Marcin Polak: Station Opera

After the closure of the station, 42 months of work will begin to move the entire communication infrastructure underground, and then the construction of the so-called EC-1 Power Plant, which covers the vicinity of the station and is located nearby. New Łódź Centre, a district dedicated to culture and art. The modern, two-level station created as a result of this one of the largest investments in the country will be reopened in a few years. Now food outlets are slowly moving out of it, and the travelers are decreasing.
Despite the fact that the French cultural anthropologist and sociologist Marc Augé divided our space into "places" and which are spaces of people passing each other, nobody's and anonymous "non-places" (French Non-lieux), which included stations, airports, hypermarkets, gas stations and highways, then Łódź Fabryczna Station has little in common with those places without identity described by Augé. The Łódź Fabryczna station, often shining with an incomplete blue neon light and crowned with a neo-Renaissance attic added at the end of the 19th century, was permanently inscribed in the city's landscape, for many also an emotional one. Its history began in 1865, when one of the kings of Łódź cotton, industrialist Karol Scheibler, contributed to the creation of a railway junction on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway route. The historic building was built in 1868 according to the design of Warsaw architect Adolf Schimmelpfennig (author of, among others, the summer theater in Ciechocinek, as well as the now defunct Cemetery Synagogue in Warsaw). 
It was the characteristic silhouette of the station that greeted most of the travelers coming to the city. Here, both tourists and those whose fates were intertwined with Łódź permanently began their adventure with Łódź. Among them were many artists, filmmakers, musicians. The station was the place that starred in the 1981 film The Case of Krzysztof Kieślowski, the place of Cezary Bodzianowski's performances. In the trains that the people of Łódź commuted to work in Warsaw, lasting ties were formed between everyday fellow passengers. Almost everyone had their own history related to the previous station. Now her last act will play out. 
To celebrate this moment and highlight its importance, instead of announcements about the departures and arrivals of trains delivered in a specific way by the intercom thanks to Marcin Polak and Atlas Sztuki, the voices of world-class singers, soloists of the Grand Theatre in Łódź will be heard from the station speakers: soprano Dorota Wójcik and baritone Przemysław Rezner. 
The last travelers passing through the station will hear them on Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 7.15-9.15 (D. Wójcik) and 15.15-17.15 (P. Rezner). Some will mark the end of the journey, others will mark its beginning. What story will begin? The station, witnessing so many greetings and farewells, will now experience saying goodbye to its current character and at the same time welcoming modernity.