Pracownia Działań Przestrzennych
Studio of Spatial Activities

Poland is a peripheral land stuck between the West and the East. It is divided in two by a river, which was once used for the transportation of enormous amounts of grain. It is a symbol of the slave labour that supportedthe lavish lifestyle of the Polish nobility. That social disparity was especially visible on the territorycalled “Kresy”[literally: “the borderlands”], a former Polish colony that still sentimentally resonates in the imagination of the Poles.

The title of the work is a quote from The Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad was born in “Kresy” to later describe the atrocities of the colonial practices in Congo in his famous novella. Today, it is still often discussed as an anti-colonial manifesto at schools. In reality, Conrad never objected to colonialism nor did he doubted the legitimacy of the political and cultural domination of Europe. In 1975, in his famous speech, a Nigerian author Chinua Achebe called Conrad “a bloody racist.” Perhaps, Conrad turned a blind eye to the dehumanisation of the Congolese and never questioned colonial relations because he himself was raised in a place where dehumanisation of others was commonplace. The relations in“Kresy”were strictly colonial. The slave labour of the Ruthenian serfs was hardly different from the slavery in Congo. The grain produced by the starving subjects of the Polish nobility was floated down the Vistula River (just like the ivory floated down the River Congo), in order to be sold in Gdansk to the West.

The West and the East – the Occident and the Orient – are the opposing categories dividing the world into Europe and non-Europe, civilisation and barbarity, colonisers and the colonised. The figure of Conrad, an English author born in “Kresy,” becomes a pretext to think about the split between these two categories that is so omnipresent in the Polish worldview. The Vistula, just like the River Congo, becomes an axis of the problematic Polish narration.