Artists embark on exploration of The Disappearing City in Wrocław

One of the most important threads of the international project “What’s next?”, co-created by the Wroclaw Institute of Culture, is the creation of a safe space for reflection, especially in the current international situation. A thread naturally emerged in our minds connecting the above issues with Barbara’s most important and popular program, “The Dissapiring City”.

In the framework of cyclical meetings around the city that is never finished – it is always subject to transformation – lecturers and participants share their knowledge and experiences about the gradual disappearance of various elements of the space of Wroclaw, which are often a kind of tame asylum for its inhabitants and residents.

Taking a step further into the realm of artistic interpretation, the project has extended invitations to acclaimed artists Arek Pasożyt and Anastasia Zazuliak for a research residency slated for April. Both artists bring unique lenses to the table, promising a multifaceted examination of the city’s metamorphosis.

Who are the invited artists and what activities have they planned as part of their artistic research?

Arek Pasożyt is a visual artist. He works at the intersection of the fields of socially engaged art, post-art, artivism and cultural animation. In 2010, he formulated the “Manifesto of Parasitism,” presenting the idea of his activities as a parasite artist, thus referring critically to the status of the artist in society. According to the ideas contained in the “Manifesto,” Arek Parasite lived, lived and created by parasitizing for four years in more than a dozen cities in galleries, institutions and cultural venues. Over time, his activities evolved into so-called “host projects. In late 2017 and early 2018, as street protests intensified, he began to participate in them with “Strike Paintings.” He has created and exhibited in many places in Poland and around the world. He is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities, Theology and Arts at the University of Toruń.

• Taking his previous dose of knowledge about the vanishing city of Wroclaw and looking at the topics included in Barbara’s current program, Arek would like to focus on the interaction between the economic aspects he is currently researching in the field of art and “The Dissapiring City” phenomenon he is discovering. He is interested in the economic mechanisms that have influenced Wroclaw in recent decades, both in terms of transformations in urban and social space.
  

The second person we invited to research practice situated somewhere between science, art and other cultural activities is Anastasiia Zazuliak, a photographer born in Ternopil, Ukraine. Her story in Poland began in 2018, when she was an exchange student at the University of Lodz, Poland, and then an intern at the Creative Summer international summer camp in Wroclaw, Poland. She is a graduate of Canon Student Development Program 2022 (Module 1 and 2) and VII Academy (Level 2). In 2023, she was awarded a W/E Lab Foundation Fellowship (Flowland Foundation) and a student of Eddie Adams Workshop XXXVI (USA). For the past 2 years she has been documenting the impact of the Russian war on the Ukrainian people, and is currently working on personal projects and as a freelance portrait and reportage photographer.

• Anastasia is fascinated by the City Port, where she would like to photograph a “portrait of a person” who will soon disappear or transform into someone else. The artist plans to enter the port and show through her camera its different aesthetics, power and imperfections. That’s not all, the photographer’s attention is also drawn to kiosks, the most iconic places on the map of large cities, which are falling into vacancy and oblivion. Why are these tin-roofed neighborhood temples disappearing from our reality? Why do we mostly encounter them now at train stations or shopping centers? What does this mean for the city landscape, what era is ending and what era is beginning perhaps we will see in the photographs of the resident.

“The Dissapiring City” residency is part of the project “What’s next? Safe Cultural Multi-spaces for Multidisciplinary Reflection on (Post)War and (Post)Crisis European Identity,” a project created in partnership between zusa GmbH (Germany) ,Musiktheatertage Wien ( Austria ),Proto produkciia (Ukraine ),Wroclaw Cultural Institute / AIR Wro (Poland) and Gabriela Tudor Foundation (Romania). The project is co-financed by the European Union.