Excerpt from the exhibition of the 13th edition of the WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival
photo: Sisi Cecilia
Anna: And who are the artists during this edition?
Paweł: The partners.
Szymon: This year we referred to what is the tradition of the festival - such a use of all elements, including art, in which it does not have a privileged role. Rather, it was an affective complement to what appears in the sets, drawings, photos or graphics. Last year's festival was an exhibition of contemporary art. We did an exhibition that has a certain quality of a critical historical exposition, in which art illuminates certain problems or introduces a kind of emotional complexity to specific lined content, showing a certain process. We used it quite deliberately and did not make an exhibition of "Schools in Art" or an exhibition about school. Rather, we focused on experiences that can say something about the system. It's not about the iconography of the school appearing in art.
Anna: Was your exhibition an educational exhibition?
Paul: Here, different zones really intermingled. Sometimes they occurred side by side, and sometimes together. We didn't want our activities to have any imposed direction. I call this exhibition a "casket exhibition." Just like in "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa," one can discover successive layers. We assume that different people come to us. There is a group that comes to the exhibition because there are works by a particular person. While visiting, at some point he will see architectural photography, and at this point art may begin to intersect with knowledge, which may lead to architectural discoveries, and vice versa. Someone who comes to learn something about Warsaw functionalism can move seamlessly into art through this photography. This was an exhibition on education, in which, by working with our specialists, the different needs of the audience were taken into account.
Simon: Everything is interrelated. Just because we make a great school building, but don't think through what to teach and how, won't make us move forward. On the other hand, radical programs and changes in teaching require transforming the space, which is such a generator of certain ideas. We try to capture moments when a change in school architecture suddenly generates a greater desire to meet, to work in groups, to go out into shared space, a better opportunity to use the building as a tool to educate about architecture and the processes that happen in the biological world. We are following such moments that are bottom-up. Top-down and bottom-up. There are certain standards that the city proposes. If we want to build a school and get money for it, we have to build in an organized and smart way. It also happens that someone comes and wants to improve a particular situation that they diagnose and think about what they can do about it. Such was the case in Radowo Male precisely. It's a post-state farm town, where half of the residents don't work, and the school's test scores are the worst in the country. Ewa Radanowicz works there. Her example is fascinating: she started by gluing this community together, and this is what we showed in the exhibition. Suddenly there is a need to make this school spatially different: to arrange the entrance differently, which can foster contacts, to build a kitchen, which offers many possibilities, including social ones. These are changes that are driving themselves. Secondarily arranged space drives new, more radical ideas.
Paul: Design for education has a history as long as the idea of universal education itself. One of the Uniejewski brothers' earliest texts on how to design schools includes a passage from the National Education Commission in the late 18th century: "The chambers in which the children will study should be spacious, high, on a place of dryness and free air with a chimney and a comfortable stove, cheerful as much as possible, decorated with paintings, maps of cities, etc., always kept in coolness, so that the children will not look upon the school as their prison, but as a pleasant dwelling." The language has aged, but the postulates in this text have been repeated for decades to come. Today, too, we ask ourselves how to develop space so that classrooms and corridors are used: both spatially and colorfully, so that they foster the process of making friends and enhance mental health. Another question is how art can be present in school spaces. A wonderful thing happened at the school that Maciek Siuda designed, on Zaruby Street in Kabaty, Warsaw. Katarzyna Przezwańska, a Polish visual artist, sampled the colors in the Kabaty Forest and then proposed facade shades that softly blend with the natural surroundings of this building. Reality changes, but certain kinds of postulates remain constant.
Excerpt from the exhibition of the 13th edition of the WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION festival
Photo: Sisi Cecilia
Anna: This is very wise, such going back to the roots. When one observes the activities of the Museum, one can see that pro-environmental activities are close to your heart. Did this theme come up during this year's festival?
Paweł: In the "Standards," a document issued by the Bureau of Architecture and Spatial Planning of the City of Warsaw, there is a provision for education through architecture. This means that a school building is not only a place where we learn, but also a tool for education. In these documents is a list of suggested solutions for designers to include in a building to enhance climate education. We also brought this out in the exhibition, because it is important, it also seems to us the most interesting change that is happening. The choice of colors in the space and the garden by the school are elements that appeared in the 1930s under Stefan Starzynski, for example, the school on Grottgera Street located by the escarpment, schools by parks as part of the 100th anniversary campaign, the school of Tadeusz Iskierka's design established in Żoliborz with its own garden and a hut that created a garden. These are the historical solutions that we presented at the exhibition and that we are pursuing now. Such solutions are returning to our interests. The architect, according to the standards, is supposed to bring out certain architectural solutions that show electricity consumption, carbon footprint, noise in and in front of the building, emphasize the role of waste segregation, for which garbage cans should be in front of the school building, that gardens can be water-saving, that there can be gray water circuits in buildings.
Simon: We invited people who were fresh through the education system, this year's high school graduates, to review the system. We had a section of the exhibition that talked about how the school learns and what it still doesn't know how to do. In our opinion, it doesn't know how to "handle" diversity. It doesn't know how to speak directly, equipping us with certain abilities, about what the future holds for us. This something we have to deal with is the climate issue and the identity issue.
Anna: These are fairly basic questions.
Simon: I think this is also a big value of our exhibition. In addition to the fact that we're doing this kind of discussion on a meta level, we're following history, we're commissioning analysis that we then translate into visual images, we're giving voice to people who have freshly gone through this and they're saying, "Listen, you haven't prepared us at all to talk about the world at this point and that point." Showing the synergy, the fact that we can work together on different levels, or that each of us is looking for project solutions and those that should be introduced into the school program, gives the sum total of critical reflection that will say it's time to do something about it. Starting from a pragmatic perspective, I think it's important for us to work with the city. In 2019, when the festival was about the role of the monument, the formal result was the creation of a commission that is an opinion-giving, advisory body, and it works. The commission, which is made up of representatives from various backgrounds, including the arts and from the conservator's office, gives its opinion on proposals for forms of memorialization in the city. We hope that this year's edition of the festival, if it illuminates the issue from several points, shows the right people, certain trends and the problems these trends face, will be something ready to take or start a process that will later turn into a kind of local government legislation that takes into account the role of museums in the education process.
Anna: So, however, we assume a long-term action. Does this also enable you to start some new museum activities?
Paul: As part of this year's edition, we launched something that we intend to keep for years to come, which is an architectural education program. We have established cooperation in this regard with the National Institute of Architecture and Urbanism. We are preparing the program on the basis of joint experience and materials. The nature of this activity will be permanent and will stay with us in the new building. We want architectural education, which is needed for our spatial order, common space, to be part of the core curriculum. We want to do it structurally and systemically.
Simon: During the preparations for the festival, there were activities wrapped up that we want to leave in place permanently. For example, the sanatorium for education workers, that is, four days of activities in Shumin that refer to the tradition of Hansen's open form pedagogy. This is a format we want to stay with and carry it out in various guises - an activity on the borderline between education and architecture, which we can try to develop and incorporate in the museum and in schools. There is also the "Basic Forms" project, an experiment in art and on-site activities in schools, a program spread over three years for now, which had its debut during the festival. We have a local government perspective, and what the museum can develop to tie in with education.
An excerpt from the exhibition of the 13th edition of the WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION festival
Photo: Sisi Cecilia
Anna: I think that using the festival as a tool for initiation in many areas is a brilliant move. And will there be a traditional manifesto form as a result?
Paul: We wrote the exhibition a bit like this. We won't release a separate documentary, but our exhibition was such a manifesto. Realizing that the discussions inside the educational circles are extensive, long and unreadable to outsiders, we did the work through the materials of the educational circles. Ten short demands were created, for which we took inspiration from Tillmans' posters shown at the "Never Again" exhibition and Barbara Kruger's works. We invited Witek Orski to collaborate with us. Our posters with ten demands were included in the exhibition. These are small manifestos that we wrote, trying to keep the essence, abbreviation of the form and legibility of the demands.
Anna: Do you have your favorite Warsaw school buildings?
Paul: A building that is no longer a school and that I hope will become visible after this exhibition - a project by Romuald Gutt from President Starzynski's action. When Starzynski came to power in Warsaw in 1934, it turned out that the city had no schools. Most lessons were held in rented buildings. Starzynski decided to build schools. He invited excellent architects to work with him, and absolutely stunning buildings already in the spirit of functionalism were created. The school designed by Juliusz Żórawski on Różana Street was lucky. It has undergone renovation and continues to serve an educational function. For Gutt's project, which is located in Zoliborz Oficerski, this is the last call to have it looked at by a conservator. It's about to turn out that we had something nice, and we don't have it anymore. There is a beautiful sgraffito with a Mermaid preserved on the face of the building. The architecture is minimalist and very elegant. I looked at the buildings that were built as part of the millennium campaign. From the "Golden Book of the People's Republic of Poland" I took a list of Warsaw's millennial buildings, we have sixty-two. During the vacations I went around all of them. We selected twenty that show the unorthodox side of this phenomenon. I will now choose one example that has a particularly interesting story. In the series "The Crown," about the British queen.
Anna: It's off to a good start....
Paul: There was a media tycoon, the publisher of a daily newspaper with a huge circulation. When the Daily Mirror wrote that enough is enough, the British government packed up. His wife was a conductor. She led a choir and toured Central and Eastern Europe in the 1960s. She visited a music school with great traditions, which was then located in Praga-North. The infrastructure left much to be desired. She thought something had to be done about it. She informed her husband and he donated state-of-the-art printing presses to the RSW, or Workers' Publishing Cooperative, and the RSW allocated the cash equivalent to the music school, which is also located in Praga, on Namysłowska Street. To this day, it is one of the most modern school buildings. It has one of the best concert halls, excellent acoustics, made entirely of brick, and, well, it is one of the monument schools of the millennium of the Polish state. We have found some such schools.
Anna: What will the next edition be about?
Paul: On the challenges of communication in the city.
Anna: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed: Anna WALEWSKA
Photo credit: Sisi Cecilia
Illustrations courtesy of MSN in Warsaw.
Szymon MALIBORSKI
Art historian and cultural studies scholar, PhD student at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Since 2015 he has been co-creating the WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival. Interested in engaged practice and models of cooperation with local communities. Between 2014-2018 he was associated with the Museum at Open'er project, co-curator of the exhibitions "140 beats per minute", "Communis - renegotiations of community". He has collaborated with the Labyrinth Gallery, the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, ArtBoom Festival, among others. Since 2014, he has collaborated with Daniel Rycharski on more projects and activities, including Kurowek and Sierpc. He has published, among others, in the magazines "Szum" and "Obieg" and in collective volumes.
Pawel BRYLSKI
Educator and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. He has been involved in cultural communication since 2007 and has worked with Warsaw's most important art and cultural institutions, including POLIN, the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle and the Museum of Warsaw. He organizes and creates activities at the intersection of art and the city, architectural walks or site-specific interventions. He works with language, is a publicist, but also writes children's songs and is a member of ZAiKS. In the team of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw since 2019, he builds relationships with the audience and talks about art in a friendly and engaging way.
