two months after the distribution of all the Oscar statuettes, after viewing all the requisite cinematic works, it’s worthwhile to examine the biography of engineer Stefan Kudelski. Despite being an exemplar of a man who did not direct, act in, wrote, or compose a single film, yet received two Oscars (and two Emmy awards, often referred to as the “television Oscars”). It’s recommended that one familiarise onerself with the family history, commencing with the grandfather of Stefan Kudelski, Jan Tomasz Kudelski, an architect from Stanisławów. This is the story of the Lviv intelligentsia, which is quite typical of the fate of people with passion and talent, engaged in what they have chosen. People to whom an utterly improbable, unforeseeable grand history suddenly takes everything away
From 20th of April to 24th of November, in the Procuratie Vecchie building on St. Mark’s Square in Venice, the exhibition “In the First Person” by Andrzej Wróblewski can be seen. It is one of the accompanying exhibitions of this year’s Biennale, with Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa as the inviting party. The exhibition features over sixty works on display come from the collection of Anna and Jerzy Starak, with the Starak Family Foundation, headed by Elżbieta Dzikowska, acting as the main organizer on the Polish side. The exhibition is curated by Anna Muszyńska. The tragically deceased thirty-year-old in 1957 is a key figure in Polish art in the early years after World War II. The strength and simplicity of his very distinctive painting, somewhere halfway between reportage frames and
She said she believed in tenderness as the most universal language on earth. She said she didn’t believe in God, but she believed in humanity. Any of these statements could be the headline on the biggest portals and newspapers in Europe. None of them will. Anyway, the denomination doesn’t have to be highly exposed, centrally located. That usually turns out to be a bad idea. In her statement after the jury’s verdict was announced, the new European Poet of Freedom Laureate, Monika Herceg from Croatia, casually said a few important things. It is enough that there are competitions like Gdańsk Literary Prize „European Poet of Freedom,” such committees, and somehow, miraculously, they manage to make such precise choices. Remember, strong faith can circle around for years, muttering bon mots in
May holidays! Our legs carry us on their own. Our journeys are almost always dreamlike. Journeys we imagine without opening our eyes. Blind journeys? The kind that struck Odysseus for trivial reasons and carried him for a decade from one adventure to another, but not towards home. Journeys to places from which few have returned, such as the narcotic land of the Lotus Eaters. Well, with today’s (alleged) level of physical fitness – why not? With good equipment, in good company, we can go anywhere. What’s more, even the shortest of journeys will always require a mind. Even one like Homer’s, a mind that sees nothing. Equipment, company, finances, planning – yes, they are all important for good travel, but they are not enough. It’s hard to define the missing element. Perhaps it is given to
Neither sports nor art is mainly about emotions or competition. In neither case can we determine what is going on. And that's why it happens that sometimes we look at something carefully. Forbes (Who does not know art, but is influential) proposes the following tour of the most interesting exhibitions of this year's 60th Venice Biennale ("Here are 11 of the must-see country pavilions"): https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanneshurvell/2024/04/30/11-of-the-best-country-pavilions-of-the-venice-biennale-2024/?sh=25cd556913e6 1. Great Britain: John Akomfrah " Listening All Night To The Rain 2. France: Julien Creuzet, "Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon" 3. Australia: Archie Moore, "Kith And
You have to realize how intense the circulation of new photos and media images is. It is something as powerful as the Gulf Stream, the current that runs between America and Europe. It’s a current that binds these two continents together in an extraordinary way. Better it stays that way. The photo is as it should be. Simple, intense, it’s hard to pretend for long that exoticism, for example, prevents us from seeing what we’re looking at. A photograph by Mohammed Salem, who works for Reuters, won this year’s edition of the World Press Photo. The moment when the jury’s verdict was announced in Amsterdam was itself the scene for a good photo. A cultural institution in a former church interior, in a presbytery, the winning photo in the place of an altarpiece, with concerned officials
A man with a past, financial problems, just an unhappy little grey man, a dusty veteran of Lepanto. He invented someone who fights against a wicked world, who stands up to it, who takes on every giant, a hero straight out of a twentieth-century western, lonely, simple, confident in his assessment of the situation. Why did Daumier, who painted with a single stroke painting the expressive head of the nag in a single stroke, save paint for the head of the horseman? It’s one of the most enigmatic portraits of a true madness. Five years earlier, in 1863, Gustave Doré published his magnificent, detailed illustrations for Cervantes’ novel. The graphic depiction of the moment when a galloping imagination collides with reality was to become a compulsory illustration for both the matriculation
I think it's just "the one from architecture", well, today maybe you from SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and tireless Site admins They still believe it. Like a string, like a ruler, like a table or syllabus, point by point. Images of reality, even those absolutely still, well known, seen for thousands of years look very confused. The second extreme are the masters of the winding and the living word, which is all the same thing they are talking about - intensity, bit and flow count. For them, the plot and meaning are archaic concepts directly from the 19th century weaving loom, having nothing to do with the current message and image. If you like illogical puzzles, look unhurriedly at the relief set at the western wall of the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre at the southern nave of the
Joanna Krenz is responsible for their translation. As critics write, Yang Lian's poetry combines Western, modernist sensitivity with almost shamanic, Chinese tradition, becoming a bridge between Western and Eastern culture. Impersonal snow 无人称的雪 1. Dry snow hasty imitating human uplift Animal twilight and dawn Snow on small paws climbs on tree branches Delicate skeleton Glass skeleton tempered in a powerful fire The snow always buzzes sharply in the ears Long after he stops What can the deceased remember from death Secretly scattered silver inside the body A thousand pregnant women giving birth in the heavens Cold orphans without permission The pale red ladder of the body leads to a tiny attic At the attic of the white night where the corpse is stored You don't exist, that's why your days
Election is about to come up, might there still be a chance to unexpectedly veer off course? Or even break away? Or even stay. And do some good in the city. If the date is to be believed, Maciej Słomczyński penned these three sentences on July 14th, 1969. This sentence opens a short, seven-page text “From the Translator,” concluding the eight hundred and seventeen pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses , in the PIW edition. PPR’s mintage of 40,000 (+200) copies descended like a ghost and powerfully changed the face of “this land”. And Słomczyński’s sentences will remain with us long into the 21st century. “There is a great group of fortunate people in the world who dismiss as obvious nonsense everything they cannot understand at first glance. These people demand from art only the utmost swiftness
to understand anything in a city. „The tangibility of the concept (of architecture)” is both a crucial characteristic/ability to understand anything and a linguistically sensual turn of phrase that poses its own challenges as well. Language and its rules allow us to write about „intangible concepts.” Is this phrase merely a linguistic expression, lacking a referent, devoid of content existing beyond words? These are the kinds of questions we probably ask ourselves all over Poland – not only in Łódź. And, of course, not only in Łódź they remain unanswered. The most sensible thing to do would be to raise such imaginary problems in „Hunting Club”. Such a Hunting Club has been created in our city by local architects. They set up their hunting boxes under a lamp post (that’s where it’s the
It’s time to focus on the city. Time for the Brain. But not the brain of Chief Architect yet. The brain ( cerebrum ) is called the largest electrical organ of a human. We are fascinated by the brain’s electrical activity. Similarly, every city can be described and studied as a hub of life that transmits, generates, and consumes electricity. We can compile a complete diagram of a city’s electrical connections, and we have round-the-clock records of the electrical activity of cities. We have such data even for Capital Cities. The word capital comes from the Latin caput (genitive case – capitis ), it shows how anthropocentric we are in describing our environment and the forces shaping it. And how much we want to describe ourselves precisely as a network of physical forces. Łódź extends on
They are not always available „on demand” (in the standard of World on Demand – WOD), but they are always revolving close to us. Perhaps it is for this reason that we „shooted” a next project at our Foundation. The future began to heavily impinge upon the present. The Future Games were supposed to calm the situation a bit and commence the construction of the Tenement of a Future Age in Łódź. Naturally, in the eastern row of the future Kobro Market in a New Center of Łódź, opposite the Tenement of a Promised Land, as part of the same 21K project. As always, it was about the Baron of Łódź – Münchhausen. Not everyone has as much vigor as the baron who climbed to the Moon using a rope. What about the others, who don’t possess such strength? And yet, one must move through the streets of Łódź
In fairy tales, so many incomprehensible things happen at once that chaos is easily bred. Asymmetry works well in the realm of fairy tales, allowing for clear distinctions. Especially in fairy tales, injustice is always asymmetrical, fueling and driving the action. A rapid action is a fundamental parameter of a good fairy tale and media narratives. Advertisers appreciate this. From their point of view, the direction of perspective doesn’t matter. Are there any intuitive laws, gravitations, consequences of the prohibition of bilocation, non-identity of good and evil? Only the endlessly repeatable sequentiality counts, like in a supply chain. This has even reached Elon Musk, apparently. Immersing oneself in fairy-tale, in fantasy, is one of the simple ways to survive the realities of sharp
Certainly, politics has always, and probably everywhere, been a spectacle, an often unbearable theatricalization of everything that comes along. Our trouble, now, in the winter of 2024, lies in the fact that this theatricalization has also encompassed the law. And it tries to generalize spectacularly emotional behaviors in this area as well. Applause, whistles, booing – the entire theatrical, ludic immediacy starts to displace legal argumentation. With such theatricalization, the skill of reading between the lines, catching legal nuances, referring to the text, becomes of little use. If this process becomes widespread, we will again be proud of our theatrical avant-garde, though it will not be an inexpensive experiment. Theatrum mundi is a term describing the reality of many cultures
On January 22, 2021, Henryk Jerzy Chmielewski passed away at the age of 97. Before the war, he was associated with the Polish Socialist Party, and as he mentioned, he was involved in drawing „political caricatures”. During World War II, he fought in General Kleeberg’s army until October 6, 1939. After escaping from a prisoner transport in 1941, he returned to Warsaw. From 1942, as a twenty-year-old, he published drawings in the underground press, sketched from radio broadcasts. Under the German occupation, listening to and possessing a radio was punishable by death. Chmielewski was a practical man, in 1980, he detailed how to pin a roll of drawings inside the trouser leg with a safety pin to avoid detection during street inspections when needing to cross the city to a contact point. In
how, a few years after the war, do women’s calves became socialist in content, yet still alluring in form over a few seasons? Do you want to understand better what connects the reticent, cunning Eros with the perspective of streets in Bałuty district? You have to go to this exhibition. Four small rooms in the old building of the Museum of Art, where it has always been, on the corner of Więckowskiego and Gdańska Street. Seemingly nothing, but a grand exhibition. This is one of the most important exhibitions of the last year, not only in Poland. Don’t overlook, don’t miss, the kind of childlike “One-Eyed Devil”. The kind that the one twenty-something Nowosielski drew for the Puppet Theater in the city of Łódź, where he arrived in 1950, looking for work and a place to anchor himself in the
The one on the left is an ancient cave scratch, perhaps over three, or maybe just two and a half thousand years old. In our minds, it looks like someone entering a labyrinth, In the middle, not you either; this is, after all, the ad quadratum, ad circulum man we are reminded of to the point of boredom, two Leonardo da Vinci’s collected and brilliantly straightforwardly superimposed representations of that which supposedly ought to normalize us, to mythify us. A perfect („Renaissance”, as taught before high school diploma) symmetry and perfect fit into the circular world, a transparent, simple geomery that effortlessly transforms our human imperfect squareness into a lasting ideal. Next to it, Le Corbusier’s Modulor, a source of countless contemporary ergonomics and design systems
Since the situation forces a return to the endless discussion of a desperate, forced uprising, January Let's try to do it with a clearly defined political goal. Historical circumstances allow an attempt to change the understanding Republic of Poland As an ethnic, national, Polish entity, on a surprisingly modern project aimed at equalizing the rights of different ethnic groups within the framework of the agreement negotiated by Citizens (equal nations, religions and languages) - Constitution . If you managed not to start like at school always with the Constitution of May 3... "It is generally accepted that the Constitution of May 3 was the first in Europe and the second in the world (after American Constitution From 1787) written constitution (
The next elections are already scheduled for April this year. Reportedly, both the Gospel of Luke, detailing Christ’s childhood most elaborately, and the Gospel of Matthew, also focusing on this period, are at times far from the truth. From a religious standpoint, this sounds bad: a gospel far from the truth. It only sounds so when we bear in our minds the exceptionally popularized 20th-century notion of truth as something that reflects in some record (e.g., mathematical) the arrangement of things, their interactions, the state of affairs, or the “laws of nature.” There’s no need even to refer to the specificity of a religious perspective; it suffices to notice that in such a world view, we ourselves, our status in the world, the functioning of our mind, consciousness (soul?) can be just
Today, they scare us with the cold to come. What do they know, only as much as trickles down from the screen. But it was cold. Somewhere between 1978 and 1979. They later called it the “winter of the century,” even those who still remembered the winters of the forties, winters sometimes far away. There must have been something to it. Outdoors, there was definitely a lot of snow. This is still evident in photographs. The snow has long since melted, contrary to what Francois Villon wrote (in the era of photography) it’s still a fact, comparable even years later. One could bury oneself in it for good. Then there’s something like love (Villon wrote about it too). And it would be useful, given the cold. Michalina Wisłocka’s „Art of Loving” appeared just before the communist Winter of the
We will not delight the world with a project Polish exercises on the tragedy of the world. Between Germany and Russia . The problem is that we will repeat such exercises for a long time (to pain) in the country. Well, but a simple minister with the rank of lieutenant colonel does not have to know this. Ignacy Czwartos' paintings - as Jerzy Nowosielski once said - are perfectly "abstract". Although clean in its species, it is extremely "warm", emotional. Economical in form, even scanty, with a faded colour tone, there is some peace in them, for some - spirituality, for others - lyricism. They are compared to the painting tradition, which Kazimierz Malewicz began with his "Black Square on a White Background". The fourth began to paint abstractions while in college, but his "artistic"
At other times, science, technology change, and in a completely different rhythm social behaviour, morality, or aesthetics. It is easy to observe changes in the preferred models in aesthetics. In the 1880s, one of the fastest growing cities in the Habsburg Empire was Lviv in Galicia. As in most cities at the end of the 19th century, decorations of public buildings were created there, which were supposed to show the rapid pace of civilizational changes. Set of decorative panneau Triumph of Progress In the auditorium of the Lviv University of Technology was designed by Jan Matejko in the 1880s (Master Matejko sketched small compositions enlarged and supplemented by a group of his students from the Krakow Academy of Arts). Among the eleven paintings you can see such unprecedented allegorical
and look pale against the backdrop of solidly written and painted fantasies on FB. Girls… 2024 will be the year of predators. It means it will belong to you. Western culture has the knack – mumbo jumbo – to transform what’s dangerous into what’s delightfully pleasant, encouraging purchases, whetting the appetite for more from life. True, it doesn’t work everywhere, but in major centers, it does. That’s why it’s cooler to live in London, Brussels, Paris, than in Skiroławki or Bronowice Małe. We’ve been able to fantasize like this for at least half a millennium. Since the time Count Hendrik III van Nassau hung a large painting in his palace on the outskirts of Brussels, brightening conversations during feasts. In schools, this ability to focus on what’s attractive, within arm’s reach, is
