The article appeared in A&B 10'2020
So many such different people involved in the creation of reality have gathered within these walls over the years that the Engineering 3 address has become a true symbol of artistic bohemia. The story began when this reality was at the peak of its transformation. The city had to be dealt with, and the locals had to be dealt with. Prague-North fulfilled an important category for artists - it was interesting. The inherent passion of explorers of the new land here could come true. Although there were also those who cared only to drive a car to the very entrance of the studio and sneak inside unnoticed.
Warsaw's Praga-Północ is an area stretching from the former 10th Anniversary Stadium (today's National Stadium) to the General Grot-Rowecki Bridge. It borders Saska Kepa (part of the so-called Praga-Południe), Downtown, Zoliborz and Targówek.
In the 18th century Praga developed as an independent trading town. Unfortunately, since the outbreak of the Kosciuszko Uprising, the neighborhood began to decline. A string of unfortunate events caused the character of the place to change and Praga gained a bad reputation. It's a place where, sitting within the four walls of one's studio, one can hear the cry from the guts of the street "K****, how to live!!!" after dark. Liquor stores have their own names: "Glass weather" or "Jacek and Placek", and people immersed in their daily life and routine are able to coexist politely with each other despite their differences, but also give each other a slap for the same reason. Prague's image is not simple.
Life here moves at its own pace and has its own color. The district's residents feel that they belong to a local community that is perhaps nowhere else so diverse. Warsaw folklore intermingles with the artistic energy of visitors, retirees and drunks. Kids running around backyards with matches in hand and local artisans. Smaller streets and Prague's backstreets. And in between, monuments and relics of an uneasy past, which is very much rooted there.
Leonard Sempoliński and Stefan Wiechecki "Wiech" carried out a unique documentation of the district. "Sempoliński's "Disappearing Suburbs" is a stripped-down, aestheticized picture of the poor neighborhoods of Warsaw in the 1970s. They show the effects of the war and the subsequent problems the city faced. In his texts Wiech rendered the language of Praga and the reality of the residents of Targówek or Szmulowizna.
Praga has always had a specific image in keeping with the atmosphere of artistic bohemia, but until the 1990s only individual cases populated this part of Warsaw. At the corner of Ząbkowska and Markowska Streets, in the vicinity of the Warsaw Vodka Factory "Koneser" (now the Praga Koneser Center) was the studio of Praga's artistic legend Jerzy Zieliński, known to all as "Jurry." Painters who collaborated with each other over the years, representatives of the new figuration trend Marek Sapetto and Wieslaw Szamborski, found their place here. Many artists had a "Prague episode."
building on Inżynierska 3
photo: Anna Walewska
The real breakthrough, however, came in 1995, when, in the words of Roman Wozniak, an artist and founder of the Academia The ater, "the first bastion of artists" settled here. Painter Olga Wolniak rented a studio on Bialostocka Street. Her neighbors included painter Jacek Zieminski, photographers Pawel Zak and Mikolaj Grynberg, and visual artist of Greek origin Kostas Kiritsis.
A year later, in September 1996, two young artists, graduates of the most famous atelier at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts at the time, "Kowalnia" (named after Professor Grzegorz Kowalski), rented studios in the attic of a building at 3 Inżynierska Street, beginning, as it turned out, one of the most interesting chapters in the life of the neighborhood.
Inżynierska Street is located right next to the heart of Praga-Północ - the Vilnius Railway Station. Four red clay brick warehouse buildings of varying numbers of stories, arranged in rows, occupy the property between Inżynierska 3 and Targowa 80. Each has an exit gate closed with an arch, so that in theory you can move between courtyards and individual buildings (in reality, most gates are always closed). This is the only complex of industrial tenements in Warsaw preserved intact since its construction (until a fire in 2013). The buildings were constructed between 1910 and 1914 (in 1910 the first three tenements from Inżynierska Street, in 1914 the last, fourth one).
The complex of buildings was the result of the expansion of Adolf Wróblewski's company, which was engaged in organizing removals, storing furniture, providing loans for its purchase and commission sales.
After the war, the warehouses were privately owned, and were later taken over by the State Administration of Abandoned Property. Before the tenement of the Joint-Stock Furniture Storage Society of A. Wróblewski became an oasis for modern artists, it was used by various companies, including Moda Polska and Jubiler. It housed sewing rooms and various wholesalers. For example, a coffin store operated in the second warehouse on the second floor in the 1990s.
Warsaw Cashiers
Katarzyna Górna and Katarzyna Kozyra found their studios there on the top floor of the front building. It was the most decorative of all. To this day, the original inscription on the facade reads: Tow. Akc. A. Wroblewski and Sk. While on one of the side risalits "8". This is a remnant of the date 1875 - the year Wróblewski's company was founded. On the other was the year of the erection of the first buildings, unfortunately, the inscription located under the upper cordon cornice separating the last floors of the facade has not survived.
The sides of the facade are finished with gables with hipped roofs. In the central part of the roof there is an ox-eye. Inside, the original staircase with wooden stairs, windows and baluster is preserved. Originally, each building was equipped with an external freight elevator. Only structural elements remain; the contents of the shafts were stolen by thieves.
photo from the "Kasie-niteczki" series by Katarzyna Górna and Katarzyna Kozyra, 1993
photo: courtesy of Wall Gallery
As Górna emphasizes, both she and Kozyra knew what they wanted to do and what they needed for it. They searched for space through Real Estate Management Boards. They checked offers in Mokotow, Zoliborz and other parts of the city. Praga came up by chance. Here they simply found what they were looking for.
Katarzyna Górna needed a space to photograph in. The artist, who is still involved in large-format photography, needed a high interior and the ability to "walk away." The building's distinctive semi-circular wooden window openings were well captured in Górna's famous series of photographs titled "The Madonnas. "Madonnas" from 1996-2001, at which time Katarzyna Kozyra was just after "Pyramid of Animals" and in the middle of "Olympia." She came to the studio during her treatment (she was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma). I remember her once mentioning that she organized her time so as to go up and down the stairs once a day. For the staircase at Inżynierskaya is impressive. This arrangement shaped various business and social arrangements and situations. The development was also influenced by the lack of cafe service. Café "U Krawca" and "Bald Penguin" or later "Vinowajca" were established relatively late, after the neighborhood community was formed.
Artists known in the society at the time as Warsaw's Cashiers soon began inviting artists they knew to set up their studios on Inżynierska Street. Other graduates of "Kowalnia" ended up here: Paweł Althamer, Waldemar Mazurek and Grzegorz Matusik, who took the studio next door. As Althamer recalls, there was previously a fireworks factory on this floor. Two floors below were occupied by Roman Wozniak and Zelda Klimkowska. A while after Górna and Kozyra, the famous Studio Melon - the first studio and agency working with artists and producing photo shoots in Warsaw - was established in the building at Inżynierska 3 on the initiative of Iza Bil.
Katarzyna Górna, photographs from the "Madonnas" series, 1996-2001
photo: Katarzyna Górna
end of the century
As late as the late 1990s, there were still references in the media to Paris' Montmartre, New York's Brooklyn, Berlin's Kreuzberg, but there is no other place like Warsaw's Praga. Groups were formed and new initiatives were created. As early as 1997, artists informally affiliated with Inżynierska Street organized joint projects, exhibitions or other types of events there. One of the first was the "Parteitag" exhibition realized in the studios of Górna and Kozyra by Artur Żmijewski, who was never a formal tenant, but is a recurring figure in the history of Inżynierska.
Over time, the circles expanded. A special relationship developed between Inżynierska 3 and the famous courtyard at 11 Listopada. Wozniak moved his Academia theater there, and the "Dream of the Bee" was established in its place on Inżynierska Street. Górna had an "Effect event" company, and the Association of Warsaw Artistic Activists (members: Katarzyna Górna, Alicja Łyszkowicz and Artur Żmijewski) was formed, which turned out to be a short but intense episode in the life of the district.
Some of the more unusual "numbers" include the placement of a plaque commemorating the figure of Paweł Althamer on the facade of the first tenement of the building complex at Inżynierska 3. On it we see an image of the artist and information: "In this house (intercom 11) since 1997 lives and creates Paweł Althamer, sculptor." As it turns out, it was created on the initiative of the artist himself. The author of this work is Waldi (Waldemar Mazurek), a sculptor who shared a studio with Pawel. Althamer at the time was fresh from reading Neale Donald Walsch's "Conversations with God." He felt it was time to start appreciating himself. The artist, who had worked with self-portraiture several times before, presented the idea to a colleague. Both approached it with humor. This is how an unusual plaque was created, during the life of the great artist, which had a ceremonial unveiling - an opening was organized, which was attended by, among others, Andrzej Przywara and the late Warren Niesłuchowski, who was incredibly amused by this situation. To this day, tours stop in front of the building to remember Althamer because of this plaque.
Paweł Althamer "Rubber", 2008, sculpture (metal, rubber, 166×60×60 cm), work from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
© Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
Prague's artistic potential was developed almost every day. This development was intertwined with Prague's everyday life and the "locals," who sometimes looked on in amazement. Upper pointed out during our conversation that for her personally it was interesting at first to meet the "locals." Later she got used to it. "It's interesting how the artists fit into the 'Prague climate' and found their way there. We were poor and harmless. I think they treated us like useful idiots, but we weren't useful to the locals. Coming to Prague, you could feel the atmosphere of business." Roman Wozniak stresses, however, that claims that Prague is safe are a myth. He remembers the beating of his son, various kinds of burglaries, and that everything was handled by Mr. R. You had to fight your own battles in a place where street law applied and going through the wrong gate could end badly.
neighbors for neighbors
In 2001, Roman Wozniak initiated the "Neighbors for Neighbors" festival, which lived to see five editions and quickly became known as "Warsaw's largest neighborhood event." It was attended by local artists, residents, as well as artists invited from all over the world, representatives of various cultures. The finale of the often several-day festival took place in the courtyard of Inżynierska 3. The event included an "Open Studio Day." The artists invited not only other artists and art dealers, who were also in abundance in Praga during those days, but just their neighbors. Dancers, musicians and performers also took part in the event. A butcher's store on the corner of Inżynierska and Wilenska Streets featured video art, and art objects were placed in display windows. Projections were projected on buildings, and there were various interactions on the streets, such as Jan Mioduszewski's immovable performance from 2003 (Furniture Factory, "Wall," 2×5 hours, 10 Stalowa Street). Roman Wozniak recalls that this festival, as an activity, had three main objectives: to tame "Pražka" with the presence of artists, to tame "City" with "Pražka", and to introduce "light", artistic provocations. This stimulated the local community and allowed them to look at each other with a friendly eye and stomp their feet together during the festival's live concerts, which happened every year.
Artur Zmijewski and Rafal Zwirek enduring the "Horseman of the Apocalypse" on the cage of Inżynierska 3 - the collective work was created as part of the "Warsaw under Construction" festival, 2014.
photo: Anna Walewska
here comes the new
At the beginning of the 2000s, new artists began arriving at Inżynierska Street, including first Jacek, then Janek Dziaczkowski, Jan Mioduszewski, Nicolas Grospierre or Karol Radziszewski, Piotr Kopik and Ivo Nikić, who formed the "szu szu" collective at the time. As Ivo recalls: "After graduating, I needed a place to paint. I was on Inżynierska Street from 2003 to 2013. At first I sublet a corner at Janek Mioduszewski's place, and from 2004 together with "szu szu" we had our own space, an open space of 250 meters. We decided on Inżynierska 3 because of the super conditions we had there, and the preferential lease terms for artists." The new artists had their own world, which was different from the world of those in the old bastion. They also had an entrance from Market Street, which necessarily limited contact. They participated in the "Neighbors for Neighbors" festival and the "Open Studios Day," and also met at nearby venues and visited in studios, but their area of interest was different, and they created a new bastion, another chapter in the history of Engineering Street.
In January 2013, a fire occurred in the third building of the complex occupied by the "new artists," almost completely destroying the building. The skeleton itself remained, which still stands today. The well-known "Dream of the Bee" club was also located there. A short circuit in the electrical system was considered the likely cause.
In 2003, Miroslaw Nizio opened his gallery at Inżynierska Street. The first tenement also housed his design studio Nizio Design, which now occupies three floors of the building. Still later, Inżynierska 3 became a meeting place for the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art, and "Readings for Art Workers" were held here. In 2014, the studios here were included in the "Warsaw under Construction" festival, an event organized every autumn by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, or the I Consortium of Post-Artistic Practices, led by Sebastian Cichocki and Kuba Szreder.
Today, artists still have their studios here, Nizio designs, and the Inżynierska 3 Association is also active. In the second building, in the basement, have their headquarters VINTAGE KOLEKTYW / Norm Core Vintage Shop, dealing in, among other things, vintage... furniture. And at number 1 operates "Cafe Melon".
