Wytwarzanie codzienności. O esejach Krzysztofa Czyżewskiego i działalności Ośrodka „Pogranicze”
The Making of Everyday Life. On Krzysztof Czyżewski’s Essays and the Activities of the “Borderland” Center

Summary/Abstract: The article is an interpretation of Krzysztof Czyżewski’s essays as an exponent of the activities of the “Borderland” Center, launched in the early 1990s. The essays and “Borderland” act for the benefit of a society of multiple identities capable of forming good bonds. This project combines the activities of “Borderland” Center with many artistic groups that emerged in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as with numerous works of prose from that period. Memory and utopia stand in the way of this task. Memory reveals the richness of the life of diverse social groups in pre-war Poland, but also recollections of ethnic conflicts. To overcome this contradiction we need a vision of a better life, marked by utopia. This leads to a second contradiction: the need to renew utopia clashes with the memory of modern utopias realized in totalitarian states. The solution is the concept of a non-idealized Central and Eastern Europe, in which the memory of past conflicts is not erased but expressed and incorporated into the construction of everyday life.

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