Łódź Kaliska / Trembling Machines

According to Janiak, it is also: "a quiet and humble story about the lack of respect for the past, about the stupidity of not using its energy. It's a story about what you get for free. About primitivism, destruction, lack of culture. About social rudeness. About a group boor who loses the "golden horn" and doesn't even notice it. About the fact that communist and post-communist society only knows how to destroy, because it is sick with a lack of continuity. Trembling Machines is also a story about a race against time that loses the city devoured, through nonchalance and neglect. A story about children who, instead of multiplying, destroy their parents' achievements". Łódź Kaliska has probably never sounded so seriously.

In one of the halls of the Atlas Sztuki there were sculptures imitating textile machines covered with fabrics. However, in Łódź Kaliska sculptures, fabrics do not cover machines, because they are no longer there, there is emptiness. The machines were set up to reproduce the layout of the former working machines of the textile plant, but this layout, this imitation attempt shows how much, these machines do not fit into the inside of the gallery. In addition, we hear the sound of working machines in a textile factory from the speakers.

In the second room on the wall is a monumental photograph showing from a bird's eye view the contemporary Łódź centre, from which all the objects created until 1945 disappeared. According to Marek Janiak, "the photo shows a city in which the inhabitants have definitively got rid of the "problem" of history". From the speakers you can hear known from The Promised Land Władysław Reymont's sentence: "You have nothing, he has nothing, I have nothing, so we will build a factory". 

As I mentioned earlier Trembling machines Is a serious project, touching on very universal issues, identity and heritage, history and memory. Piotr Rypson notes in his text that "The process of deindustrialization of Łódź, another European industrial city, experiencing a huge crisis as a result of the globalization of production and migration of stateless capital, which local administrations cannot face, is a painful experience for the residents of this unique Polish metropolis". Małgorzata Butterwick, writing about the project, draws our attention to: "absence and emptiness - inherent experiences of our existence - which seem to be the key concepts of the exhibition".

The essays of Małgorzata Butterwick and Piotr Rypson are complemented by a conversation with members of Łódź Kaliska by Krzysztof Cichoń and Andrzej Walczak.
I cordially invite you to the Atlas Sztuki.