http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/
'Stadium X' - Joanna Warsza
BONIEK! A One-man Re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium Football Match by Massimo Furlan, commentary by Tomasz Zimoch, 10-th Anniversary Stadium Warsaw, October 2007
Open Lecture
Wednesday 02 December 2009, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design,
16 John Islip Street London SW1P 4JU
Joanna Warsza will discuss her curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader Stadium X — A Place That Never Was. Both projects were inspired by the heterotopic logic of Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium, and its long-standing (non-) presence in the middle of the city. Built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated capital, in the early 1990s the stadium fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders. Since then the Stadium and the open-air market surrounding it have become an Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of discount shopping, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, a spontaneous piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for archaeologists and botanists.
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, becoming a post-Communist phantom. It was ‘revived’ by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism. An open-air market called Jarmark Europa became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies, a major tourist attraction, a primeval forest, a realm of precarity and discount shopping, or a work camp for botanists. Its heterogeneity, its longstanding (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 problematic exoticism of a disappearing place.
The reader Stadium X-A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts presenting 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
Laura Palmer Foundation takes its name from the character whose absence organizes the plot of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The label produces actions, conceptual events, and performances. Incor po rat ing real life and fictitious or staged events, and its representation, it seeks out new collaborative models.
Joanna Warsza A curator and artist on the cusp of the performing and visual arts, she also directs the Laura Palmer Foundation. She works mostly in public space with the invisible, the ephemeral or staged situations — around the Vietnamese community in Warsaw, Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland or post-soviet architecture legacy in Georgia and Armenia. She has collaborated with AICA Armenia, CCA Kaliningrad, CCA Kiev, the Centre Pompidou, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the Building in Berlin or Performa in New York, among many other projects.
The book and the events were created with the generous support of the City of Warsaw
In collaboration with Critical Practice.
