The 10-th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-ruined Warsaw. It was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years, by the mid-’80s, it fell into ruin, becom ing a post-Communist phantom. It was ‘revived’ by Viet namese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russ ian traders, pioneers of capitalism. An open-air market called Jarmark Europa became the only multiculturalsite in the city, a storehouse of biographies, a major tourist attraction, a primeval forest, a realm of precarity and discount shopping, or a workcamp for botanists. Its het erogeneity, its long standing (non)presence in the middle of the post-Communist city, the invisibility of the Vietnamese minority, the debate around the new National Stadium here for the Euro 2012 football cup, and the lack of a critical debate on Poland’s post-war architectural legacy — inspired Joanna Warsza curatorial project Finissage of Stadium X.
A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium (2006); Boniek!, a one-man re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan, (2007); or Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio (2008) were subjective excursions undertaken by artists, activists and athletes into the reality of a Stadium ‘no longer extant’. The result were projects of a participative and semi-documentary nature (a walk, a football match, a Sunday radio station, a spectacle on a building site, an exhibition featuring real people) which touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, the power of imagination, ambiguities, and the future, as well as on the problem aticexoticism of a disappearing place.
The reader Stadium X-A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts present ing a multi-faceted picture of that site’s deterioration and its existence as a ‘city within a city’ and also documents the series of live art projects. The Stadium and its parasites functions, which are now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was.
Stadium X — A Place That Never Was: A Reader
Edited by Joanna Warsza
Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Ewa Majewska, Daniel Miller, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Van Tuong, Tomasz Zimoch
Design by René Wawrzkiewicz
Photos by Mikołaj Długosz, Marta Pruska, Marta Orlik
Published by Bęc Zmiana Foundation and Ha!art, Warsaw and Kraków, 2008/2009
U. S. distributor Textfield; European distributor Motto
Project supported by City of Warsaw
FINISSAGE OF THE STADION X
- Finissage of the Stadion X
- Stadium X, located in the center of Warsaw is a contemporary ruin. Build from the debris of the II WW was the flagship of the Stalin era. In the early 1980s, it lost its function as a sports facility to be “resuscitated” by Vietnamese and Russian traders – the pioneers of capitalism who created the biggest market in central Europe called Jarmark Europa. The area is the only “out of logic” place in the capital: overgrown with wild plants, shops open from 3 am to 12 pm, the crowd communicates in Asiatic languages while archeologists search for medieval treasures, making the place a Warsaw ‘Berlin wall’. The Stadium and the market will be replaced by a new National Stadium by the end of 2008. This (absent) presence of the ruin in the centre of a postcommunist city, the ongoing debate on Poland’s hosting of Euro 2012, lack of debate on the architectural heritage of the postwar era, the invisibility of the Vietnamese minority and a different logic of this place brought about a series of performative events titled “Finissage of the Stadium X in episodes”.