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This text proposes an analysis of the art of walking conceived in the prose of Miron Białoszewski as a carrier of literary meanings. By extracting the functions of walking as a cultural activity A. Karpowicz embarked upon a reconstruction of the conception of space and the methods of becoming acquainted with it in Białoszewski’s oeuvre. In doing so, he came across their concurrence with anthropological conceptions of space and methods of studying urban space, focused on the practices of walking (the anthropology of daily life according to Roch Sulima, the visual ethnography of Sarah Pink, and the integral and creativity-oriented approach represented by Tim Ingold). This interpretation made it possible to indicate the superior importance of the practice of walking – the creation of a continuum - in writings by Białoszewski.
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Poemat o mieście Lublinie, written by Józef Czechowicz in 1934, is musical score of sorts. Its realisations (a radio programme conceived by the poet, successive strata of interpreting Poemat ... as a literary text, actual expeditions across Lublin along the route described in the poem) provide each other with various options of reading the text and associated registers of meanings; in doing so they expand and render nuanced the complex (semantic, imaginary, existential) inner potential of the poem, which is a certain form of memory (Czechowicz used the term: ”recollection”) and which inserts memory-recollection into the town’s topography. This gesture performed by the poet and the permeation of an imaginary trail and an actual itinerary are the object of the reflections pursued by the author of this essay, which is another sort of wandering involving the imagination, thoughts, and writing.
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Pessoa and Lisbon. A manual. An odyssey of the imagination. Information indispensable for getting to know Lisbon and superfluous for experiencing it. Is it possible to rid experience of all sorts of literary borrowings, not to mention cultural ones? What would be the effects, gains, and losses of such a striving? The author attempted to answer these questions by delineating a map of the territory of impacts on the way, and involving himself, Lisbon, and Pessoa. By following the traces of our encounters, evasions, permeations and dependencies. By cultivating a t(r)op(e)ography of assorted dimensions of joint presence/absence, and by indirectly taking into account the rarely discussed Pessoa guidebook to Lisbon.
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A presentation of an extraordinary image of a town that emerged in the course of flâneur explorations of subterranean metro tunnels. The point of departure for these reflections is the anthropology of the metro proposed by the French scholar Marc Augé, whose work is situated along the borderline of anthropology and literature and portrays the metro as a fascinating field of research for the anthropologist and, at the same time, as a “memory machine” blending collective History and the individual histories of daily travellers (including the researcher). In turn, literary inspirations, exemplified by a series of books inaugurated by Metro 2033, a novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, provoke readers-flâneurs to embark upon sometimes hazardous journeys into the underground recesses of a city in a search for mysteries created by a tangle of historical facts, rumours, urban legends, and the imagination of the town dwellers.
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This conversation about Podróżnicy bez mapy i paszportu. Michel Leiris i ”Documents”, took place on 18 June 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
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Recently, the oeuvre of the German artist Anselm Kiefer, brimming with references to historical events, Germanic, Nordic, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern mythology as well as assorted religions features intensified interest in Jewish mysticism. The intention of the author of this article is to decode the artist’s particular works explicitly referring via the title or the visual stratum to ideas derived from the written sources of the Kabbalah (The Book of Creation, Etz Chaim) as well as those preceding them (Hekhalot). Particular conceptions of Jewish mysticism present in the works of Anselm Kiefer – the journey across seven celestial palaces and communing with the Throne of God, His emanations (Sefirot), the female element (Shekhinah), the Tree of Life, the pre-catastrophe (shattered vessels), God’s withdrawal (tzimtzum) and the rectification of the world (tikkun) – comprise the structural axis of the text and were presented upon the basis of works by Gershom Scholem. A discussion about successive mystical ideas is accompanied by matching them with the artist’s concrete works. The author also proposed to insert into the context of Jewish mysticism those of Krieger’s works that originated before the artist became interested in Judaism as well as those, which literally referred to cultural circles other than the Judaeo-Christian one (e.g. the myth of Osiris and Isis). At the same time, the analysis refers to such themes as material (e.g. lead). The author perceives the presence of the Kabbalah shevira – a mystical catastrophe – in a considerable number of the artist’s works referring to destruction, including those evoking the Holocaust and thus opposing the universally held view linking Kiefer’s oeuvre with a readiness to work through the traumatic lineage of the German nation.
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The peasant (group) posthumous portrait is one of the four canons of posthumous photography executed in Poland in the last century. This text attempts to analyse five portraits upon the basis of the specificity of peasant culture. The interpretation is based on the mythopoeic potential of the camera, which assists in telling stories about the passage of time, the changing generations, the transmission of genes and tradition, man’s place on Earth, and the place he goes to after death.
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The text deals with concept of the Uncanny (das Unheimliche) in context of the (art)works presented between 2011 and 2013 within the four-part project secret universe run by the Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. To present my identifications concerning the notion of the Uncanny I am referring to Bartlett’s oeuvre. For nearly thirty years, he has been following his passion for the Uncanny. Bartlett has developed an extensive and intimate practice of creating dolls, from carving their shapes through designing the entire wardrobe, to performing the dolls live-like, narrative acts which he then photographed and put aside. Bartlett’s mysterious family is an excellent foundation for the analysis of the Uncanny concept initially introduced by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche. I will also investigate the category of Disgust as used by Sara Ahmed in her essay The performativity of disgust and inquire, which emotion / affect, uncanny or disgust, is more adequate for describing Bartlett works.
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The authors of the reviewed book undertook the task of a detective tracing Malagasy customs as well as those of the inhabitants of neighbouring islands. Naturally, myths were preserved and today speak of the creation of man in local conditions. Puppets, however, left behind scarce traces; some are to be found in Swiss and French museums and display distinctive natural features. Old illustrations also testify to the existence of à la Planchette puppets (dancing on a small plank). Extant para-theatrical forms include the theatre of seeds and beads or stories told with stone figures. The theatrical instinct urges the population of the island to create figurines portraying persons encountered in daily life or to adorn a gravestone pillar with statuettes. Other surviving forms include the Ngoma dance performed under a huge hat or funereal games played with the corpse of the deceased. Magic practices using mirror fragments or fertility sticks with female heads have also endured. The former hegemony of the French is recalled in Guignol de Lyon, which, however, does not fulfil noble functions similar to those performed in its homeland.
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Doctor Krokowski from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann as well as other examples from inter-war European literature demonstrate that the psychoanalyst in the group consciousness of the period was a Polish Jew. The distinct connection between psychoanalysis and Polishness was the outcome of a considerable representation of persons of Polish origin among the pioneers of the movement: Poles were among the closest collaborators of Freud and in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society they comprised the second largest group after the Austrians. They also included numerous courageous women who frequently combined psychoanalytical practice with radical socialism and decidedly feminist views. The author of the article outlined a sui generis group biography of this generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals, lay Jews born in Galicia, Poles educated and working in Vienna or Berlin, believing in the cultural and political force of the Freudian project and dramatically aware of the need to change the world or at the very least its sexual and social codes. In this fashion the author showed the way in which the outbreak of the Second Word War affected the fate of the protagonists of the text, condemning them, at the height of their careers, to emigration and starting life anew in entirely different conditions; he also proved that the year 1939 denoted the end of the emancipatory dimension of classical psychoanalysis, which from a Central European cultural project turned into an American theory. The personal successes of the Europeans in their new homeland and the ostensible triumph of psychoanalysis in America conceal its actual end: psychoanalysis assumed medical dimensions and became deprived of feminist and radical features. The resignation by the emigrants of the core of Freudism – a condition for finding employment in the United States – also obliterated its Central European roots. The presented attempt at geo-psychoanalysis entails predominantly following the trajectory of the Polish members of this movement, who at the onset of the twentieth century arrived from the provinces of the Empire to its Viennese capital, and who as a result of World War II once again found themselves on the sidelines, in a psychoanalytical “Wild West”, which in the course of the following decades turned, with their cooperation, into a new centre of the world, thus relegating the former one to the role of a periphery.
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