Cut-Outs Are Everywhere
It is amazing that in a world supposedly entirely woven of pixels, rasters, beats and in a country that values folk culture so much, only now, in June 2023, the Museum of the Cut-out was opened.
Modernity is one big cutout, a collage of a madman with scissors for cutting people in his hand.
The museum was built on the site of the Royal Paper Factory founded in 1755 in Konstancin on the Jeziorka River. The scaled folk cutout covering the Polish pavilion at the Expo in Shanghai in 2010 appealed to the world (https://www.bryla.pl/bryla1,85301,7561313,Polski_Pawilon_na_EXPO_robi_furore.html). Despite this, it was not until thirteen years later that we arrived at a facility that collected traditional cutouts. More than twenty meters of folders with cutouts were collected in the archive. The place was in a well restored (https://www.modernizacjaroku.org.pl/pl/edition/3413/object/3883/muzeum-wycinanki-dawny-zabytkowy-dom-ludowy-na-os-mirkow-w-konstancin) the building of the former People's House (and shelter) for paper mill workers designed in 1908 by Stefan Szyller.
The cutout is contagious, we look at the neo-Gothic cornices and see the teething from the cut sheet.
Surprisingly little is known about the beginnings of this tradition. First, there had to be paper for the custom of decorating the house with a cutout, perhaps inspired by Jewish culture (in which everything that comes into contact with the letter acquires a mystical meaning). Apparently, the last paper good for cuttings comes from the 1960s, commissioned by the then Ministry of Culture for folk artists.
In excess culture, cutting should be a common practice, a skill practiced from an early age. Even if in adult life someone fails and takes care of politics, for example, efficient cutting (in the national style) can be useful, already on vacation.
Like holidays, no school, but here throughout the summer and the beginning of autumn you will have to intensively educate yourself "on the subject" of Muslim countries, directions of migration from such countries, hopefully not "in the debate" about rebuilding the caliphates, somewhere far in the south of the Pyrenees.
Why not, but why is it all at the rubber level? Why in such a primitive way, reminiscent of old Polish splek cepem? If real politics must be demagogic, let it be, but Dem-agogos, leading the people SurelyDoesn't he have to do it so clumsily? It is a streeful belief that the size of the group depends on it.
Poland is rapidly Westernizing. We "rework" debates and problems, fears warming up emotions in the West half a century ago. Does anyone expect that since we should get used to migration from outside Europe, we will see information and public debate, for example, about the differences in the school system?
Is there a calm discussion about religion, about the status of the prophet Yusuf, about the concept of sin in Islam, Christianity, among the scientists, imaginable in our supposedly traditional country?
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Allegory of the triumph of the Church, Fresco from the Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence by Andrea di Bonaiuto - c. 1368
At the feet of the seated with open Book On the largest throne of St. Tomasz satted down based on Books Ibn Rušd, called Averroes by Latins from أهل الكتاب, Ahl al-Kitâb;
The rest is a familiar chicken coop.