Autumn in Gdańsk: Foxes, fires and outsiders Rob Garre Rob Garre reflects on his role as curator of “Unearthing Delights: Markets, Memories and Mee�ngs”, the 5th edi�on of Narracje - Installa�ons and Interven�ons in Public Space organised by Instytut Kultury Miejskiej (Gdańsk City Culture Ins�tute) in partnership with Gdańskiej Galerii Miejskiej (Gdańsk City Gallery). Originally published as “Foxes, fires and foreigners” in Art News New Zealand (Autumn, 2014; pp98-101).

Rebecca Ann-Hobbs, “Ah-Round” 2009; photo by Bogna Kociumbas In November 2013 I curated the 5

th edi�on of Narracje (Narra�ves), a programme of temporary night-�me

public art projects in Bal�c coast city of Gdańsk, Poland. The night before the fes�val opened, I was walking back to the town centre, the medieval heart of Gdańsk, with colleagues from the City Culture Ins�tute. It was very early in the morning; the street lamps reflected their amber light off the wet cobblestones; and the below-zero autumn air was moist with the promise of mists forming on the river and canals. Our small group was walking heads down, deep in quiet conversa�on, when suddenly something caught my eye through the mesh fence next to me. At that moment I was standing precisely at the threshold between the old town and the territory of our programme; an unmade district of neglected spaces and ruined sites; historically a place of outsiders. This was the very place where the two worlds of the 12

th century urban dwellers of met with the world of travellers, traders and villagers who were

kept outside the city. We stood between the first historic city gates and the water markets, the hub of more than five centuries of trade. Right here I was suddenly transfixed by what was, for me, quite exo�c. Suddenly the real world of foreign encounters collided with my ideas about this place as an historic site where people carefully regulated the approach of foreigners and strangers; bringing them near, but not too near, while they created an urban home behind the city walls. For a lingering but brief moment I was looking into the face of an urban fox, not more than one metre from me. The fox was also contempla�ng me for the same brief moment before loping off again into the shadows. The annual fes�val “NARRACJE – Installa�ons and Interven�ons in Public Space” organised since 2009 by Gdańsk City Culture Ins�tute moves each year to a new territory in or near the historic heart of the city in order to familiarise locals with lile-known parts of their city. In 2013 the territory was a district with no name, formerly known as Długie Ogrody, or the Long Gardens, an area immediately outside the original city gates

where trading and gardening took place in an arrangement that was typical of city development in the medieval era. The mid-November autumn fes�val is staged over three to four nights between 5pm and midnight.

Gregory Benne, “Apokalypolis I” 2013; photo by Rob Garre NARRACJE 2013 was contained within a 1-kilometer square territory 1000s of people followed a trail, map in hand, to encounter art and community projects disbursed across 22 sites on building walls, open green spaces, streets, shop fronts, clubhouses and over water; and involving sound, scent, light, installa�on, performance, memory, spoken voice, song, photographs, video, interac�ve situa�ons and par�cipatory workshops. The 29 ar�sts included several familiar to New Zealand audiences: New Zealanders Juliee Laird, Gregory Benne, Rebecca Ann Hobbs and Rachael Rakena; German Ines Tartler who made a public art project at Britomart, Auckland in 2009; and Australian Anastasia Klose who showed in Primavera 2012 at the MCA, this year’s Melbourne Now at the NGV, and my group exhibi�on Lost in a dream at Snake Pit. At the end of the 2-hour trail, people would arrive, either in small groups of friends or as a part of one of the many guided tours, at the Fes�val Club in the middle of the territory for warming food and drink accompanied by a con�nuous programme of local bands.

Granary Island, November 2014 (where the fox was encountered); photo by Rob Garre What aracted me to the Długie Ogrody territory was that it is a palimpsest of heritage traces which maps the ebb and flow of Gdańsk’s history from the 12

th to the late 20

th centuries. It is also a place where the complexity

of the city’s contemporary situa�ons are evident, from neglect, lack of planning and derelic�on to high-end

gentrifica�on and the humble everyday of long-standing residen�al communi�es. In this context, in which delight and disquiet rub shoulders, I wanted to work with ar�sts who could bring what I call a ‘light touch’ to the mee�ng between historic situa�ons and present-day con�ngencies. Ar�sts whose art works give audiences both a direct art experience as well as opening their awareness to thought-provoking or moving aspects of the site and its situa�on.

Ines Tartler, “Gdansk Golden Garage” 2013, photo by Rob Garre (top); and overlooking Kanał Na Stępce towards the Ines Tartler and Alexandra Guillot sites; photo by Rob Garre (boom) An example of the modest and unassuming manner which allowed the art and site to speak in tandem was Ines Tartler’s “Gdansk Golden Garage” 2013 project in the lile crooked residen�al street of Pułkownika Jana Dziewanowskiego crowded with residents’ cars. Visi�ng the neighbourhood in the days prior to the fes�val that ar�st, her assistance and I invited residents to par�cipate through their hos�ng a golden dust cover on their own parked car for all or part of the evening. NARRACJE organisers had been scep�cal that local people world get involved; but our op�mism and confidence proved well-founded, as, on the stroke of 5pm on the first evening of the fes�val one local resident took up the offer and promptly celebrated the occasion with his partner and their dog. From then each evening there were takers for all three covers. Knowingly the project pointed to the oOen humble rela�onal gestures needed to turn a street into a neighbourhood and a house into a home. The golden covers also mined the unpleasant memories of many locals affected by the recent collapse of a local investment company Amber Gold. Though it re-awakened people’s memories of their outrage at the loss of their savings, it also affected a détournement of the symbolic value of gold, at least momentarily, away

from the world of corrupt privilege to a place more homely and connected with the neighbourhood aspira�ons of ordinary people. In the same cobbled street of largely 19

th century apartment buildings; a street which had survived the

devasta�on of Bri�sh bombing and the Russian invasion of 1945; French ar�st Alexandra Guillot presented “Silencio”, a performance that was projected in giant scale onto the exterior of the building. Nearby and only visible via the live video projec�on, the ar�st sat behind a table, slowly, sheet-by-sheet, feeding a stack of A4 sheets of white paper into a paper shredder, all the while forming a soO mountain of shreds on the floor. The mystery of this work was not whether there was anything wrien on the paper before Guillot gazed at and shredded each sheet, slowly, methodically, one at a �me; more it was the mystery that perhaps every viewer could iden�fy with in wondering about the rela�onship between loss and memory; and how we try to hold onto ephemeral sensa�ons. The Guillot site was chosen because it symbolised some of the most recent social memories of Gdańsk. It is one of two places apartments that survived the destruc�on and almost total evacua�on of the city in 1945; and therefore became one of the city’s first new communi�es when Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Polish villagers repopulated Gdańsk. Yet for many locals, this was something they were not aware of. More than this, Guillot’s project about loss and memory could point to even earlier stories. Prior to being reclaimed from the marshes and turned into a street at the end of the 19

th century, it had been one of several waterways criss-crossing the

Długie Ogrody polder that echoed to lost dialect and songs of the Flisacy, Vistula raOsmen, street traders, craOsmen and entertainers who navigated the waterways across Poland and the Ukraine, and who had occupied the site, for many centuries.

Alexandra Guillot, “Silencio” 2013; photo by Rob Garre Deep within the only truly public green space in the whole territory, a city-block wide park, there is a formal avenue of mature trees with a damp, leaf-strewn gravel path and a few park benches. On these dark autumn nights the park’s interior would have been formless silhouees and deep shadows were it not for New Zealand ar�st Juliee Laird’s site-specific installa�on “Dreaming of summer”. Laird had craOed clusters of colourful leaves and branches out of kniRng yarn, wire and �ny LED spot-lights. By graOing these onto the trees either side of the gravel path, just above head height, she made a delicate and invi�ng bower that drew people deeper into the otherwise unlit park. The assemblages were just within reach of the inquisi�ve who peered and touched to work the forms out. Placed towards the end of the NARRACJE trail and off the street, this site and art work created one of the quiet moments of delight in the fes�val, where people lingered and talked in hushed tones. “Dreaming of summer” was conceived as a response to the loca�on’s historic gardens that had fed the growing city from the Middle Ages; and more recently there had been community gardens here, allocated to local residents by the state in the mid-20

th century and then arbitrarily abolished some�me in the 1990s. Laird’s

work also memorialised New Zealand’s connec�on to the mid-century Polish diaspora. On November 2nd,

1944, 733 Polish orphans arrived by ship in Wellington and became famous as the “Children of Pahiatua”. Each leaf in the bower is a reminder of those children and the binding serves as a symbol of the challenges all migrants face in trying to graO themselves onto a new home.

Juliee Laird, “Dreaming of Summer” 2013, photo by Rob Garre (top); and Katarzyna Malejka and Tomek Wlaźlak, “What a beau�ful disaster” 2013; photo by Bogna Kociumbas (boom) Within the fes�val territory alongside small residen�al neighbourhoods, pockets of gentrifica�on, the river and canals, there are many ruins and unused or abandoned sites. One of these is an extensive acreage of open space and heritage buildings that was once the city’s abaoir but that has been in pernicious decline since being sold off to private and now bankrupt interests aOer 1989. One consequence being that its original stock of 22 heritage listed buildings has been whiled down to nine over the past ten years as one building aOer another is rendered unsafe by apparently deliberate fires. Katarzyna Malejka and Tomek Wlaźlak’s project “What a beau�ful disaster" re-staged the burning of one of the most beau�ful of these buildings through sound and video anima�on. As people approached the work on Angielska Grobla they were enclosed by dark 5-storey working class apartment buildings on one side and burnt-out heritage sites on the other. The roads are pied and uneven and the pavements seriously neglected. It feels like a part of the city that the local government has abandoned; yet it is a diverse and viable neighbourhood, albeit bordering on a whole block of ruins.

The ar�sts created their installa�on at the ornate gates of the former abaoir. With a cluster of video cameras mounted on tripods facing one of the looming administra�on buildings of the former abaoir, Malejka and Wlaźlak presented a computer anima�on of the building engulfed by flame, the roar of fire filling the street as if asking “What say do ordinary people have in the shaping of their city?” In the end it was an emblema�c ques�on; consistent with the ques�on that lay at the heart of “Unearthing Delights”, namely: what new sensa�ons and challenging thoughts can be born out of the sensi�ve pairing of art projects with historically rich sites in order to shed light on the real situa�on for ordinary people?

Mariana Seredyńskiego, January 2013, photo by Rob Garre (top); and park on Świętej Barbary, January 2013, site Juliee Laird’s project and former site of community gardens, photo by Rob Garre (boom)

Remnant of Baroque palace garden wall, photo by Rob Garre (top); warehouse of old butchery, photo by Instytut Kultury Miejskiej (middle); Rob Garre giving curator’s tour, photo by Bogna Kociumbas (boom leO); and N5 audience members, photo by Bogna Kociumbas (boom right)

Apartments, garages and park on Krowoderska Street; photo by Instytut Kultury Miejskiej (top); Narracje 5 posters, photo by Rob Garre (middle); and Długie Ogrody Street, photo by Rob Garre (boom)

Granary Island, summer 2012; photo by Instytut Kultury Miejskiej (top); and N5 Fes�val Club, November 2013, photo by Rob Garre (boom) LINK: Narracje 5 documenta�on on Rob Garre’s website

Originally published as “Foxes, fires and foreigners” in Art News New Zealand, Autumn, 2014; pp98-101.