Zaplecze [1.]

Poznań, department store Alfa, Święty Marcin Street, view from the back, north side; ca 2000; scan from a black and white negative.

The hinterland, or 'scratch' of modernism.

Alfa Department Store was built between 1965 and 1972, designed by Jerzy Liśniewicz, on what was then Armii Czerwona Street, on the site of several tenement houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were demolished for this purpose. It is a complex of five 12-storey high-rises, connected by a long common plinth in the form of a horizontal two-storey pavilion, with elevations divided by windows framed by vertical ribs. It was built along the northern frontage of the street, hiding behind it the blind walls of two quarters of buildings covering Gwarna, Kantaka and Ratajczaka Streets, which became exposed after the necessary demolitions. This resulted in a specific space separating the old from the new, as the "pavilion" form of the ground floor - in accordance with the modernist doctrine, which genetically most often did not fit into the traditional and historical structure of the city based on the building plot - required open space.

This specific, narrow and elongated space, stretching from the west to the east, like a Heideggerian 'interstice in being' or a 'break in the beingness' of the city, functions at the same time as a symbolic border between two worlds, the horizontal and the vertical, the historical and the contemporary, the pushing in and the pushing out, bearing in itself the traces of the indefiniteness resulting from its character, becoming a specific game of "Aussehen" and "Enseehen" (Ich erinnere hier an Heideggers Spiel von Emergenz und De-Emergenz). "The horizontal is something whose essence includes the open field or fissure (fugue) of vision that surrounds it from all sides," Heidegger wrote in his Conversations on a country road.

Poznań, department store Alfa, Święty Marcin Street, view from the back, north side; ca 2000; scan from a black and white negative.

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.

Zwielokrotnienia [2.]

Warsaw, PKiN, 2010, frame size 6x9 cm, Kodak Brownie No 2 camera, multiple exposure, scan from 120 Kodak 100TMX negative.

Tame or untamed?

Many times in Konwicki's works, the Palace of Culture became an untamed, foreign, alien axis in the topography of the city, a central point around which the protagonist revolved. It was a symbol of political, cultural and spatial violence in a mutilated city, in times when this political, cultural and spatial violence was not symbolic, but real and affecting everyone. And what did he become when this violence receded?

Tadeusz Konwicki:

"(...) I harassed that poor Palace of Culture, I mocked it. Why: it was some kind of symbol of the Soviet Union's supremacy. When the Soviet Union fell, a clock was installed on the tower, and suddenly I looked up - a nice city hall. And I changed my attitude. I will confess to you, if nobody can hear us, that I like the Palace. I have a view from my balcony, you know, I'm constantly watching what's going on with it."

Adam Michnik, polish press redactor, Gazeta Wyborcza:

"(...) Well, for me the Palace of Culture is all the time a symbol of what would be done to us and to our language and to ourselves if they succeeded."

Tadeusz Konwicki, polish famous writer:

"Adasiu, they have already succeeded once. They erected a gigantic cathedral on today's Piłsudski Square, and it seems to me that in terms of its size it was not much smaller than the Palace of Culture. And it is gone. It has disappeared. So we know how to escape somehow. But the Palace of Culture ... Adasiu, it's such a building now, everyone comes, tourists take pictures of it. Should I continue to hate it? "

Adam Michnik's interview with Tadeusz Konwicki, in Contexts. Polish Folk Art, no. 4 (291), 2010, p. 72.

Marek Nowakowski, writer:

"Does the Palace of Culture deserve to be called a monument? It has already become one and should be protected as such. Although I do grieve about the city being demolished just so a hideous building could stand in the heart of the city. I used to want to tear it down, but I'm used to it now. I also look at it more practically and wonder how much it would cost to demolish it, probably millions. Besides, the Palace in its hideousness is not so lonely in the capital. Its blocks of flats from several dozen years ago or the Foster's office building at Piłsudski Square are brave extras. PKiN is a living souvenir of communist Poland and let it stay that way. "

source: http://sztuka-architektury.pl/article/1658/co-z-palacem