Problems arouse curiosity. That's for sure. Especially if they predict the near future. We already have May, and a vacation is coming soon. An increased number of questions about what's next cannot be avoided. After years of listening to experts and tracking statistics, I think it's time for a bold step. Since current data does not allow us to determine what the future will be, it is necessary to appeal to old institutions. Łódź was faced with choosing the right one. In 2007, the City Council voted unanimously to start the construction of the New Łódź Centre. Why? After all, the idea was very controversial for those times, and the future of the venture was difficult to predict. Just like David Lynch himself, who became the face of the project. Since at least the 11th century (the code of
The media yesterday drew attention not to the lack of specifics in Putin's speech, but to what Putin did not say on Red Square, who was missing in the stands, and above all what he could not boast of. On August 22, 1939, in Obersalzberg, Adolf Hitler gave a rhetorically good speech to the Wehrmacht officers. “Be without mercy! Be brutal! The destruction of Poland is our first task. (...) It doesn't matter what the weak Western European civilization says about me. (...) The goal of war is not to reach specific lines, but to physically destroy the enemy.(...) I ordered the ruthless and merciless sending to death men, women and children of Polish origin and language. The message was simple, there was no need to write anything down. Separate circulations of information allow the same events
After 9 May 2022, one more option will appear on the global free market in myths and historical fairy tales. It will probably attract considerable interest among customers seeking eccentric narratives. One must admit that Russia spared no expense in refreshing the fairy tale about the ultimate victory over evil. Productions this costly must pay for themselves and help divide public opinion effectively, and for a long time, into smaller pieces that are easier to manipulate. They must shake the entire market. Russia acts upon the Western worldview with the finesse of an icebreaker. The 1944 poster presents the standard method: ‘ hit harder / kriepcze udary ’. It is worth noting the poster from exactly twenty-five years ago, designed by Rostislav Shvedov of Kyiv for what was probably
Sir Foster accepted the invitation in mid-April, he will develop Master plan For Kharkiv and the region. He began humanly, with words. Attention architects! We practice reading with comprehension, without plans, without sketches, words themselves. The entire manifesto (THE KHARKIV MANIFESTO) is not long ( https://normanfosterfoundation.org/meeting-between-mayor-ihor-terekhov-and-lord-foster/ ). Nevertheless, let's circle the repeated phrases, the details that catch the eye. In the first place: The most, the most desirable, the most lovely . In second place: The best, the best minds with the best planning, architectural, design, and engineering skills in the world . On the third – composites: Combining a planetary awareness with local action. If it goes well, you have to wish it to
“Hello! Oh, hello lo lo lo lo! Here here here here here Radio, radio, dijo, ijo, ijo, Tijo, trijo, tru lu lu lu lu Pio pio pio lo lo lo lo Plo plo plo plo hello!” To this the sparrow said: “What kind of music is this again? I have to look in the dictionary, To understand the nightingale's singing. Ćwir ćwir świrk! A freak, a freak!" Before we start dressing up for the opera, it is worth meditating for a while on the literary patron of the city Łódź. Then they will play him. The presence of Tuwim (he was born in Łódź, twice - in 1928 and 1949 - he received the Łódź City Literary Award, after all "Łódź called the greatest city on earth") gives Łódź an almost incredible plasticity. Thanks to this, you can set up everything in this city, even do everything, build the wildest bends and
For at least two thousand years, the clasping of right hands ( dexiosis ) has generally taken place close to a weapon held in the other hand. In ancient iconography, the handshake was associated above all with images of Mithras, the god of light and the keeping of covenants. Mithras was also a warrior god. This aspect of making a pact and displaying the attributes of one’s own power can be seen perfectly in the relief from Mount Nemrut (Turkey, Arsameia). Mithridates I Callinicus, ruler of the Kingdom of Commagene, makes a pact with Heracles. The significance of the pact is bound up with the reality of the threat.
Middle-level management staff, a great, almost ecological addition to a balanced diet and lifestyle. Even the carbon footprint if it is in a neutral shade less terrible. Two media information about the investment in an interesting place full of new opportunities. One from December 2021, the other from April 2022 ( https://www.dezeen.com/2021/12/24/ges-2-house-of-culture-renzo-piano-building-workshop/ ; Beaux Arts Magazine n°454 – avril 2022, p. 12) A noteworthy investment, the first implementation of the Renzo Piano team in Russia. The building of the power plant supplying the traction network from 1907, built by Vasily Bashkirov thanks to the V-A-C Foundation, turned into a gallery with an atrium with an area of over 1200 square meters called from Russian GES-2 House of Culture (
Religious imagination can be sensu stricto inhuman. It suggests scenes and images that defy understanding, swinging between extremes from ecstatic rapture to the terrible dread of the sacred . Against this background stands out the unceasing work, sustained across generations, of slowly taming this wild religiosity. Homo sapiens domesticates everything in its surroundings. From a doctrinal, ardently religious point of view, this cannot succeed. Yet we keep trying. The Christian Resurrection , heralding the universal eschaton , is proclaimed by the sound of a trumpet. Why not? Let it be a trumpet, since the Apostle says so (1 Corinthians 15:52). As long as it is not a trumpet sounding a military reveille. Let it instead resemble the one heard in Paris just after the great war. In 1949
Not only the symbolic, but also the real, can fit on a postage stamp. On stamps we can record heroism and preserve gestures worth remembering. The trouble is that the Real assumes the dimensions of reality only briefly. It then shrinks to the size of a postage stamp, while everyday life flows on at its overwhelming scale. The Ukrainian postal service has announced the result of its competition for a stamp commemorating the soldiers of Snake Island. Contrary to what maps show, Snake Island may be larger than Ukraine and Europe combined.
The structure of human imagination is atomic. It resembles an endlessly growing collection of places where we imagine what we want. It is very difficult to organise such a collection, depending on individual preferences. Books do it for us, like pandemics or war? Jan Słomka writes about Hans Urs von Balthasar's last book in Tygodnik Powszechny: “We can hope that Balthasar's thoughts will become an inspiration that will contribute to the renewal of preaching, preaching about the ultimate things. Undoubtedly, lately there has been little on the subject of hell in sermons and homilies. Perhaps this is because the tradition that the Swiss thinker treated so critically, i.e. the tradition of objectivized talking about hell and spreading the hellish flours that await sinners in the sermons
Today's decision of the Vatican to change the text of reflections written by women (Ukrainian and Russian) carrying the cross together during the downtime at the 13th Station of the Cross in the Colosseum and replacing it with the phrase (about the meaning) of silence on the fact of death is a decision matching the course of the ritual to the symptoms of catalepsy. These syndromes include: mutism - lack of ability to communicate verbally, stupor - motor rigidity, frozen in stillness, repeated repetition of the same movements. Today’s Homo symbolicus (From the homo sapiens family) is able to effortlessly relate to any wide range of meanings within these symptoms. The faces of women wrapped around the tree, peeking in silence in convincing majesty, brought a cross forged somewhere in the
Three years ago, Easter Monday came rather late to Włókiennicza Street in Łódź. Immediately afterwards, the Great Revitalisation began on the street. The tenement at number twenty received planning permission in November 2018—was it meant to pull the entire street along behind it? Włókiennicza Street was laid out in 1872 along an empty plot after the clay deposits of the former brickyard had been exhausted. ‘The barren land was divided into small plots along a narrow street only three hundred metres long. Its surface consisted of fieldstones, hence its original name, Kamienna Street, which remained in use until 1957. Redevelopment carried out in 1950–1951 demolished all the rear buildings along the southern frontage. The removal of intimate courtyards in favour of an open communal space
Although our project W20 (on Włókiennicza) is local, with a scale of only one street, we decided to plant it on a massive foundation just in case. Perhaps we were a little overly optimistic that the role of such a foundation can be played by the belief in human rationality. It took Europe a lot of time to investigate Reason, but the experience of the 20th century taught us Europeans reason enough to finally recognize that all the problems that divide us can be solved by talking. The only sense of the world available to homo sapiens always appears in conversation, in dialogue with others. Community, talking to each other Community is the source of Reason. The meaning of the existence of cities and life in the city is to live in a way that gives you the opportunity to meet others often. The
From Tinkering to Thinkering. ‘Since natural selection is unable to produce an optimal state, some other mechanism must be involved. It is highly likely that this means phenomena from physics and chemistry, autocatalytic processes, dissipative structures and principles of self-organisation, as well as other factors that science will discover in due course.’ (quoted in Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong , 2011, p. 92). We collect books, combine things, tinker and arrange them in strange constellations. ‘Some other mechanism must be involved.’ Or perhaps a set, a collection, which may resemble a mechanism just as readily as it does an organism.
Not only the Scotland Yard, but also the more free and budgeted services (MI7) are still trying to achieve complete freedom of movement in all directions. Until now, such a characteristic ability for volatile minds to follow successive signs and make logical sequences of events from them is possible only on the plane of the page, only in the space of the plot. 5inLodz tests its own prototype based on the semantic superposition/semantic suppression phenomenon. We don't all want to be Sherlock Bonds, we all want – sometimes – to know the truth. 5inLodz is working on the unification of the marking of what is cardinal. Right, left, up, down? In most situations and languages, the four cardinal directions: left, right forward to back are enough to determine where we are going. And where are the
In the 1960s, Polish youth did not really like domestic production, except for sung production. In 1966, Karin Stanek dreams: "Dad, buy me jeans-pants, Dad, I'll be comfortable". For two years (after the ceremonial opening) the Clothing Industry Plant "Odra" in Szczecin has been producing in full steam. They sew from texpol. How grumsy we were! We didn't like the colour. The blue colour looked heavily splashed with milk. The Polish substitute for American denim, called "Texas" or "Arizona", was produced by the plant. Szymon Harnam in Łódź. The communist patron was killed by a gunshot at a rally in Łódź at the Kilińskiego 2 plant in 1929. The attack was witnessed by Bernard Lichtenstein, a brilliant tailor living nearby, on ul. Włókiennicza 20 (formerly Kamienna!). Bernard left for the
When you feel such a deep inner need—on 9 May, for example—there is no escaping it. On 22 June 1940 in Compiègne, Hitler speaks with Keitel, Göring and Hess. In the background stands Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s private railway carriage, transported there for the occasion: in that same place, on 11 November 1918, the German delegation signed the surrender that ended its lost First World War. After the French signed the terms of the 1940 armistice, the carriage was taken to Berlin. The Germans burned and destroyed the site—but not the private carriage. On 10 November 2018, Chancellor Merkel and President Macron met in the same carriage. They had evidently felt such a deep inner need. Symbolic thinking is not an irrational affliction confined to dictators in the East. It is a chronological
Today in Ukraine, the sky is where it should be and the grain is turning yellow. But the Russians do not see it that way. One need only look at the historical flags of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to understand why successive ceasefire talks come to nothing. On them, the arrangement of yellow and blue is upside down in relation to the present-day Ukrainian flag. Those speaking have opposite perspectives. Heraldry is the most formalised part of the system of symbolic signs that convey the balance of power, the course of borders and aspirations. The arrangement of colours on flags always has some obvious explanation. The red banners of Bolshevik communism were meant as a reminder of the blood of the weak and poor. It quickly became apparent that this was more often blood shed by the
The most revolutionary change introduced around 1852 by Aristide Boucicaut at Le Bon Marché , the Paris shop in which he was a partner, was allowing customers to move freely among the goods and make their own selections. No questioning shop assistants, no eager salesmen, no importuning. One could look in silence and leave without buying anything, and without being asked why one had come. Boucicaut died a very wealthy man in 1877. The habit of looking in silence spread rapidly. Buying and selling without words, haggling or eye contact became an everyday reality by the end of the twentieth century. Today it is self-evident. It is difficult to converse with a sandwich-and-coffee vending machine or a self-service checkout. Judging by the photographs illustrating events in Russia, wars too are
In circumstances of a violent crisis, the information begins to be transferred and reaches through quite new channels. Beyond the standard spectrum of communication. There is not much we can understand from the Chinese TV message. But the colours are immediately commented on and attract attention far beyond the usual range of the medium.
Ever since the Decembrist revolt—if not since Alexander Radishchev published Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1790—the idea of an open, empathetic society in Russia has always been alive and always marginal. Given today’s saturation of the media with information, there is a chance that the decisive events will take place in the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg rather than on the front line. The protests need not be bloody, but they must be numerous and resolute, like those in Moscow in August 1991. This could be Russia’s display for the world. A good one or a bad one.
These must be among the few frames in which vehicles recognised as off-road, associated with ‘military technology’ and the fording of waterways do not herald anxiety and misfortune. Fifty years ago, in 1971, a television series was made about the adventures of Pan Samochodzik, hero of Zbigniew Nienacki’s series of books for young readers. The first episode, ‘ Pan Samochodzik and the Knights Templar ’, was shown by the television of Comrade Edward’s era in 1972, half a century ago. News broke that Netflix was returning to the story. One wonders how they intend to do it—in colour? Without Mikulski? Perhaps in the dark atmosphere of a Masurian-Scandinavian crime story, like cinematic fairy tales for thirty-year-olds? That era was one great work of propaganda smoke and mirrors. It is
In Łódź we have a dancing elephant. Why is it so interesting at least one elephant does not make spring. It began on November 22, 2021 when we accepted the invitation of Tomek Ciesielski, an artist-researcher from the University of Lodz/New Theatre. In the spaces of the palace at ul. Skłodowska-Curie 11 implemented the programme of the New Theatre and the University of Łódź entitled “Getting to know a dancing elephant. Contemporary performative research". It consisted of three parts: the exhibition "Work Practice and Workplace", the external installation "Method and Tool" and a weekend of performance activities and shows. The idea of the programme referred to an ancient Indian parable about six men who came across an elephant. Each of them was a blind person. One of them grabbed the tail
