Schauplatz International, one of the most interesting Swiss independent theatre groups of the moment, employs journalistic methods in its work. The artists always begin by conducting thorough research: interviewing people, searching for information on the Web, inspecting the site, and comparing various viewpoints. The result is a theatre that is community-oriented, political, and documentary. Schauplatz has, for instance, recreated onstage the interviews immigrants have to go through when applying for asylum in Switzerland, re-enacted live the movie Free Willy, and exposed tax fraud in the Swiss town of Zug through the active participation of tax experts and corporate managers. Poland’s admission to the Schengen zone and the fact that Frontex, the European Union’s external-border security agency, is located in Warsaw, were the reasons for Schauplatz’s interest in Warsaw and the 10th-Anniversary Stadium. In the middle of the field of grass that had overgrown the pitch the artists recreated a portion of Poland’s eastern border, which is also the EU’s Eastern border, on a scale of 1:1. A control observation point was constructed on the crown of the stadium, from which viewers were able to monitor the EU’s Eastern frontier. During the eight hour-long live installation, the artists picnicked on the pitch, held discussions about the abstractness of borders, the construction of national identity, and the meaning of the EU flag. Their voices were relayed to the crown of the stadium, and binoculars and telescopes were provided for the viewers to view the action.
The starting point for the performance was the reflection that stadiums and borders are meant to build national identity. While stadiums are concrete architectural objects whose construction takes several years to complete, borders are products of our imagination, involving contracts, symbols, and potential violence. Both borders and stadiums are supposed to tell us who we are. Until recently, Frontex had its offices near the Stadium. The agency, in collaboration with the police, the military, and the secret services operates rapid-intervention teams and organises people-hunts and charter deportations. As a result, illegal immigrants resort to ever more dangerous ways of crossing borders. On their way to work every day, Frontex employees passed the Stadium, a place that, like national borders, used to divide people between legals and illegals. Schauplatz’s one-day live installation required close observation. When the artists saw the 10th-Anniversary Stadium for the first time, they immediately realised that their performance had to dialogue with scale, with dimension — ‘large’ vs. ‘small’, the hugeness of the stadium vs. the littleness of the individual within it. They wanted to give the viewer the possibility of different views. One of those was looking through binoculars at an ordinary piece of grass, where nothing happens. The artists did not force themselves on the stadium; instead they created a situation of live exhibition, turning themselves into objects of display. They also invited special guests.
One of those was software expert Hubert Kowalski, who in a matter-of-fact manner described the functioning of software that makes it possible for border guards to tell whether it is a human or animal crossing the border. He described robots that can recognise movement, objects, or the presence of living organisms, and explained the functioning of heat-sensitive cameras installed along borders. He also added that his hobby was re-enactments of historical battles. A little earlier a refugee from Chechnya, Aslan Dekaev, had appeared on the pitch, followed by someone who re-enacts events from World Wars I and II. The artists then wondered out loud whether fifty years from now military-history enthusiasts will be re-enacting the events in Grozny. The situation of obliqueness, uncertainty, and non-action created by Schauplatz was intentional, as the artists consciously renounce control of the situations they set in motion. With their subdued inaction, they provoked viewers to stroll about the Stadium, to enter the field of action — as if the artists’ presence were not important, and they were the reason the viewers were there. ‘We had the impression we had become a sonic background for the audience. It may be somewhat disappointing for an actor, because it means he has failed to attract viewers’ attention. But the Stadium seems to have simply been more important than us.’
EXPERTS WHO APPEARED AT THE SCHENGEN CONTROL OBSERVATION POINT
12:30 Jan Węcławik, long-time employee, Central Sports Centre | 10th-Anniversary Stadium 13.30 Filip and Jakub Pawlicki, Schengen correspondents in Luxembourg 14.00 Michał Kozłowski, philosopher, alter-globalist 15.00 Wiesław Nowicki, ornithologist 16.00 Radek Pyffel, Sinologist, author of China in the Year of the Olympics 16.30 Aslan Dekaev, refugee from Chechnya 17.00 Hubert Kowalski, expert on military technologies 17.30 Ngo Van Tuong, journalist of the opposition Vietnamese-language periodical Dam Chin Viet 18.00 Professor Barbara Sudnik, botanist, researcher of the flora at the 10th-Anniversary Stadium, and Marek Ostrowski, landscape information expert, research initiator 19.00 Ewa Masłowska, linguist 19.30 Tadeusz, 10th-Anniversary Stadium security guard, employee of the Ekotrade security company
Finissage of Stadium X
A series of Live Art Projects in the Derelict Communist Stadium
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, the site had stopped being used as a sports venue. It fell into ruin, becoming a post-Communist phantom. In the early 1990s, it was ‘revived’ by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism who set up camping beds with all sorts of wares on the crown of the Stadium. Jarmark Europa suddenly became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies, equipment, and stories, as well as a major tourist attraction. A place became as an Asian suburb, a primeval forest, a realm of provisionality, controlled chaos and discount shopping, a sports club in demise, a work camp for archaeologists and botanists, the seat of Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with many others. Its different logic, its heterogeneity, its longstanding (non)presence in the middle of the post-Communist city, the invisibility of the Vietnamese minority, the debate around the development of a new National Stadium here for the Euro 2012 football cup, and the lack of a critical debate on Poland’s post-war architectural legacy — all these factors served as the inspiration for the curatorial project Finissage of Stadium X and later for the publication of a Reader: Stadium X-A Place That Never Was.
The 2006 project A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium by Anna Gajewska, Joanna Warsza and Ngo Van Tuong and a series of six ‘episodes’ of the Finissage of Stadium X in 2007–8: Boniek! by Massimo Furlan, On-Site Inspection, The End of Jarmark Europa – a debate, Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio, Palowanie/Pile Driving by annas kollektiv, and Schengen by Schauplatz International, were subjective excursions undertaken by artists, athletes, and activists 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 the place.
