victim to amnesia (the ‘Stoka’ Theatre, and the House of Sailors). The face of the city is less uniform, more tolerant and colourful.

Therefore it is interesting that, regardless of all ideological differences, there are certain similarities between the monstrous commu-nist buildings from before 1989 (the Slovak National Gallery, the Parliament, the new bu-ilding of the Slovak National Theatre) and the new neoliberal construction projects (‘River Park’ and to some extent ‘Eurovea’). The Ger-man philosopher Herbert Marcuse forecasted in the 1970s that postmodernist capitalism would gradually ‘internationalise’ Marxism and become a perverse hybrid of Soviet-style totalitarianism and unlimited consumerism in the North American style.... In this world, comfort, objects and experiences will form an ideology in their own right, controlled (in a more covert way) by the establishment itself.

The language of the city The language of the city is a particularly com-plex material for semiotic study. It comprises not only the language of architecture and urban planning and the context in which it originated but also all the linguistic manife-stations through which architecture tends to communicate its meaning. Bratislava developed in the Slovak-German-Hungarian linguistic reality, of which regrettably little has survived till today. The language of the communist time is slowly being forgotten, although to some it still has a kind of nostalgic quality – like every-thing that becomes the past.

The Bratislava waterfront speaks an intere-sting architectural and verbal language. Here we can come across sentimental language that verges in places on Mucha’s Art Nouveau (the building of the construction college), the language of early functionalism of the first re-public (Comenius University), the authoritati-ve police language of new totalitarian regimes (the building of the Ministry of Domestic Affa-irs of the Republic of Slovakia), the utilitarian language of the time when functionalism and the avant-garde had not yet completely betray-ed their former social ideals (four tower blocks by the tunnel), an attempt to present commu-

nism as historical necessity and to prove that history only began in 1948 (the extension to the Slovak National Gallery), the aluminium and glass language of late modernism, devoid of content (the former Presscentre, currently the J&T building , partly also the new building of the Slovak National Theatre), postmoder-nist eclecticism that does not say anything (‘Eurovea’, Apollo Bridge), as well as relics of the transitory period of squatter improvisa-tion and struggle with developers that was do-omed to failure (the abandoned house opposite the former Presscentre). All these languages are forced to coexist and will perhaps one day communicate in some kind of Esperanto.

S. Štasselová, J. Sitarčíková, D. Bubelínyová and Ľ. Halušková also analysed the verbal lan-guage spoken by the Bratislava waterfront:

The waterfront is slowly forgetting all its native tongues. Whether it was Hungarian, German, or Slovak, all these are gradually being supplanted by young, fresh and easily understandable English. As a symbol of the proximity of the world, of its accessibility – and as a sign of Bratislava’s cosmopolitism – it is present virtually everywhere: on shop signs, information in shop windows, in names of restaurants. The waterfront speaks with a marked commercial accent, like a huckster who is trying to sell us something we do not want in an often servile and importunate way. The seller is trying to sell merchandise by me-ans of giant notices, colourful, catchy forms, loud, appealing announcements and omnipre-sent signposts that are meant to put us on the ‘right’ track.7

7 S. Štasselová, I., Sitarčíková, D. Bubelínyová, L’. Halušková, ‘Nábrežie. Mesto ako osobnosť a jej priemet v urbánnej sémiotike. Ateliér vizuálnej sociológie’, UM STU Bratislava, 2011, p. 13 [unpublished material].

Widok na Dvořákovo nábrežie i położony przy nim „River Park”, Bratysława

wik

imed

ia

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 93

The city soon learned the characteristic 21st-century newspeak. Under the pretence of a fun atmosphere, shopping centres lure us to their ‘Delicious Food Corners’ where we get the poorest-quality Asian equivalent of fast food, and passing billboards in these temples of consumerism we will be smiled upon by ‘our nearest and dearest’: mobile telephony operators, insurance companies and cable TV representatives.

with symptoms of a certain extroversion. Bratislava is becoming a city that is not afraid of showing its reactions, because it has been able to accept or reject many new things. It is colourful and diverse.

As a personality, Bratislava has undergone a lengthy process of development, and nume-rous turning points in its history have left lasting marks on it. The city’s identity has developed over centuries and is being shaped every day, as it accepts new impulses and deals with old experiences. In this sense, the city is not only a record of past events or current circumstances but also a potential of possibili-ties, an endless narrative.

translated into english

by anna mirosławska-olszewska

The temperament and qualities of the city Human temperament is inborn and cannot be changed. Is this also true of cities? Let our stu-dents R. Jankovič, D. Zsigova and S. Schroeder speak again:

Bratislava reacts to impulses from outside in a phlegmatic way and values its conservatism. The city does not like change. To an observer it seems quiet, or even indifferent. It is only sha-ken by strong emotions, so it often appears to be cold-blooded, which may be seen as apathy. It cannot be described as full of temperament. In terms of openness, the city may be conside-red introverted. Just like an introvert, it tends to be reticent and escapist but, should the need arise, it can behave like an extrovert.8

Bratislava’s temperament, unlike that of a human being, is mutable. The stagnation and phlegmatic uncommunicativeness of the 1970s and 1980s have been replaced since 1989

8 See R. Jankovič, D. Zsigová, S. Schroeder, ‘Identita a osobnosť historického centra Bratislavy. Mesto ako osob-nosť a jej priemet v urbánnej sémiotike. Ateliér vizuálnej sociológie’, UM STU Bratislava, 2010, p. 12 [unpublished material].

Zabudowa centrum handlowo-rekreacyjnego „Eurovea” zlokalizowanego nad Dunajem i otwartego dla mieszkańców w 2010 roku

Poniżej: nowa siedziba Teatru Narodowego w sąsiedztwie centrum „Eurovea”

pan

oram

io

wik

imed

ia

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 93

Peter Michalík

Our (pOst-)sOcialist

cities: between

prOgress and

nOstalgia

We usually ‘read’ cities in terms of their structural develop-ment. This approach allows us to link different architectural

and urban patterns that interfere with one another in a palimpsest – like the urban or-ganism – into chronological order. Following this logic, clearly circumscribed limitations would be imposed on the socialist city. But do we recognize these demarcation lines in our everyday use of the city? Isn’t the socialist way of shaping the environment an integral part of our contemporary urban experience?

A city is socialist in the same way as we talk about other cities being medieval, modern, or industrial: rather than a finite archi-tectural, urban and political movement, it manifests as a still-present set of tendencies. This requires us to use the term in a broader perspective, as a reference to the city’s uni-que experience rather than a finalized stage of its urban development. The recognition mark, then, lies in examining the extent to which the past intervenes in the practice of living in, making use of and thinking about our cities of today.

Besides the appearance of actual architec-tural and urban forms, the character of any specific historical period may be recognized also by the tactics through which it interacts with the past: how it re-interprets its various signs, how it re-appropriates its physical and cultural legacy, and how it transforms it into new, more suitable forms. The character of each age in the life of a city might be reco-gnized by answering the question of what place the past occupies within its present? How much of the past does the city allow to

penetrate into its present forms? These qu-estions may tell us more if we confront them with our (post-)socialistic urban experience.

If we think about the past, our mental sub-stance is like an imprint of something that is no more. But the reflection of the past in a city is the reflection of something that is still present. Let’s take a look around the cities we inhabit: various semblances of different pasts lie on every corner. Because, unlike past events, moods and atmospheres, the past of cities becomes petrified. It is the pure materiality of a city that prevents us from considering the past. Not only do its material witnesses shape our everyday trajectories, they also shape the trajectories of our mind, our consciousness of the city.

We often think cities through their symbols. These remind us of significant events and decision points, their milieux and actors. But what if the status of a dominant symbol through which we think a specific city re-aches an object that does not exist any more? Can our consciousness of the city start in a non-articulated space? How powerful is the past that we cannot see? Answering this qu-estion may help us to understand the kind of city we live in if we claim to live in a (post-)socialist city.

One place that is representative of the ten-dencies shaping the image of (post)socialist cities lies in the very central part of present-day Bratislava. But despite its very central location, enclosed by the castle hill to the north, the River Danube to the south and the medieval city to the east, it is very hard to find in most guidebooks. Even panoramic

photographs of the city’s skyline try very hard to crowd it out of the image. Once a living organism of streets, squares and passa-ges, it appears to be a non-articulated space resembling a tangle of parking lots and wild vegetation hidden behind dozens of billbo-ards. This, the Podhradie district, is the site of the former Jewish ghetto, located between two distinct complexes of fortifications: that of the municipality and that of the castle. Then, heading westwards, there used to be the Vydrica and Zuckermantel districts, mostly inhabited by artisans and traders. Though differentiated by different names, together they formed a compact urban fabric. That was before the modernisation of the newborn capital of socialist Slovakia.

The demolition of the Podhradie district, which took place in the 1970s, cannot be taken separately from the construction of a new bridge over the Danube. The public awa-reness of the necessity to cross the river by a new bridge stumbled on the different visions of where it should be positioned. The win-ning project (which was later awarded the “structure of the century” prize), required the sanitation of the old urban fabric (by doing this, the medieval situation, when the city and the castle were physically separated, was recalled).

Nowadays, the devastation of Vydrica, Zuckermantel and the old Jewish district are perceived as a deep trauma caused by the elites of the city’s socialist local govern-ment. But the need for sanitation of the area because of the new bridge construction was just one aspect of the final decision. There were also circumstances rooted in political

Progress is a direction towards an ideal state not yet achieved. On the other hand, nostal-gia is a longing for an ideal already lost. It seems that we are always trying to achieve something that is not present. If we stood before the task of conceptualizing this twofold tendency, we could hardly find a better place than Bratislava’s Podhradie district. Nowa-days an abandoned place, it stands between progress (represented by the New Bridge) and nostalgia (symbolized by the few solitary hi-storical buildings on its western edge). But the emptiness of the place doesn’t serve as a mere metaphor. The imaginary emptiness works

as a source of tendencies that shape present discussions about the city.

It is the image of the city that many try to reclaim but only few remember that draws the main contour lines of current discussions. An initiative launched early in the 1990s (and which is still shaping the debate to a certa-in degree) claimed the intent to restore the whole district to its original appearance. Let us just make the brief comment that this case was not the same as, say, the post-war recon-struction of Warsaw, where the innermost historical core, the heart of the nation’s pride, had been demolished by an enemy. Podhradie was the home of lower-class merchants and craftsmen, who inhabited the area outside the city walls. A poor, peripheral neighbourhood, lacking both social standards and significant monuments. Even the conservationists, who represented the main opposition to the new bridge project, did not justify their opinion as a struggle to protect architectural heritage in its proper sense (as reasons for not demo-lishing the area, the old urban fabric and the city’s skyline were cited). Why then, does the city live in the permanent conviction that the-re is something important missing? Looking at the cores of our cities, we may claim that it is because this is in the very nature of our (post-)socialist condition.

It seems that an era of progress was superse-ded by an era with an opposite vector. Decades spent in an atmosphere of constant progress resulted in an longing for the lost past. And the decline of the idea of progress comes hand in hand with the emergence of nostalgia. Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as longing for a home that no longer exists, or never existed.

and ideological visions. In the specific case of the Podhradie district, there were at least three: the concept of Bratislava as a modern, socialist and Slovak city. The modernisation process was about to result in the rebranding of a formerly peripheral town within a mo-narchy into an exemplary national capital of a socialist country, and the legacy of previo-us centuries was in the way. Looking at the remnants of what once used to be Bratislava’s Podhradie district, we can clearly see the character of the relationship of the socialist elites with the past: heading towards a bright future, there was no place for nostalgia.

Widok dzielnicy Podhradie na dawnej pocztówce

htt

p://

pod

hra

die

.far

a.sk

/o_p

odh

rad

i/v

znik

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 96

The newest project regarding Bratislava’s Pod-hradie district claims this close relationship in its very name: The Lost City. Its main idea rests on the concept of a “Tram of historical memory”, tracking some of the most signifi-cant events of the 19th and 20th centuries. The tram should follow an ordinary route encom-passing the historical part of Bratislava. But instead of the transparent windows of an or-dinary tram, the “tram of historical memory” will have large LCD panels showing passengers events from and the historical appearance of the places that they are passing.

The second part of the Lost City project has as its ambition to restore one of the most well-known symbols of the demolished district: the Neolog synagogue, on what was once Rybné námestie. Standing next to the city’s main ca-thedral, on a market square, where all strata of society once mingled, it symbolizes the ide-alized image of a tolerant, multilingual and multinational Prešorok (Slovakized variant of the city’s German name, Pressburg, and the Hungarian Poszony) of the pre-war period. Except for this cherished image, almost no-thing is left: the Jews were annihilated during the Holocaust, the Germans and Hungarians were displaced during the Slovakization, and the intelligentsia during the proletarization of the city. Even the square itself fell prey to the modernizing zeal, and after the new bridge sliced the square in two, the synagogue had to be demolished too. This symbolic building is to be restored as a temporary replica, two-thirds of its original size. For the limited period of its existence, it will act as an educational and cultural centre, providing information about the history of the “lost city”.

Coulisses with no core and trams with no windows. What does this say about our rela-tionship with the past? What does it say about the present condition of our (post-)socialist cities? In 2009, a young female artist, Magda-léna Kuchtová, made an artistic intervention in this “no-man’s land”. She placed 19 letters on the back of the billboards separating the road from the former Podhradie area, making the sentence “Looking downward, you see nothing.” How should we read this message, placed in a spot visible only from the passage-way to the castle? Perhaps that our inability to see things through the wall of billboards is no different to the impossibility of seeing thro-ugh the decorative walls of coulisses and LCD panels. That perhaps it is just another way of not-seeing the present. Because perhaps it is our sense of time, and not the city, that is lost.

flic

kr/

mar

k c

lift

on

U góry po prawej: budynek nieistniejącej już synagogi neologicznej przy Rybné námestie

Obok: współczesna forma upamiętnienia miejsca, w którym stała dawniej synagoga

ww

w.p

rech

lapa

.sk

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 96

Paulina Ołowska, projekt na 5. Biennale Sztuki w Berlinie − powiększone obrazy Zofii Stryjeńskiej

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 99

Łukasz Białkowski

The FuTure Shall SeT uS Free?reconstruction as an artistic Strategy in Polish Visual arts after 1989

To propose an open hypothesis: perhaps for artists to-day the past serves the same function that the future used to serve for the artists of the previous century. N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics

Interregnum The fall of the Polish People’s Republic hardly brought a breakthrough in the Polish visu-al arts. On the contrary, the political and economic changes did not seem to have any significant impact on artworks – at least not those artworks which are considered the most interesting and culturally significant in that period. By 1989, some innovative Polish artists had already been living abroad for approxima-tely 10 years (among them Krzysztof Wodiczko and Zdzisław Sosnowski), while others had been active in a semi-legal context. The latter artists went underground and presented their works in unofficial exhibition spaces. They

circumvented the restrictions of censorship by using a visual language which rarely addres-sed political issues, and when it did, it was to utter a sarcastic comment or to criticize the system rather than to oblige those in power. In terms of both form and themes addressed by innovative art at the time, the Round Table was an event of relatively minor significance.

This state of affairs is presented and pinpo-inted in the editorial and exhibition project by the WRO Art Center with the telling title: Hidden decade. Polish video art 1985–1995. The pro-ject demonstrates that artistic developments in Poland had their own pace and rhythm, completely unrelated to the milestones of the political timeline. This is also true of other di-sciplines of art. In one development, the year 1993 saw the revival of performance art (one example is the creation of the Bytów Castle of the

Imagination performance arts festival), while in another, the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle held an exhibition of Ideas outside Ideology, which along with the 1995 Anti-bodies (also by CCA Ujazdowski Castle) came to be regarded as a baptism of fire for critical art. The latter, flagship movement in the Polish visual arts of the 1990s was the first original phenomenon since 1989, and it still remains a reference point of identity for generations of young artists today.

It is not unusual that the set of phenomena we today consider characteristic of the 1990s took shape as late as around 1995. We may observe similar processes in the economic and political systems, which only then, during Aleksander Kwaśniewski’s term in presidential office, assumed the form we know nowadays. Also, it would seem self-evident that the foundations

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 99

of the new societal identity were built in the mid-1990s, and not during the Round Table ne-gotiations. The period between the late 1980s and early 1990s, therefore, may be regarded as a kind of an interregnum, when many actions necessary but not sufficient for the construc-tion of the new identity were undertaken.

A Trauma or a Gadget? In his book The Return of the Real, Hal Foster ponders the post-World War II phenomenon that is the repetition of elements and artistic techniques characteristic of the first avant-garde.1 Quoting the late works of Freud, he notes the mechanism by which “one event is registered only through another that recodes it; we become who we are, only in deferred action (Nachträglichkeit).”2

This manner of mapping the relationship between the present moment and the past, in which the present acquires meaning only in the context of past events, seems typical also for the Polish visual arts of the last two deca-des – which remained ostensibly focused upon the past throughout that period. Although Foster cites the Freudian concept chiefly in order to capture the meaning of formal reite-rations in the arts, the same approach can also be applied to certain non-formal aspects of the phenomenon of artistic repetition. If we agree that the present is not given to us directly, but is revealed as the mediated and recoded past, then the reconstruction of past events must also constitute reflection upon a certain manner of being in time. We may suppose that

1 See: H. Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, MIT Press 1996.2 Ibid, p. 29.

this orientation is dominant in the whole of Polish culture after 1989; Przemysław Czapliń-ski notes similar trends in the literature of the period.3

If constant reference to the past may be considered a necessary condition for the constitution of identity on both the individual and societal levels, the manner in which that relationship with the past is established may vary. This variation, it seems, is generation-dependent: artists of two generations who marked their presence in the art of the discus-sed period “use” the past in unquestionably distinct ways. The first model for presenting the past was adopted by proponents of critical art; the second model was shaped by the gene-ration of artists active at the beginning of the 2000−2010 decade.

The Past as a Source of Suffering Although we would be hard pressed to find a work by Artur Żmijewski, Katarzyna Kozyra or Zbigniew Libera relating to the reality of com-munism, it is easy to note in their oeuvre the significant presence of historical threads (in particular the Holocaust) and the subject of corporeality. Until the casus of Jedwabne, the Holocaust existed in the popular awareness of the Poles as an international issue only, while an interest in corporeality implied a lack of concern for the problem of setting the record straight in relation to communism. It follows that both these themes thus permitted artists to remove the artistic discourse far away from strictly national contexts and to get involved in the discussion around the categories of

3 See: P. Czapliński, Język historii, [in:] Historia w sztuce, M.A. Potocka (ed.), Kraków 2011, pp. 49−73.

différance / difference, the abject, queer, and the culture of the self – the staples of postmo-dernism. These notions, already popular in Europe in the 1980s, sounded fresh and new in Poland at the time, and although critical art wanted to be seen as a subversive commentary on contemporary social reality, the subject matter of the works by the aforementioned artists, as well as by Grzegorz Klaman, Alicja Żebrowska or Konrad Kuzyszyn, had very little to do with the real social problems of post-communist countries, such as structural unemployment, turbo-capitalism or hyperin-flation. Critical art, considered the cornersto-ne of the visual arts in the Third Polish Repu-blic, constructed its image of post-communist identity by using emphatically international elements, and when it referred to the past, it tended to be in the context of World War II experiences rather than that of the legacy of communist Poland.

This manner of addressing and working thro-ugh the past seems typical for the generation that opened a new chapter in the history of Polish art after 1989. Art critics and art historians studying the most recent contem-porary art have managed to squeeze dry the oeuvre of critical artists who evoke historical motives, while academics have enlisted them among the canon, for obligatory exploration in students’ BA and MA theses on critical art or the art of the 1990s. So much has been written about Artur Żmijewski’s Berek/Game of Tag (1999) and 80064 (2004), and Zbigniew Libera’s Pozytywy/Positives (2002–2003), that no introduction is now necessary.

Although critical art was full of postmoder-nist fascinations, and although the encoura-


ging critics abundantly quoted such names as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida and Baudrillard, the attitude of the movement’s representatives towards the past was in fact anti-postmodern. According to Fredric Jame-son, in postmodernist discourse, the experien-ce of the past loses its original status, while the moment of parting, traumatic to the point of being definable in the categories of mental disorder, leaves postmodernists with nothing beyond playing with images, themes, and styles – empty signifiants disconnected from their signifiés. Juxtaposed against that concept, critical art seems extremely conservative, romantic even. By ignoring postmodernist juggles with signifiers, but also modernist valorization of the future, which would be perfectly understandable in the political and economic context after 1989, it goes back to a time when the world seemed naturally accessi-ble in its straightforwardness.

Positives, like The Game of Tag and 80064 – to focus on the best known and distinct exam-ples – touch upon traumatic events in order to rework them. Their comical quality is undeniable – in Positives, we see laughing faces of Auschwitz “prisoners”, while The Game of Tag features unabashed streakers running around a former gas chamber. However, the comical is applied purely as a structural element to reveal the absurd tragedy of the situation and to increase its impact upon the viewer. Thus the past deserts the safe order of memory, only to become subject to the viewer’s personal experience. The shock quality and particular intensity of the emotion constitute – particu-larly as the author of The Game of Tag intended – the condition of transgression, and there-fore they allow personal understanding and

adoption of the truth, which had previously been merely a piece of information.

In the creative practice of critical artists, the threads of corporeality and the Holocaust are closely interwoven, as both the experience of the past and the experience of the body are presented here as original, primary experien-ces. In the works of Kozyra, Żebrowska and Żmijewski the body is treated as a primal ele-ment, constitutive for the shaping of subjecti-vity; placed at the very centre of critical art’s concern, it demands to be freed – it demands actions to reverse the charm resulting from the corrective and standardizing practices described by Michel Foucault, so profusely quoted at the time.

Postproduction of the Past It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when the public space in Poland became a stage for performances re-enacting events from the past. Whatever the genealogy of this pheno-menon, it became particularly visible through the spectacular actions of Rafał Betlejewski. In May 2010, following a meticulously developed promotional strategy – after all, the author of the idea, and coordinator of the happening, comes from the world of advertising – the mass media reverberated with discussions on the performance entitled Płonie stodoła/Burning Barn, a “re-enactment” of the notorious events in Jedwabne. Journalists did not refer to the portion of guilt the Poles bore for the murder of the Jews, but they spoke of the morally ambiguous nature of the reconstruction itself. On the one hand, Betlejewski was accused of superficiality in his gesture, and of its popu-laristic, even entertainment-style character, at odds with the gravity and tragedy of the

Kadry z wideo Berek Artura Żmijewskiego, 1999


reconstructed crime. On the other hand, some supported the initiative of the performer (as Betlejewski defined himself), seeing it as an important reminder, and turned a blind eye to the popular aspect of the action and the element of self-promotion of the author neces-sarily embedded in the venture.

Regardless of how we assess Betlejewski’s in-tentions and the overtone of his performance, we are clearly faced with a concept for depic-ting history that is completely different to the actions of Żmijewski or Libera. Betlejewski treats history as a gadget, an attractively packaged PR message, in which the traumatic dimensions of the events reconstructed are merely an excuse to create a spectacle, while the pursuit to make sense of the past is sub-ordinated to the limitations of a simple mass media communication. Although the partici-pants in the happening witness the performer setting the barn on fire – the repetition of a macabre gesture – the presence of TV cameras,

the flashes going off, the bizarre folk costume Betlejewski is wearing, and the script writ-ten with a view to its media attractiveness, conspire to turn the audience into consumers of a spectacle. His other historical re-enact-ments – such as Ostatnie dni getta – Będzin 1943/The Last Days of the Ghetto – Będzin 1943 or Grudzień ’70 – za chleb i wolność, i nową Polskę/December 1970 – for Bread and Freedom, and a New Poland were similar in character. Although the audience were in many cases invited to participate in the dramatization, the spectacle dimension often precluded the possibility of maintaining critical distance in relation to the re-enacted events, so that they served not to make sense of the memories, or to plumb their sources, but instead to fabricate memories by using existing moulds. The whole thing was about putting on a show rather than undertaking a critical reconstruction of the circumstances which had led to the given event.

The performances mentioned in this text fall within the model reminiscent of the recon-struction pattern used by the generation of visual artists who debuted at the beginning of the last decade. In Kuśmirowski’s Fontanna/Fountain of 2003, inside Gallery XX1 in Warsaw, a spa building for “taking the waters” was rebuilt, with the central element a fountain with rusty coins inside. For the 5th Berlin Bien-nial, Paulina Ołowska blew up five paintings by Zofia Stryjeńska to monumental propor-tions, accompanying them with a selection of mass-produced merchandise decorated with Stryjeńska’s motives, and historical docu-mentation on the artist. Whereas showcase reconstructions by the critical art movement treat the past as a source of experience, in the works by Ołowska and Kuśmirowski the

Przygotowania do akcji Płonie stodoła, 10 lipca 2010

Rafał Betlejewski, inicjator akcji Tęsknię za tobą, Żydzie, w ramach której zrealizowano projekt Płonie stodoła

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 103

past becomes the subject of an eclectic mosaic. These artists do not attempt to approach the signifié of memory, but instead they produce ironic simulacra, thus creating a casual play of copies and originals. Karol Sienkiewicz expressed it aptly in his description of Robert Kuśmirowski’s installation D.O.M. (a recon-struction of a cemetery):

On the one hand, Kuśmirowski creates a mock-up of reality which is just like real; on the other hand it seems more akin to a cinematic rendering of a cemetery out of a horror movie or a Disney animation than a real necropolis. In the world of the movies, which the artist perhaps relates to, death either occurs with such frequency that it cannot be treated quite seriously enough, or it is impossible – even the fall of the heaviest anvil cannot annihilate the protagonists of children’s stories, who are always revived in the following scene.4

Artistic practices of this generation fall into the strategy of postproduction – what Nicolas Bourriaud believes to be the pattern followed by the generation of artists growing up in an age which values DJs remixing other people’s songs over musicians playing live originals. When this attitude is cross-pollinated with irony, the fruit it bears is often a “playful” usage of historical motives, which – detached from their original context – become part of a visual patchwork and lose their specific gravity in the process. Therefore, even if po-litical motives appear in the reconstructions

4 K. Sienkiewicz, Robert Kuśmirowski: „D.O.M”, http://www.culture.pl/baza-sztuki-pelna-tresc/-/eo_event_as-set_publisher/eAN5/content/robert-kusmirowski-d-o-m [accessed: 22 December 2011].

by Robert Kuśmirowski and Paulina Ołowska, or in collages by Jan Dziaczkowski, these are completely devoid of any worldview, any ide-ological function, and in most cases they act as visual gadgets in the new, popular context.

*** We may wonder whether this excessive expo-sure of fascination with the past notable in the visual arts of the last two decades comes at the cost of devaluating the efforts of other artists – those who get politically involved in an attempt to influence contemporary reality, and who propose models of social develop-ment. Nevertheless, looking back on the past remains one of the most distinctive features of contemporary art in Poland, while referen-ces to a particular perception of history – as a source, or as a gadget – have become an important mark of generational identity for

contemporary artists. While it would be an oversimplification to treat these two models of perceiving the past as mutually exclusive, the distinction seems feasible and useful as it allows us to trace and, to some extent, to capture the process of identity metamorphoses developing in the Polish visual arts after 1989.


Robert Kuśmirowski, Fontanna, 2003, Galeria XXI

Dziękujemy Paulinie Ołowskiej, Fundacji Galerii Foksal, Rafałowi Betlejewskiemu i Robertowi Kuśmirowskiemu za zgodę na wykorzystanie prac.

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 103

Jurko Pro

chaś

ko

how is

a

middle

europea

n

possi

ble an

d wha

t is h

is

benefi

t toda

y?

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 105

What were the characteristics of this human species, whose involuntary destiny was to ensure the unity of Europe and often to pay heavily for its loss? One the most defining features was his command of many languages, fluent and accent-free, with the exception of English. The all-but-absence of English was one of the essential attributes of the species, whereas Middle Europeans today (if there are any left at all) coming from various linguistic spheres communicate among themselves in English more often than not. And this is a surprising, even shocking turn, a novelty. The classical Middle European considered German the lingua franca in his part of Europe. Therefore he always tried to communicate in German first. At that time, globalisation did not yet exist, but without a shadow of a doubt Middle Europe already did.

The Middle European was not always aware of the fact – to be honest, mostly he had no idea – that he was a Middle European, but this unawareness even more emphatically made him one. Con-temporary Europeans inhabiting Central European countries are convinced that they are Middle Europeans, though in most cases they are not.

What constituted this enigmatic human type? Intuitively, its re-presentatives suspected that most probably they did not belong to the West – meaning both Western Europe and the West in general, the West as a construct. Their lives were too indeterminate to lend themselves to any definition, too uncertain for them to take control or at least to gain self-assurance, too changeable for them to be persuaded by any theology. Their theology consisted in a lack of faith, or in doubting any and every religion. Life and history did not provide them with a sufficient sense of continuity, but rather brought them upheavals and schisms in excess. Their capacity for adaptation was astonishing, but not inexhaustible. And that is precisely what distinguished a Middle European from an Eastern European most clearly.

A Middle European was not frightened enough to become a megalo-maniac. From a historical perspective, however he desired fame he was unlikely to be vain – personally, he might have been; histori-cally, he was rarely so. He was hardworking, but rarely zealous. A Middle European knew with absolute certainty that he was not the

Jurko Pro

chaś

ko

how is

a

middle

europea

n

possi

ble an

d wha

t is h

is

benefi

t toda

y?

There was a time when everyone knew what a Middle Euro-pean was. And even if they did not know precisely, at least they conjectured. One way or another, they believed they were able to recognise one at first glance, even if they had

never heard the term before, even if their conjectures were wrong. It is true that not at every time, and most definitely not everyone knew with absolute certainty what Middle Europe was. And yet a Middle European…. There was something in the very atmosphere, in the very construct of Europe of old, which heralded the presen-ce of a Middle European, which rendered his existence necessary and irreplaceable. He just had to be, therefore he indubitably was, and even the notion of Middle Europe was not a necessary condi-tion for his existence. So self-sufficient was he, and so versed in the art of self-limitation, that at times he may indeed have seemed limited. And yet he was not limited really – not in the least – but most of the time he chose self-imposed constraints. He had to. These self-imposed boundaries were so obvious, so evident, that he became self-evident of old. In short, it was always evident that he had always existed.

What instituted the self-evidence of this, if not nearly extinct, then at least seriously endangered human species? The long-la-sting, ever-replicated lines of European history. The never-ending variations upon a few easily recognizable themes, embellished with an abundance of peripeteia for diversion, yet always against a certain, constant background. The wholeness and unity of Euro-pe was defined by tensions and competing ambitions, while the state of peace or war depended on the balance thereof. In order to maintain the balance, hostages, witnesses, and potential victims were required. As well as culprits, found ex post. Missions and objectives were indispensable. Space – soon to turn into distance – was needed, except that space was not so much a common ground as the ground of common grievances. This continued for some three hundred years. This is how Middle Europe came into being. It came into being, because everyone needed it to be. Finally, much later, it turned out that it needed itself, for its own good. Restric-tions hardly ever came to a Middle European from within, not right away; in most cases they were not a freely chosen, categorical imperative.

autoportret 1 [36] 2012 | 105

one to mark out the borders of his assigned territories, and that he must make do with the borders outlined by others – and that inc-luded state borders. He knew he needed to manage within them, and that within these boundaries he was forced to cultivate his creativity. This external constraint was compensated for by means of an infinite space within, his interior landscape.

Grand political strategies, therefore, were the work of others – in the West, and in the East. This is what distinguished the Middle Europeans, and this made them alike in their own perception. Whenever Middle Europeans wanted to achieve something momen-tous (admittedly, not a rare occurrence), then they either with-drew inside, within themselves, or they emigrated. Either of these two paths was good enough. The third path – to stay where you were – statistically, was the one most abundantly proven. In the case of emigration, the West was the more popular choice compa-red to the East, provided that the emigration was voluntary. This historical experience became so deeply engraved in the memory of Middle Europeans that if there ever was a chance of an even semi-voluntary emigration, it inevitably took them in the westerly direction.

The real strength of the Middle European lay in the fact that from his involuntarily chosen, defined central point, he understood both the West and the East; what is more, he understood them much better than they were able – or dared – to understand them-selves. Otherwise, the West and the East understood one another perfectly in their historical pretensions: in this they were alike and like-minded – after all, they wanted the same thing, only they were trying to achieve it from the opposite ends of Europe. And although from the strategic perspective their ambitions were mutually exclusive, from the philosophical perspective, the un-derstanding was complete, since the ambitions were equally great. This understanding offered the sense of being equal. As a general rule, respect does not always have to be the opposite of hatred. The West and the East simultaneously respected and disrespected each other in equal measure. The only thing they were not able to do was to disregard or to ignore one another. Therefore they never lost sight of each other, always keeping tabs. Instead, they disre-garded Middle Europe, while eyeing each other over its head.

Middle Europe, however, could not afford to disregard either the East or the West. Indeed, it was destined to always keeping its eyes on them, as it never knew what they would come up with next. One thing was for sure: they would come up with something. Their mutual pretensions were usually solved in Middle Europe, no less. By the same token, Middle Europe became the measure of histori-cal success for the West and the East – regrettably, for the West and the East at the same time. As a result, Middle Europe was left with too little time to mind its own affairs, because it had to mind both the West and the East simultaneously.

Whatever misunderstandings between the East and the West in strategic matters, ambitious endeavours, megalomanic plans and far-reaching intentions, their mutual understanding in everyday, household affairs, was equally slim. For the West, the East Euro-pean way of life was laughable and contemptible, while the East admired and glorified the Western lifestyle. The East also envied it. When it came to the so-called “soul”, the situation was exactly the reverse. There was a mutual bewilderment: negative from West to East, positive from East to West. Or was it the other way round? They were exotic to each other, in their manners. And yet this exoticness of manner was very powerful and universal. There was perfect agreement as to who wanted what, but a lack of agreement as to how they wanted it.

In such situations as this, intermediation is often indispensa-ble. And for a long time, the Middle European was such a direct intermediary. Although he did not manage to develop consistently or sufficiently his own identity, due to the lack of attention – both others’ and his own – to himself, the premises and conditions of his life imprinted upon him this identity of intermediary with even greater force. At the same time these constant, continuous observations of East and West, this increasingly, incredibly subtle, sensitive alertness, this – as it were – “historical empathy,” ena-bled the Middle European to know and understand the East and the West intimately: for his own sake and theirs. To understand, in minute detail, that which had to be constantly watched.

Thus we arrive at the first explanation of the term “Middle Eu-ropean.” The Middle European was a European of the middle not


only because he remained in the middle, but also because he found himself in the middle, in-between. He was a middleman-European in the great dialogue – and often the great conflict – between the West and the East. To mediate, to intercede – that was the true gift and true calling of the Middle European.

He was the intermediary for everything: languages, intentions, accents, passions, souls and their various hues, ideas, nay – even humour. So intense this intermediation was that the Middle Eu-ropean assimilated the qualities of both the East and the West. He knew all the languages, including the intermediate ones. Including the trans-border, in-between languages. Although he did not usu-ally speak English, he was equally amused by Western and Eastern jokes – because both these regions appear ridiculous to the Middle European. Therefore he laughs twice, in a manner of speaking. That gives him an enormous advantage, and that is his wealth. He has developed his own, separate amalgam of humour, which not only allows him to laugh at the jokes of both the East and the West, but also at the East and West themselves, mostly at both at the same time. Often this was his only weapon whenever pressures from either or both sides became unbearable. To understand the humour is the key to understanding the essence. The Middle Euro-pean had an advantage: he understood. He had a double understan-ding. He often understood, in the West and the East, what they did not understand, either about their own selves, or about each other. That is rarely pardoned, since the fact of others understanding something which you do not yourself understand always inspires suspicion and never sympathy. That is why the Middle European was unpopular, not much liked. He was dangerous not because of his strength, but because of his capacity for understanding.

Now the Middle European was not a man without qualities. He was a man of double, twofold qualities, of manifold qualities, and that made him amazingly flexible in his capacities and talents. Because these capacities were usually too numerous to constitute one coherent character, he may have appeared to be a man without qualities. In addition – and above all – he was something other, something third, and quite unusual. Time and again the horizons of expectations, memories, hope and fear lent atmosphere to his intuition and climate to his creativity. The probability of extraor-

dinary ideas occurring here was always much higher than outside the middle, while the probability of their incorporation was never equal to these countries’ potentials. Ideas are born out of obscuri-ty, but they are incorporated in determination.

The Middle European knew from his own experience that each thing, each affair, each event has at least three dimensions – the-refore it should not be explained and named and handled squarely. He knew the inconsistency, contradiction and imperfection of the world inside out, not sparing the world of ideas. More than once – frankly speaking, more often than not – he allowed himself to be swayed and seduced by apparently strong, convincing ideas. The greatest weakness and the gravest sin of the Middle European lay and still lies in his longing for unambiguity, a trap he repeate-dly fell into, which is perfectly understandable in this reservoir of complications, this reserve of complexes. Just the same, it is tantamount to self-betrayal, because enlightenment ideals carried through with the utmost constancy culminate in leftist dictator-ships, and practical romanticism brought to excess in rightist ones. In either case, the middle falls apart, and the extremes emerge triumphant. The middle disappears beneath the edges, beyond the borders. It perishes beneath the extremes. It disintegrates.

This is not to say that Middle Europe was merely the victim of extre-misms and totalitarianisms. Far from being a laboratory used to evil ends, where the East and the West carried out their experiments, oh no, it was not as innocent as that. Quite the contrary: it certainly took part in those experiments zealously and of its own free will. The zeal, perhaps, resulted from the uncertainty, the complexity and the ambiguity of its own inner world. From the ambiguity which was so agonizing, so unbearable. Conceivably, this is why it was so eager to get rid of it, to shake it off, to flee into certainty.

However before Middle Europe was thrown, or threw itself, into the realm of barbarity, by breaking up into East and West (and therefore ceasing to exist), it lived in a trial, a pursuit of a middle way. That middle way was defined by scepticism towards each and every all-encompassing, all-explaining ideology. It was inspired by distrust towards tantalisingly daring declarations. It was carried by a lasting hunch that antinomies, contradictions and inconsi-


stencies are not only an inseparable part of life, but also its proper expression. Not a deficit, but a manifestation. Life as such reveals itself only in contradictions. It does not suffice to recognize and tolerate these contradictions but – as far as possible – they must also be enjoyed, in the pure sense of the fullness of life.

Obviously, I am talking about a Middle Europe which never existed in stated form, the idealised Middle Europe, which – in addition to the above – I also attribute with mediating postmodernism and post-heroism (Švejk being an excellent example of a Middle Euro-pean). As usual, here also they took their liberties with the great ideologies of the West and practices of the East. Even more so than in the West. Indeed, here also they were desperately seeking and chasing after clear and unambiguous identities, for themselves and for others, in order to define and consolidate them once and for all. Of course, in this case they also overindulged in questions as to “who,” instead of asking “how” to live together and create a shared future. And yet: if Middle Europe makes any sense at all, it is this, ideal Middle Europe.

Notwithstanding all that, today it matters very little which depar-ted Middle Europe we mourn and recollect: whether the Imperial and Royal-coloured utopia returned to the past, equating Middle Europe with the Danubian Monarchy, or rather the other, German one, which views Middle Europe as the space between large-format spheres of influence, the German, and the Russian. It matters little, not because there is no difference in the origin, but because there is no difference in the outcome. And the outcome is as fol-lows: today, Middle Europe is no more.

The private Middle European visions of great Europeans – Jerzy Giedroyc and Czesław Miłosz, Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal, György Konrád and Danilo Kiš, Claudio Magris and Karl Schlögel – also played out differently than their authors intended, joining the exceedingly portentous, extraordinarily beautiful repository of well-worn illusions. Unrealised, because unrealisable, unachieved, because unachievable.

So variably sensed, so variously systematised, Middle Europe was last seen alive in 1989. Middle Europe was important for as long as

it had no access to Europe “proper”. The latter has been continu-ally, increasingly equated with the European Union. Metonymy gradually morphs into synonymy. It turns out that the said Middle Europe is not its own form, it is not a form in itself and for itself – it is merely a temporary quarantine, an enactment of a passage to Europe “proper”, the Europe believed to be the true, the better one. Thus the notion of Middle Europe in the sense of the Europe of intermediation became devalued to the meaning of Europe as a separator, a mean, a middle. Middle Europe as a separator for and by virtue of Europe. A European means, not an end.

The transition happened against the backdrop of semantic muta-tion within the concepts of “Middle Europe” and “Middle Europe-an”. Until that point, the “middle” in those expressions did not denote the inferior “not clear where this belongs”, but meant hi-ghly creative connections, productive and significant for the sense and self-awareness of the said “middle”: “neither – nor” – in other words, a self-conscious assertion and distinction from “just the West” or “just the East”; and “both – and” – namely, staying open in the face of these two horizons. Today, the “middle” has acquired the embarrassing resonance of an inferiority complex. Of the inter-mediary, the mediator, nothing remains save meanness and medio-crity. Step by step, this mediocrity, this averageness took over the stage of semantics and the interior landscapes of self-perception. The movement to escape these meanings was frantic. Suddenly, no one wanted to be Middle European any more. A Middle European meant a mean, “average,” a pitiful, deplorable European.

In fact, several faithful devotees remained, but they have no power, and, as we say in these parts – “they do not make a spring”. To former Middle Europeans, the European Union certainly means what Middle Europe meant until not so long ago: the certainty and constant affirmation that you belong to the proper, inner circle, to Europe proper, to Europe itself. The fact that yesterday’s Middle Europeans enjoy this circumstance of belonging most intensely is perfectly understandable. For too long their European identity had been too uncertain, too much threatened, too heavily compro-mised. The Union, on the other hand, is the only true guarantee of belonging to Europe as such. It is the guardian of the Grail, the highest authority on things European.


Then again, today we might have particularly good reasons to reanimate the notion of Middle Europe. It would be good for the West, good for the East, and good for Europe as a whole. For Europe in general. For Europe as such – not only for the Middle.

A new Middle European identity would be important for these countries which do not (yet) belong to the European Community but gravitate and aspire towards it. Middle Europe would find its significance no longer in the outdated sense of a purgatory on the way to the EU paradise, but as a conviction and certainty of the middle – a conviction which not only derives from the historical and cultural belonging within Europe (the greatest weakness of non-EU European countries west of Russia at present), but also vi-gilantly and tenderly stands at the very centre of European events. It takes an interest and engages in European affairs energetically and passionately; it shows and shares the European existential curiosity; spiritually, it remains within, inside, in the middle. The Middle European also embraces the spiritual centre. He becomes European in the sense of the immediate idea of Europe.

“The other state” of such a Middle European individual, newly thought through, a brand-new edition thereof, would define itself beyond the capacity to bear Europe’s and the world’s complexity, assuming it to be a tiring, transitory state of emergency, at the most. He would add to it his capacity to notice, amidst all that complexity, the necessary premises for a valuable European life, worthy of every effort. At times, even to enjoy that complexity. The Modernists believed in condensed truths. They believed in truths that could not only be discovered, but also implemented in reality. Many of them were ready to fight wars for these truths, and many did. They produced heroes and martyrs. Perhaps a contemporary Middle European would be concerned not so much with truth and war, but with good neighbourly relations and collaborations. A new Švejk would be more beneficial to us today than a new Roland. In the conviction that the “middle” – including Europe’s middle – is not located somewhere definite, but may be found in any place where they believe in Europe. Where they live in “the other state”.

This is the only way for Europe to stay, to survive, and to exist in its entirety. Only when it is composed of the middle, and nothing

else. Of one compacted and diverse middle. This is how we may live, in European integration, as an alternative to unification.

Not only to endure various ideologies, but also different versions of the past – which means also different designs for the future. And not only to endure – this is not the hardest part – but to live tru-sting that this state is perfectly normal, perfectly inevitable and – perhaps – unpleasant, rather like our own ephemerality and finite-ness. On the whole, the lack of a one and only, coherent model of life, the presence of otherness – the coexistence of it – should be dealt with in the same manner in which we deal with the fact and idea of our own mortality. By learning to cope with it, and by not letting these circumstances spoil our life, while it lasts.

The Middle European today might return, this time again as a ne-cessity, out of necessity. As an inner and internalised necessity of a new species. The Middle Europeans – if they appear again – will appear in order not to lose themselves. But mostly, in order not to lose their and our own Europe.



autoportret 36 uk

Documents

different way

main market square

young people

honest way

different route

mass buyout

mass media

natural phenomenon