Wesoła is one of the most important undeveloped spaces in the center of Krakow. However, before the City finds a use for the district filled with buildings after the Copernicus Hospital moved to Prokocim, numerous events take place in the area, which use the potential of the existing space and activate the neighborhood. What did Wesola find this time?
(Not always) Merry history
Historic Wesoła, once known as the suburb of St. Nicholas, is a neighborhood east of the Old Town, which is home to Krakow's Central Station, the Botanical Garden and the Krakow Opera House, among others. One of its most characteristic areas is the vicinity of Kopernika Street, where buildings belonging to the University Hospital of the Jagiellonian University's Collegium Medicum were located on numerous lots. The neighborhood acquired its medical character as early as 1788, when the St. Lazarus Hospital was established on Kopernika Street, which served as one of the first clinics in Europe. Over the years, the hospital complex on Kopernika grew, housing 24 clinical departments at its peak.
Open City 2024 Festival - The opening of the Open City 2024 Festival in Krakow.
Photo: Agnieszka Kozlowska © Crossroads Center
2019 saw the relocation of the clinic, which now operates in a new building on Jakubowskiego Street in Prokocim. Shortly thereafter, the City of Krakow bought the land located on Kopernika Street, with a total area of more than 9 hectares, along with the buildings, from the Jagiellonian University. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate on the idea of developing Wesoła, and until a final decision is made, the site, managed by the Agency for the Development of the City of Krakow, is home to, among others, the Krakow Festival Office along with the Pharmacy of Design. Carolina Pietyra, president of KBF, spoke with Małgorzata Tomczak about their activities.
Open City 2024 Festival - Bohdan Ruciński, "Transition," 2010.
Photo: Tomasz Kulbowski, ©The Crossroads Center
Open City
The latest event co-organized by the Krakow City Development Agency is the Open City/Open City Festival, which transformed the city-owned grounds in Wesola into an open-air art gallery. The festival has a long history, dating back to 2009, but it is not associated with Krakow. The first edition, initiated by Waldemar Tatarczuk and organized by the Crossroads Center for Intercultural Creative Initiatives, was intended to bring art out of the gallery white cube into the city, to annex public space, to create circumstances for confronting works of art, the existing urban fabric and the community living in Lublin. All subsequent editions of Open City took place in Lublin, where each year a group of artists carried out artistic interventions in the city space. Individual editions had their own slogans - these included: "transience/permanence", "latent city - open city" or "formation".
Open City 2024 Festival - Opening of the Open City 2024 Festival.
photo: Agnieszka Kozlowska © Crossroads Center
Recent editions of Open City are slowly moving beyond the usual formula of an urban festival inextricably linked to Lublin. The aforementioned 2022 "formation" sought a new formula, story and identity for the city. Last year, Open City joined the "Shapes of Beauty" project, thus becoming part of an international art initiative, and now it goes to a completely new place - to the still undeveloped, though increasingly activating Wesoola in Krakow. Will the festival find its way in Krakow as well as it did in Lublin?
Open City 2024 festival - Radoslaw Skóra, "Kula" 2019
Photo: Agnieszka Kozlowska © Crossroads Center
matter of art
This year's edition of the Open City festival is held under the slogan "Mater:I," which, in the words of Piotr Franaszek, curator of the exhibition and director of Lublin's Crossroads Center, can be read in multiple ways. Franaszek sees the hospital buildings of Wesola as birthplaces, drawing parallels between the mother (the "Mater" of the title) and the artists and artists giving birth to the fruits of their creativity. An installation by Tomasz Krzpiet tells us about the birth of the works and the relationship between them and those responsible for their creation. Also not unrelated to the theme are Krzystof Bednarski's endlessly reproduced Marx heads, which were also present at Wesola. The second part of this year's slogan - "I" - corresponds precisely to the works themselves, giving them a subjective dimension. Franaszek also mentions this in the curatorial text, referring to the posthumanist current of new materialism and urging us to discover the "hidden life" of objects and places.
Open City 2024 Festival - Mariola Wawrzusiak "You won't sleep peacefully anymore," 2018; "Mroczek/Transition," 2018/2023
Photo: Klaudia Olender © Crossroads Center
This seems to be an appropriate way to understand this endeavor, which becomes a meeting place of material artistic objects with the spatial fabric of the place, marked by a rich history. Visitors to the exhibition thus become witnesses to a dialogue between places and things, taking place without human participation. However, this is not a dialogue that omits human threads - themes of birth, childhood or death recur like a boomerang. Between the buildings of the former University Hospital, David Černý's superhuman-sized newborns "crawl", while the disturbing sculptures of Mariola Wawrzusiak, who filled the building of the old kitchen with nightmarish visions of ants, spiders and bats, refer to children's fantasy, but also fears and anxieties. The same building also became a theater of death, consumed by flames looking out of the windows, installed there by Jacek Koziara.
Open City 2024 Festival - A montage of Dariusz Sitek's work "Polish Table" from 2019.
Photo: Klaudia Olender © Crossroads Center
Gro of the works on display are about discrimination, a sense of alienation or playing the role of a guest. At the back of the building at 19 Kopernika Street appeared banners inscribed by Alexander Perigot with words from the Polish language about foreign origin, the experience of discrimination is told by the accounts cut out on the walls of Dawid Marszewski's "Cell", while the social mood is illustrated in turn by Mariusz Tarkawian's "Coloring Book".
Open City 2024 Festival - The opening of the Open City 2024 Festival in Krakow.
Photo: Agnieszka Kozlowska © Crossroads Center
Such a theme seems to be no coincidence, not only because of the uneasy situation of minorities in Poland, the presence of people fleeing the war in Ukraine or the discussion taking place around the Union's ratification of the Migration Pact. The Open City festival itself is also a new initiative in Krakow, having come from another city. Fortunately, it has been welcomed by residents with enthusiasm - even in the middle of the week, in the mornings, people curious about interventions in the city's space stroll through Wesola in large numbers.
There are probably two reasons for this situation. The first is the way the exhibition's curator, Piotr Franaszek, has dealt with Krakow's reality. Coming from the collection assembled by the festival, the works have been organically and thoughtfully connected to the buildings on Wesola Street, gaining new and inscribing themselves into existing contexts. Artists from Krakow were also invited to collaborate - Open City presents interventions made by Jan Tutaj, Bartolomeo Koczenasz and Maja Moroz, among others. The second, and seemingly more important reason, is the need for art in the city space, the greatest expression of which is the interest in the Krakow edition of Open City. The vacuum left by the ArtBoom festival in Krakow, which hasn't taken place since 2016, is making itself known, and it looks like it's high time for Krakow to get its own initiative to fill its streets with art.
