Co to jest Pogranicze?
What is the Borderland?

Summary/Abstract: The article is an interpretation of Krzysztof Czyżewski’s essays as an exponent of the activities of the “Pogranicze” Center, launched in the early 1990s. The essays and “Pogranicze” act for the benefit of a society of multiple identities capable of forming good bonds. This project combines the activities of “Pogranicze” 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.“Borderland” remains in a close relation with “border” and, at the same time, constitutes the latter’s contradiction. Border denotes an end, a breakthrough, division. On the other hand, it is a meeting place – in a certain sense an antithesis of disjunction and, simultaneously, space marked by the latter. The centre of meetings with Others, inspired by those borderlands – once inhabited by Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Romani, and Belarusians – includes the theatre, music, and art. A meeting appears to be an event comprehended in the Tischner sense: it initiates drama leading towards an unknown direction. The philosophy of the bridge, professed in the “Borderland” Centre, calls for openness towards that drama and its unpredictability.

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