[thingist] 16beaver, THE THING, and Laura Palmer Foundation present:

[Wolfgang Staehle]

Public-Art Projects in the Ex-communist Stadium and in the former Warsaw
Ghetto 

Joanna Warsza and Warren Niesłuchowski / Laura Palmer Foundation /
Warsaw, Poland


Talk, Screenings, Book Launch and Discussion

Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7:00 pm

16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor

New York

Free and open to all

http://the.thing.net

http://www.16beavergroup.org/

www.laura-palmer.pl



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's 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 readerStadium 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 Foundationand 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.  Incor­po­rat­ing 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, 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.

Warren Niesłuchowski was born in a Polish refugee camp in Germany after
World War II and was raised in the United States.  While a deserter in
Paris in the late ’60s, he performed with the Bread and Puppet Theatre
throughout Europe and in Iran.  For the last many years, after studies
in linguistics and social theory at Harvard College, he has been working
with and for artists, first at P. S. 1 in New York, and then
independently, as a writer, speaker, translator, editor, and
collaborator.

The book and the events were created with the generous support of the
City of Warsaw