Sta­dium X – A Place That Never Was – a Reader

con­tribut­ing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebas­t­ian Cichocki, Ben­jamin Cope, Halina Galera, Ewa Majew­ska, Pascal Nicolas-​Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grze­gorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rot­ten­berg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Bar­bara Sudnik-Wójcikowska, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Văn Tưởng edited by Joanna Warsza
photos Mikołaj Długosz, Marta Pruska, Marta Orlik

A mix of Social­ist mau­soleum, Aztec temple, and bunker system with a network of small gar­dens, along with a grid struc­ture of end­less market stalls – here is one of pos­si­ble pic­tures of Social­ist Real­ist ruin – the 10th-Anniversary Sta­dium and the Jar­mark Europa open-​air market sur­round­ing it. After twenty years of a phantom-like exis­tence in the middle of Warsaw, this expanse in 2008 became the con­struc­tion site of a new national sta­dium. The book offers a selection of texts pre­sent­ing a multi-faceted pic­ture of that site’s dete­ri­o­ra­tion and its bizarre exis­tence as a ‘city within a city’. It pic­tures the area as a Land-Art piece and pic­turesque ruin, a primeval forest, a realm of pre­car­i­ous­ness and dis­count shop­ping, a work camp for archae­ol­o­gists and botanists, a ‘Vietnamtown,’ a sonic phe­nom­e­non or archi­tec­tural splen­dor. The reader also doc­u­ments the series of site-​specific art projects enti­tled The Finis­sage of Sta­dium X curated by Joanna Warsza and pro­vides them with a theoretical con­text.
The Sta­dium was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated, and was to pre­serve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being at the same time ‘revived’ by Viet­namese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russ­ian traders, pio­neers of cap­i­tal­ism. Jar­mark Europa sud­denly became the only mul­ti­cul­tural site in the city, a storehouse of biogra­phies and urban leg­ends, as well as a major tourist attrac­tion. The het­ero­topic logic of the place and its long-​standing (non)presence in the middle of Warsaw brought about the series of art projects, and later this reader.
Over the course of time, the 10-th Anniver­sary Sta­dium which is 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.