Beneath the paving stones, there is the beach!

Vivre sans temps mort — ‘Live with­out any dead time’ — was the call of the Sit­u­a­tion­ists in the 1960s. Let us not be bored, and let us not vainly chase after unfounded desires, the ful­fil­ment of which con­tributes to the accu­mu­la­tion of cap­i­tal and the legit­imiza­tion of the soci­ety of the spec­ta­cle. For Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, author of The Rev­o­lu­tion of Every­day Life, the best field for cre­ation was urban exis­tence.  The Sit­u­a­tion­ists called for cre­at­ing sit­u­a­tions and not mate­r­ial objects of pas­sive con­tem­pla­tion; they sum­moned us to recover the nature of imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence, to stim­u­late cul­tural diver­sity, and to ‘Be real­is­tic — ask the impossible!’ As a project draw­ing on the econ­omy of expe­ri­ence and par­tic­i­pa­tion in sit­u­a­tions located in the pri­vate spaces of walk­a­ble city dis­tricts, X-Apartments relates to the pos­tu­lates pro­posed by Sit­u­a­tion­ism and its psycho-​geography — the emo­tional impact of space on the individual.

The artists, archi­tects, film­mak­ers, the­atre direc­tors, or musi­cians invited to par­tic­i­pate in the project have been asked to create a situation based on two para­me­ters: time (each episode last­ing up to 10 min­utes) and place (within a given pri­vate space). Work­ing with time belongs to the daily expe­ri­ence of direc­tors; for visual artists, how­ever, cre­at­ing an action in a set number of min­utes (and not in the mea­sured space of a gallery) changes the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of the way they work. Artists like Pierre Huyghe or Rirkrit Tira­vanija posed the ques­tion of what would happen if art were not present in space but in time? The role of the spec­ta­tor has been sim­i­larly changed here: the­atre is usu­ally expe­ri­enced col­lec­tively by the audi­ence, in a ritual silence and com­fort­able pas­sive posi­tion. In the case of this project, the audi­ence can enjoy its free­dom, just as when vis­it­ing an exhi­bi­tion, where the per­cep­tion is indi­vid­ual, freer, and where con­ver­sa­tion is allowed. The project is also a dialogue with the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of art in public space, which relates to a grid of data: the nature of the place, its his­tory, the con­sec­u­tive­ness of events and geo­graph­i­cal, as well as dra­matur­gi­cal, links, not just the frag­mented expe­ri­ence of the loca­tion. In the 1960s, Daniel Buren urged artists to leave the studio and go out into the street; this time, the artists in X-Apartments go back to enclosed spaces, and a whole net­work of public expe­ri­ences with them.

This will be the first edi­tion of the project ‘behind the old Iron Curtain,’ where pri­vate spaces were often of a semi-public char­ac­ter: as roving uni­ver­si­ties, art gal­leries, places of gath­er­ings (tapped), art stu­dios, or hide­aways for fugi­tive oppo­si­tion­ists. We are inter­ested in the rela­tion­ship of a certain social order vis-à-vis the indi­vid­u­al­ity and lim­i­ta­tions of these places. During London Design Days, pri­vate flats were opened to public as exam­ples of ‘true design.’ In our case, it will be about ‘live experience’: someone’s pri­vate col­lec­tion of home videos, an aban­doned apart­ment still bear­ing traces of its old inhab­i­tants, or a hotel room — which, after all, is a surrogate home.

X-Apartments has been car­ried out a number of times in dif­fer­ent cities through­out the world. Each time the project related to the het­ero­gene­ity of the city, the given dis­trict, the his­tory of its inhab­i­tants, or their daily prac­tices. In Warsaw, we have selected bor­oughs which seemed par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing and ambigu­ous. Mirów is an area around the Hala Mirowska, an indoor mar­ket­place, which is char­ac­ter­ized by an explicit mul­ti­lay­ered his­tory: begin­ning with the topog­ra­phy of the Jewish Ghetto from the time of World War II, through the city of ruins, the res­i­den­tial estate Za Żelazną Bramą (Behind the Iron Gate), new build­ing projects, minor­ity dis­courses, and the prob­lems of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. As in other places in Warsaw, the one strik­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic is the unre­solved own­er­ship sit­u­a­tion of indi­vid­ual build­ings, flats, or land plots. The dis­trict of Mokotów has the most inter­est­ing his­tory, as a historical suburb of Warsaw, turned into a German res­i­den­tial area during the time of the War — a fact which has saved the bor­ough from destruc­tion. It is also where Nowy Teatr is located; hence the project in this case is a question of map­ping out and taming the sur­round­ings. Seek­ing out what is hap­pen­ing in the neigh­bor­hood, X-Apartments will also include a special ver­sion in the dis­trict of Bródno, this time more par­tic­i­pa­tive and network-​based. It is the ten­ants of the var­i­ous flats, neigh­bors and col­lab­o­ra­tors of artist Paweł Althamer, who are the authors of the sit­u­a­tions taking place there. The seven bal­conies look­ing out to the same court­yard make up a single story con­sist­ing of numer­ous plots.

X-Apartments is mainly based on research into places and their inhab­i­tants, on map­ping out prob­lems and trails: from the issue of Ukrain­ian phys­i­cal labor­ers, through the mass phe­nom­e­non of refur­bish­ing homes in the style of early cap­i­tal­ism, buying prop­erty with mort­gages, reject­ing the her­itage of mod­ernism, for­get­ting the method of exchang­ing cor­re­spon­dence with other inhab­i­tants by let­ters sent on string stretched between win­dows and bal­conies, the his­tor­i­cal views from win­dows, flats that once hid Com­mu­nist oppo­si­tion­ists, or gal­leries housed in pri­vate spaces.  The other aspect of the project, equally impor­tant, is how one has to walk from one flat to another, what has been called ‘promenadology.’ Prom­e­nadol­ogy, a term pro­posed by Swiss soci­ol­o­gist Lucius Bur­ck­hardt of the Uni­ver­sity of Kassel, is a discipline of urban plan­ning and soci­ol­ogy. It aims at focus­ing on and con­sciously per­ceiv­ing our sur­round­ings, at a time when per­cep­tion is first and fore­most depen­dent on tech­no­log­i­cal and sci­en­tific progress, often alien­at­ing the indi­vid­ual from his or her own envi­ron­ment.  When apply­ing prom­e­nadol­ogy, one switches off the GPS device in the car, or trav­els the trail by bike or on foot. X-Apartments brings back the dérive, free drift and delib­er­ate urban con­fu­sion. After all, ‘Beneath the paving stones, there is the beach!’