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A first impression in January 2011

Entry point in January 2011

Crucial points...look around...whistle...

boot legs - another day - the city and the stranger.

How can a direction be sensed without light?

Along the river many walk to promise each other a common future.

It is quite another matter to put the past behind.

Here the body stems against the door to keep the wind and the rumors out.

Across the street goes on the light in an apartment on the upper floor.

The imaginative eye sees like artists do things behind the curtain.

No one else seems to watch. It is nearly nine o'clock in the evening.

A darkness full of whispers and strange sounds fills the city.

Naturally not all of these sounds can be deciphered or decoded.

Blue notes exchange their colour with the red ones.

After the light went on, he started to notice her. Beautiful.

She came swiftly into the room but then stopped. She waited.

Still the clock moves on. Time pushes forward.

There are those moments in which something happens.

And then someone shouts all of a sudden:

"einen Augenblick, bitte! Sind Sie das? Nein. Dann Entschuldigung! Es war eine Verwechselung, aber Sie sehen meinem damaligen Freund sehr, sehr aehnlich."

("One moment please. Are you the person I am thinking of? No. Then pardon! It was a deception but you do look very much like my former friend.")

Things end with a nuanced thought:

'Von dannen gegangene Figuren, Schatten der Vergangenheit, ein Liebesgedicht!'

(figures which have gone away, shadows of the past, a love poem)

Hf 16.1.2011

 

 

Diary notes 16 - 19.1.2011

The flight Athens - Wroclaw was via Munich with several hours to spare during that stopover. Since anticipation is very strong when going to a new city while waiting at the airport of one city, namely Munich I knew during my childhood (1952 - 57), naturally many thoughts enter the mind. It is a kind of recollecting bits and pieces before going on to the new city.

Munich

in the darkest of all hours

remorseful as I am

I sit and watch in astonishment

the silence of the church bells

of the Frauenkirche

hundred meters up high

to mark the deafening silence of hers

as she turns another page

in her own note book

to recall that she had left her mirror

at his home the last time she was there

to pass by like the angel fleeing with Walter Benjamin

into exile

as soldiers come marching down the street

their boots now cracking the pavement

to let the earth shudder once again.

HF 16.1.2011

 

After leaving the Art hotel on ul. Kielbasnicza 20, Wroclaw 50 - 110, a first encounter in the street was this small figure.

I recognized it since Jan Wais, Assistant director of Wroclaw city had given to me a little minature at the conference in Berlin last December. It was dedicated to the freedom of the woman in society - a remarkable introduction indeed.

Entering at night the central square to see a Christmas tree but without any snow around on this January 16th 2011, that allows something to imagine how this special season was celebrated.

Of course, by now almost every city puts up for Christmas such a special tree. Upon entering I was, however, surprised by the enormous free space. All buildings kept themselves at a respectful distance. More important I felt welcome by this city even though until now a complete stranger.

Map of Wroclaw found at the one end of central square

The map indicates how the central square and its nearby buildings are surrounded by a river. It is said that the city has 100 bridges. It evokes some associations with a city like Venice even though that is but an imaginary glance towards the South.

Associations as to this city are more towards a 'microcosmos' captured in a book recommended as best entry point into a city no longer called Breslau but since 1945 Wroclaw.

Away from the centre, in a nearby narrow passage, the former alley of the slaughter house, there can be found these sculptures with a prominent piece being the goose laying the golden egg.

Near to the other sculptures can be found this rooster

 

 

View from the hotel room, sun just coming up and mist in the morning air

 

Another one of those figures, this time outside a former jail now a popular student cafe

Art centre with banner for Wroclaw 2016

A church with flat towers

Typical flats build in the fifties with no where to go thereafter except to stay

As if all European cities whether now in the East or West became marked after 1945 by a kind of building construction which did not wish to have any frills. They were flat, functional and ugly the older they got. Still, it has to be recognized that the people living in these flats do not wish to move anywhere else. Having come into the city from exile they put down their suitcases in the wish to no longer go on yet another journey. 'Moda Polska' may indeed be a kind of trade mark which continues, however, on a much larger scale outside the city borders, there where high rise apartment blocs shape the lives of not two hundred but of thousands of people as if the Socialist construction for the masses was to be continued after 1989. The dominance of lines and of cement leaves little space for anything else. It explains why the concept of Wroclaw 2016, namely 'spaces for beauty' makes so much sense but which needs to be translation into an ongoing transformation of the city. However, the design of the future or what is called nowadays 'city branding' has to be more than mere work at image level. For remove the imagination of its people and you have virtually nothing worthwhile to remember as experiences remain just the same. Thus there has to be given shape to other kinds of materials if the city is to take on a warmer tone, that is aside the new pebble stones and kind of modern obstacles that all pedestrianized zones take on without any afterthought how dangerous this material can be for absent minded tourists looking around but then stumbling over different levels of the terrain meant to bring into the urban landscape some simple variation.

View of the puppet theatre and to the right a part of the WRO centre for media art

There can be found many streets with a mixture of old and semi new

At such a street corner there reveals itself something. It may be called just escaping by the breath of the neck urban poverty. A lot more needs to be done to upgrade the city into something livable and enjoyable insofar as weather conditions allowing, there is not a sign of a tree or nature nearby. It seems to forget that spaces to move around should not be just deplorable in the meaning of the word as being not worthwhile to talk about.

Such a street scene with the streetcar tracks in the middle of road remind very much of Leipzig.

Suddenly there can be discovered in midst of this revamped city some modern architectural effort to alter the building code, to break rules, to empty the historical references and yet they return with a force of their own as this city has a cultural heritage known more by its double name Breslau / Wroclaw. Circumstances have it that also the take over of modern cars and shops mark at street level the present. Circumstances have it that there is no way around them.

Opposite the modern looking building there can be cast a view down a bend road depicting the structure of the old town near the central square.

19.1.2011 Departure

Pick up by driver from Municipality at Art Hotel, 15.30

On the way to the airport due to being daytime and after having managed to escape the usual traffic jam, I could see better the urban landscape around Wroclaw. There is a tremendous extension of the city outside its old boundaries. I was aghast how anyone could agree to such ugly urban development casting thousands of people into massive building blocs. It is easily to see that this can reproduce a lot of urban poverty.

Even if some recent constructions attempt to include some architectural tricks, these huge building blocs are in reality senseless monstrocities of large scale housing schemes. Someone is making a lot of money out of them while the majority just suffers.

Adam Chwielewski mentioned a wish to do something to do about what has replaced the importance of the church in old Poland compared to what are rapidly becoming the new churches, namely the huge shopping malls on the outskirts of the city. However, I saw real new churches besides those suburbian buildings.

It seem as if the mistakes of the previous Socialist regime favoring huge apartment blocs for the masses is being continued. Why is this so?

When in Pecs in October 2010 and European Capital of Culture besides Istanbul and Essen / Ruhr 2010, I had discussed with urban planner Anna Arvanitaki the weakness or even fault of the Pecs concept since it concentrated on the historical centre but left out completely the urban poverty around the edges of the city.

I would wish Wroclaw 2016 does take up a position with regards to this kind of ugliness and urban deprivation. There are real social costs being accummulated and it shall come to the same kinds conflicts which broke out in suburbs of Paris due to a lack of culture in those areas.

As a matter of fact I left Wroclaw with an overall impression there is a lot of carelessness or something in-between poverty and ill conceived urban projects. The decisive year of 2016 should really take the city forward by being more than just a mere cheap place for drunk tourists.

If there is a hesitation amongst the people to go forward and no real openness really existing, then because they are still afraid of authority. It is the kind of ritual I spoke about in my first reflection while in Wroclaw. Caring means also people sense they do live and work in a humane surrounding and are not dragged into endless efforts made in vain to beautify the city.

Thus I can understand now much better the reason for Wroclaw 2016 concept being expressed as a desire to give 'spaces for beauty'. It could start by having the grey houses be painted, a scheme Athens applied for the Olympic year in 2004. But if the road and transporation system is any indication at all, then more confusion reigns and lack of proper design than anything being done in a proper way. That then is an indication that the entire system is not well thought through and the urban designers, architects, engineers, urban planners etc. at work but also construction companies involved, have nothing really in mind. There is no vision for the city to link its historical centre with the outskirts and region. Rather development remains massive but equally stupified on how to take care of details when there are so many other demands at macro scale.

It would be important include in the bid for Wroclaw 2016 very much the urban and cultural planning component so as to make compatability with culture into a prerequisite for future decisions affecting actions by the Municipal Council.

To cite a positive example, Linz when preparing itself to qualify for European Capital of Culture, pledged in a resolution passed in 2000 that "the City of Linz, by analogy with point 4 of article 124 of the Maastricht Agreement, commits itself to take cultural aspects into account in fulfilling its communal functions." (Cultural Development Plan, 2000, p. 19)

That should link up with the cultural strategy for the city and the region. You cannot emphasize the historical centre by asking the tourists coming to close their eyes to all the other urban ugliness for that would repeat the unethical behavior of the former Socialist tourists who went to Moscow without noticing the Gulags.

When I asked the driver of the City of Wroclaw taking me to the airport what he expects or hopes as outcome if Wroclaw becomes European Capital of Culture in 2016, his reply was most convincing: "a good story!"

 

 

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