A story about the power of building women’s community – Olga Budzan’s residency

As part of the “Barbara 1965–2025” workshop series, Olga Budzan and a group of women from Wrocław created a large-format textile installation inspired by the history of the iconic Wrocław bar, now the headquarters of WIK.

Working on the large-scale handmade piece entitled “Barbara 1965–2025” created a space for preserving stories and memories about the building, the city, and their continuous transformations over the years. This memory was not understood as a fixed set of facts. On the contrary, it took the shape of an open, expansive narrative about people, co-created by the community. These elements are intertwined with their individual stories, allowing the creative process to generate not only a textile but also an intergenerational bond among women.  

A crucial foundation of the project was active participation and regular meetings during which new fragments of the patchwork were created. The workshops took place both at Barbara’s and at the Ethnographic Museum, where Olga Budzan works. These two spaces, different in function, atmosphere and rhythm, became equally important for the development of the project: Barbara offered a living connection to the memory of the place, while the museum introduced a dialogue with craft traditions, the history of making, and the role of material and technique. 

One of Budzan’s key artistic choices was the use of second-hand materials. Using scraps, old clothes, household fabrics, and randomly preserved textile remnants enriched the work with an additional historical layer while also reflecting the artist’s everyday practice as an ethnographer. She visited second-hand textile shops and carefully selected structures, textures, and colours to accurately reflect the decades in which Barbara operated. Each fragment carried its own biography and incorporating them into one composition allowed the project to be understood as an act of care, the recycling of memory, granting a second life not only to fabrics but also to stories. This decision also rooted the textile in everyday domestic practices, in the things stored at the bottom of drawers, marked by wear, infused with scent, and family memories. 

During her residency, Budzan drew on the research of Adam Pacholak and Iwona Kałuża, yet she did not treat their work as a set of data to be illustrated. Archival descriptions, analyses, and photographs functioned instead as an inspiring echo, a background to be interpreted freely and filtered through the experiences of the contemporary participants. As a result, the textile ceased to be a reconstruction and became a multi-voiced, intuitive interpretation, emotionally grounded in the material practice of those who made it. 

To understand what this textile grows from, it is worth pausing on the context of the place itself. The Barbara building, named with a feminine first name, celebrated its sixtieth anniversary as an architectural structure in 2025 and its tenth anniversary as the office of the Wrocław Institute of Culture. The textile, which gradually acquired the features of a persona, naturally anchored itself in Plac Młodzieżowy Square. A space that from its beginnings was shaped by social tensions, performative gestures, grassroots actions, and spontaneous bursts of urban energy. The collaborative work on the textile became an attempt to capture the rhythm of this place, which underwent numerous metamorphoses: from post-war ruins, through socialist realist ambitions and the modernist thaw, to the architecture of the Tarnawski duo still remembered in Wrocław as the first post-war expression of modernity in the Old Town. The community of women participating in the project drew out details from this history: café window displays, the black-and-white columns, the neon crab flickering above the entrance, recipes from the Swedish-style restaurant, and stories about the shoe store once located inside. These small narratives created a social map of the place, one that proved just as essential as the historical record. 

From a curatorial perspective, the process highlighted not only the importance of collective women’s labour but also the way social memory often forms through small, caring encounters. Grandmothers’ stories about ice cream from the Italian machine, anecdotes about cockroaches running along the columns, tales of stolen soup or the legendary “sultan cream” were translated into the language of fibre, bringing an informal, non-institutional narrative into the textile. In this way, “Barbara 1965–2025” became not a reconstruction but a dialogue. A conversation with the place and about the place, conducted through community. The textile records both organized and spontaneous meetings, conversations born during shared work and reflections that emerged later at home while sewing individual fragments. It also stands as evidence of how collective work by women can transform urban history into an intimate experience while giving it a communal dimension. 

The culmination of the entire process was the ceremonial unveiling of the textile in Barbara’s reading room on October 29^th 2025. The event brought together the participants, their families, city residents, and people interested in textile art. It was the first moment when the artwork could be seen in its entirety. The atmosphere was less like a formal exhibition opening and more like a community gathering : full of emotion, laughter, and the instinctive pointing out of those fragments in which personal stories had been woven. 

Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka

• Artist: Olga Budzan  
• Curator: Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka 
• Community of women: Joanna Bożek, Agnieszka Jagodzińska, Magda Brumirska-Zielińska, Hania Sobolewska, Aleksandra Abramik, Małgorzata Karpicka, Hanna Golis, Anna Glanowska-Cieśla, Maria Zając, Marta Wiercińska, Małgorzata Składzień-Sikorska, Aga Tomaszewska, Olga Vaskanian, Joanna Falkowska, Maryna Hrysiuk, Magdalena Olewicz, Stanisława Łomnicka, Bożena Kędzior, Małgorzata Stasiewicz, Róża Gontarz.  

WIK is a partner of the international Magic Carpets platform, co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program, which brings together more than a dozen cultural organizations.