Naura śpiulkolot!

Young people in Łódź. This time, entrepreneurs. Since they are entrepreneurs, it goes without saying that we, the slightly older members of Think Lodz, are on their side. Thanks to an influential member of our Council, we managed to postpone—substantially—the deadline for submitting FORMS to the ‘Łódź for Young Entrepreneurs’ project.

Why? We were waiting for the result of the latest online poll for Youth Word of the Year 2021. The young Łódź factory owner was REBRANDED as a young Łódź entrepreneur long ago. This was meant to demonstrate the ability to combine current language flexibly with images that are not necessarily the latest; it showed yet another capacity for adaptation demanded by contemporary (business) culture. The winning word was ‘śpiulkolot’, while the sonorous farewell ‘naura’ came second. In 1977, Roman Cieślewicz created a collage he called ‘Suspendu malgré lui’.

Cieślewicz cut out an oneiric image, a picture of someone suspended somewhat against his will. The new, ‘rebranded’ title bids farewell to a nineteenth-century factory owner flying into the boundless reaches of urban ecstasy. We shall never meet him again—not even in the New Centre of Łódź. He will recede from us like Paul Klee’s ‘Angel of History’. A typical urban situation: a factory owner flying away. Here still depicted as a knight.