interview from issue 11|2021 of A&B
The 13th edition of the WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw lasted from October 8 to November 7, 2021. The event was curated by Paweł Brylski and Szymon Maliborski, and the theme was school.
Anna Walewska: Last year I had the opportunity to talk with Natalia Sielewicz and Tom Fudala, curators of the 12th edition of the festival. At the end of our conversation, I asked if they already knew what the next edition would be about. They replied that the project will be developed by the education department, and the theme is "The Common Museum" [see A&B 12/2020].
Szymon Maliborski: The reality of 2021 proved to be very unpredictable. It has affected not only how the world works, but also the Museum's plans. As a result, the theme has been radically transformed.
Anna: Radical?
Simon: What's left of the idea is to try to grab something that is closer to people, that is concrete; something that we know affects us. This area is education. I think the approach to the theme of "Common Museum" was similar. However, the content and forms of action were far different from what we could experience at the Pavilion on the Vistula River.
Pawel Brylski:The fact is that our times have accelerated. From today's perspective, it seems to me that the "common museum" - that is, the exhibition of artworks in public space, directly in the fabric of the city - was something much more serious than we thought at the very beginning. It was to be an attempt to rethink the relationship between what the Institution is and who the Recipients are, and not only this permanent audience that is with us, but also people who for some reason do not participate in these activities. In preparing the public program, that is, the accompanying events of this year's edition, we set up Tuesdays to be reactive to what was happening in education matters, because the system is so dynamic that we were not able to say three weeks in advance what we were going to talk about, we didn't know what was going to happen. Reality is so fast that it constantly surprises us, so it's difficult to plan a year ahead if you want to develop something up-to-date. The fact is that on the leaven for the "Common Museum" was born the project we did. Intuition told us that there was more to education than we thought.
Simon: To conclude, we were supposed to do an exhibition about the Museum's collection in a social context, and we did one about schools.
Curators presenting sashes designed by artist Sharon Lockhart for the "Basic Forms" project.
Photo: Sisi Cecilia
Anna: What ultimately determined this change?
Simon: I think the decisive factors were two. On the one hand, the feeling that we still have time to tell the story of this new Museum, and perhaps instead of focusing on such an internal analysis, we should do a project that deals with important issues happening here and now, and such an issue for us is education at different levels. The observation of the shifting discourse on design for education from the periphery to the center has played an important role. On the other hand, we have a dispute that has been going on for several years about what education is supposed to be. Every now and then there is an eruption of information about how bad it is. More reforms are happening. The WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival has a tradition that manages to combine a historical perspective and a current view of the phenomenon. It appeals to the concrete and is not necessarily just an art exhibition. I get the impression that we missed that a bit. That's why we decided to tackle something that has a stronger anchoring in society. To translate in practice what kind of museum we are.
Paul: There are more of these reasons. I would add that as an institution we are growing, getting bigger, and through this we are also redefining ourselves, and within these definitions the role of education, which for a museum like ours has always been important, is increasing. On the other hand, in view of the new building that is being constructed on Parade Square, we need to prepare even better in terms of education. This is the moment.
Anna: What did this year's festival consist of?
Szymon: It consisted of three complementary elements. Two of them are always, namely the main exhibition, which this year was held in the Pavilion on the Vistula River, and the public program, which is what happens during the festival. The events have their own rhythm. Every Tuesday there was a so-called rapid-response format called "Up to the plate!", that is, meetings addressing the most current topics. Every Thursday there was some kind of debate that dealt with the most important areas of the festival. We then gave the floor to those who practice education - male and female teachers. The discussion also included local governments. We wondered what Warsaw could do, besides enacting standards for a well-designed school. This is a discussion about design in the broadest sense, that is, trying to answer the question of how to do school. And also what museums and cultural institutions can do for the system, that is, why schools need museums.
A fragment of the exhibition of the 13th edition of the WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION festival
photo: Paweł Brylski
Anna: And what for?
Szymon: This is a broader concept that we are trying to create. During the pandemic, museums functioned quite extensively as "repositories of images" from which to take and do something in lessons. It seems to us that in the long term, if this system is to have a raison d'être, survive and not be a form of service, education should let itself be unsealed and allow other institutions to operate, not just schools. We have such a working concept of taking education out of schools, which we are working on with Ewa Radanowicz, until recently the head of the school in Radow Maly. If this is to make sense, then the school cannot be the only place where the education process takes place, so we should think about how museums, through their programs, exhibitions, can realize systemic particles of educational elements. This adds up to a vision of school as a very "porous" space. We use the analogy that a school is such a building with a large number of windows. Through these windows very many things can enter the school, very many things can be seen through them. Such an element of looking at the world is looking at institutions, the local community, NGOs. We're trying to build a systemic reflection that, without naming who is making what reforms today, is at the antipodes of what you're trying to do.
Paul: An institution still has the opportunity to have tools that can be useful in a changing world. An institution like ours, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, has art that is not just to be looked at. It is a tool that can reinforce new competencies. We can ask ourselves whether the school, in the model in which it operates, is ready to prepare young people for the challenges that modernity brings. The pandemic, for example, that state of uncertainty, of suspension, of a big question mark over what will happen tomorrow, of such being between the real and remote worlds, answered the question of what an institution can give clearly. An institution can give art. And art can help you understand better or see the world differently.
Simon: I think this is a circulating truth, but it hasn't yet broken through in the education system. Namely, what art gives us is the need to learn permanently, that is, to get used to being flexible to the context, to take into account how the world changes in interpretation, but also to step forward a little bit out of one's comfort zone, because there is always something we don't understand. Every exhibition is a bit about entering a new and different social world that we need to understand, and art gives us momentary images that allow us to summarize what is relevant in the world. This is a realm that is lacking in education. We have this idea that this process happens from the age of seven to eighteen. This is how compulsory education is currently defined, and after that it is for the willing and it stops. All indications are that this is not the way to think.
Anna: The area of education after 1989 is one of the most neglected areas. You have taken on a subject that it is difficult to imagine that it could somehow transform in the short term, and I get the impression that this is your goal.
Paul: Our goal is to strengthen the teaching community. The community honored this teacher of theirs by putting a basket on his head. This is not the content of our exhibition, but we remember it because it happened. On the other hand, when we reach deep into the history of the Polish teaching profession, we see that it was one of the most united, strongest professional groups, which undertook protests, achieving successes, that is, it had a high causality. By showing this, we can symbolically, within the professional group and the surrounding society, strengthen the status of the teacher, or at least begin to do so. The second thing that seems important to me is that our goal is to make visible the architecture of the school, probably the most invisible architecture in the fabric of the city. We happen to be unfamiliar with school architecture. Often the architects of these buildings are not even listed on the SARP website. Someone may have designed dozens of school buildings, and it's not even mentioned. That's why we pulled out the often completely unknown stories, wanting to draw attention to these areas. We organized walks, led by Grzegorz Piątek, through the school buildings, while placing them in the field of architectural criticism.
Excerpt from the exhibition of the 13th edition of the WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION festival
Photo: Sisi Cecilia
Anna: I understand that we are talking about buildings and education at every level? Elementary schools, high schools...
Simon: We decided to tackle something that seemingly seems boring, transparent and mass, namely elementary schools and high schools. What the system in general is to the masses. In museum reflection, this area does not have a "sexi" reception, like critical studies, the free university or radical seminars. This year we said it was good to get down to grassroots work and show how things play out that determine what kind of society we are and what kind of country we live in. We also wanted to show the fact that disputes in the field of education do not come out of nowhere. Some situations have been going on for a hundred years. Understanding this history, where we are from and where some of the problems we still face today came from, is valuable. We show how it was and who, at what point, decided that it just happened. The exhibition was not chronological, although we did a quick overview of a century of design for education, but we did it because we started from the here and now, looking for models of a well-designed school, and we looked for these aspects in history. We started from today's problems of system inefficiency.
Anna: "Inefficiency of the system"... What a beautiful euphemism.
Simon: Who was thinking about the system a hundred years ago and why did it go wrong? I feel that it's a little deeper thinking than shouting at one minister or another. We don't need to make an exhibition about it, and trying to understand how it works systemically is, I feel, more valuable. What can a museum do? A museum alone won't change the world, but an alliance is being formed that wasn't there before. Cultural institutions that set a certain discourse and symbolic stature regarding design: "Listen, now it is relevant and important to design schools. From what is repetitive, we go to what is qualitative and necessary." We are thinking about how to make the festival such a platform, where different communities that maybe don't see each other every day meet. These are a lot of questions about the future, relevant also to the new Museum headquarters. Without that, it's impossible to move to a larger scale.
Paul: In making an exhibition about education, as MSN we can use the tools at our disposal. I mean both those developed during the 13th edition of WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION and those developed through the organization of countless exhibitions. If we assumed at the outset that we were looking for answers to three types of needs: analytical, affective and civic, then the tool at our disposal can be adapted to all of these.
