Episode 6: SCHENGEN




Schauplatz International presents one day live installation
SCHENGEN – control observation point


15.06.2008 / 12 a.m.-8 p.m

Stadiums and borders are meant to build the national identity. Whereas the stadiums are the real architectural objects constructed within few years; borders are the products of our imagination. They are in fact consisting of contracts, performativ acts, symbols and potential violence. Borders and stadiums are supposed to tell us, who we are. Berlin-Bern group Schauplatz International recreated in the middle of the lawn a fragment of the polish eastern border in 1:1 scale. An observation point was constructed on the crown of the Stadium. Artist were picknicking on the lawn, in the borner zone, during the whole day long, taking to the experts and passers by. In this space of multi-meaning and contradiction, past and future Schauplatz International wanted to cool down and look at the site beauty and misery.

Until recently Frontex was located near the 10th-Anniversary Stadium. Frontex, the EU agency based in Warsaw is responsible for the border security in Europe. In cooperation with the police, the army and the secret service Frontex is organizing the quick intervention groups, people hunting and charter deportation. In consequence the emigrants are using more and more dangerous ways to pass the borders. Frontex employees, on their way to work, were passing every day by the Stadium and the market – the place which was dividing people in legal and illegal ones.

The artists were inspired by the phenomenon of the Stadium - built from the ruins of Warsaw as a monument of the communist regime, then the seat of the pioneers of the capitalism, the only place diverse culturally where the emigrants gathered, the meta-ruin. Very soon the new National Stadium for Euro 2012 will be built on this location. The amazing contrast between the derelict monument with the new, bottom-up energy of the traders and the emigrants, the architecture of the future, questioned procedures of Frontex and all other unknown features – created the climax of the control observation point.

experts taking part in Schengen, in order of appearance

Jan Węcławik, sport club long-term employee
Filip Pawlicki, student, have been to Schengen
dr Michał Kozłowski, philosopher, alterglobalist
Wiesław Nowicki, ornitologist
Radek Pyffel, sinologist, author of China in the year of Olimpics
Aslan Dekaev, refugee from Chechnya
Hubert Kowalski, expert on military technologies
Ngo Van Tuong, Vietnamese oppositionist journalist from Dan Chin Viet
Prof. Barbara Sudnik, botanic, exert on the plants in the stadium
and dr Marek Ostrowski, specialist on landscape information
Ewa Masłowska, teacher
Tadeusz, security guard, company Ekotrade



PRESS:
Gazeta Stołeczna, 14.06.2008
CJG, 13.06.2008