Tadeusz Piechura: Freedom Square – Independence Square

In 1974, Tadeusz Piechura made a nine-minute film. In the centre of a static frame, aligned with the main street, stands a white sign bearing the indistinct words “Freedom Square”; after a moment, the word “Square” disappears. Thirty years later, Piechura once again positioned his camera in the same place and filmed the same thing. Or did he? We see the same frame, the same sign bearing the same words, the same lack of response from the surroundings. We are naturally inclined to regard the first film as more important—but why, exactly? What actually happened in 1974, and what are we looking at? An image of what was in fact a daring, though ignored, political demonstration? Of a Conceptual fascination with film? Of private experiments with a new Soviet movie camera? 

Whose memory should we consult? The artist’s? Which Piechura should we ask: the one from the 1970s, who exhibited Conceptual messages such as I Create Better Than Myself, or the one who declines to comment today?

The frames of the first film are so anonymous, exotic and mute that they might just as well come from P. Street in the city of Ł., in a country that no longer exists, as from the dark side of the Moon. 

To connect the two films, what is needed is a wavering interpretive duet rather than the topographical insistence from which it follows that the street being filmed has always linked Freedom Square with Independence Square—Atlas Sztuki rather than an atlas of Łódź.

The pleasure of reading an atlas of art lies in the luxury of not finding precise answers. Reading, because—as always—the image is gradually covered by words.