Laura Palmer Foundation

IDEA: Laura Palmer Foun­da­tion oper­ates on the verge of fic­tion and real­ity. Bor­row­ing its name from the char­ac­ter whose cen­tral absence orga­nizes the action of David Lynch’s movie Twin Peaks, the label pro­duces actions that exam­ine social and polit­i­cal agen­das, con­cep­tual exhi­bi­tions, par­tic­i­pa­tion events, staged sit­u­a­tions and per­for­mances. Incor­po­rat­ing real life, polit­i­cal real­ity and fic­tious or staged events, con­fronting expe­ri­ence and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion, Laura Palmer Foun­da­tion exam­ines the for­mats of curat­ing, art and activist prac­tice.

ORGAN­I­SA­TION: Laura Palmer Foun­da­tion is an inde­pen­dent, non-​profit label and was cre­ated in 2007 by Joanna Warsza as a platform for her projects. Many of them resulted from con­ver­sa­tions with Agnieszka Kurant (artist), Janek Sowa (soci­ol­o­gist, activist), and Rene Wawrzkiewicz (graphic cura­tor). Projects have been pro­duced by Zuza Siko­rska, and the web­site designed by Kuba de Bar­baro. For each project dif­fer­ent artists, experts, jour­nal­ists, activist and other part­ners are invited.

ATTEN­DANCE AND STA­TIS­TICS: In its very short life­time the Foun­da­tion gained a very trust­ful audi­ence wel­com­ing over 700 people to each man­i­fes­ta­tion. The Laura Palmer projects are fully cov­ered by daily and pro­fes­sional media and press (“Gazeta Wybor­cza”, “Dzi­en­nik”, “Inrock­upt­ibles”, “TVP Kul­tura”, “TVN”, Tok Fm, “Berliner Zeitung” and many more.)

PRO­FILE: Laura Palmer has been oper­at­ing mostly in the public space search­ing for ‘shifts’ in the struc­ture of the real, and espe­cially in one very par­tic­u­lar loca­tion in the city center of Warsaw – the ruined and aban­doned 10th-Anniversary Sta­dium. It’s a former com­mu­nist show­piece, a sports venue for 100,000 spec­ta­tors which ceased its sport activ­ity early 1990s, becom­ing a ruined site with the sur­round­ing open-​air market known as Jar­mark Europa cre­at­ing a symbolic ‘city within a city’

AWARDS AND MORE: Laura Palmer was awared by “Gazeta Wybor­cza” for the best project 2007 (for A Trip to Asia), and nom­i­nated by “Aktivist” Cul­ture Mag­a­zin best action 2007 and by TV Kul­tura, best project 2007. Laura Palmer Foun­da­tion is extremely non-​profit and low-​cost organ­i­sa­tion. The term ‘Foun­da­tion’ is used some­how sub­ver­sively but also accord­ing to the polish low, where Foun­da­tions are easy to estab­lish with­out an ini­tial cap­i­tal.

Logo

The logo is fluid and it is gen­er­ated from three dif­fer­ent data streams. Its graphic sign can be cre­ated on a momentum as a result of an aleatory equa­tion between: a number of hours inter­net users are wait­ing for pages to down­load, a temperature in Sno­qualmie, USA and the number of light­en­ings hit­ting the planet earth every day.