16beaver, The Thing and Laura Palmer Foun­da­tion present:

Public-​Art Projects in the Ex-​communist Sta­dium and in the former Warsaw Ghetto

 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, it fell into ruin, becom­ing a post-Communist phan­tom. It was ‘revived’ by Viet­namese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russ­ian traders, pio­neers of cap­i­tal­ism. An open-​air market called Jar­mark Europa became the only mul­ti­cul­tural site in the city, a storehouse of biogra­phies, a major tourist attrac­tion, a primeval forest, a realm of pre­car­ity and dis­count shop­ping, or a work camp for botanists. Its het­ero­gene­ity, its long­stand­ing (non)presence in the middle of the post-​Communist city, the invis­i­bil­ity of the Viet­namese minor­ity, the debate around the new National Sta­dium here for the Euro 2012 foot­ball cup, and the lack of a critical debate on Poland’s post-​war archi­tec­tural legacy — inspired Joanna Warsza cura­to­r­ial project Finis­sage of Sta­dium X.

A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Viet­namese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Sta­dium (2006); Boniek!, a one-​man re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-​Belgium foot­ball match by Mas­simo Furlan, (2007); or Radio Sta­dion Broad­casts by Radio Sim­u­la­tor and back­yardra­dio (2008) were sub­jec­tive excur­sions under­taken by artists, activists and ath­letes 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 a disappearing place.

The reader Sta­dium X-A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts pre­sent­ing a multi-faceted pic­ture of that site’s dete­ri­o­ra­tion and its exis­tence as a ‘city within a city’ and also doc­u­ments the series of live art projects. The Sta­dium and its par­a­sites func­tions, which are 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.