notatki prowincjonalne [1.]

Minsk Mazowiecki, winter 2010, scan from part b. roll negative 120, frame size 6 x 6 cm, camera: Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 512/16.

A space for milling?

Peripheral cities, far from the centre, frozen by the lack of development prospects, out of time, out of circulation. Without a modernising vision, because globalisation has bypassed them. Deserted and frozen in their time of being-beyond-time, between past and future. Cities whose aim is no longer to act and develop, but only to survive and wait for the slowly approaching disintegration. At the same time such places are attacked by elements that are derivatives of globalisation, but in its "junk" form. New forms, new materials, plasticity and shoddiness, visual chaos. All resulting from a lack of rules.

The modernisation processes taking place on a mass scale are connected - as Zygmunt Bauman put it - with the production of the category of "people - waste", and the factors generating this are: demand, competition, requirements of efficiency and productivity. A category of "redundant people" is being created - unemployed, prisoners, immigrants, refugees, displaced persons, asylum seekers, old and lonely people - for the society of the modern period, who are perceived as social intruders.

Does a person in such a peripheral city have an overwhelming sense of the senselessness of their own existence, of being a part of Bauman's "life on the run"? The more active, younger ones seek their place somewhere far away in the Centre, which is a city on the run, a city of the multiplication of material prosperity and consumption, of the illusion of participation in the mainstream. And the man of the peripheral city can choose - or this choice is made for him - passivity.