Barbara Gryka
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Architecture from the Inside
The project is made at the J. Slowacki’s housing complex in Lublin, designed in the 1960s by Zofia and Oskar Hansen. The Open Form Theory, on which the urban and architectural layout of the housing estate is based, was an inspiration for the creation of this estate. The Open Form "was to open the eyes to the versatile capabilities of people, to mutual relations between them", as described by Hansen. According to him, the creative individual had to be a part of space. The man was the subject of the project, and the architecture was the backgroud for this. The second reference is the monumental photographic cycle by Zofia Rydet entitled '' Sociological Record '' covering over 7,000 portraits of inhabitants of various regions of Poland made in the interiors of their apartments. The picture was always preceded by a conversation. Rydet treated her "models" in the same way as Hansen wanted to treat architecture users.
I decided to move in one of the flat situated in this estate and visit the residents in their apartments. I talked to them about changes that took place on the estate as well as the experiences associated with the apartments, designed by The Hansens’, they live in. At the end of each conversation, I suggest my interlocutors to take a photo of me inside the apartment. Unlike at Rydet, the host chooses a fragment that will be the background for photograph and he / she will take a photo of me, and then I will take a photo of people who agree to do it in the same place. At the same time, a video-journal is being created, because after each meeting I record a video in which I tell what I learned, what I saw, and a series of drawings / notes dedicated to each apartment. I started the project in mid-August 2018, I have visited 95 apartments and I am still working.
From my own experience gained from working in the housing estate, I decided to do a performance that would reveal what is most important in my work, but impossible to register, i.e. a meeting, a conversation. The action is an attempt to reconstruct, a dream of the performers imagining stories about the characters I visited, about whom I told them. During my visits to the residents of the estate, I focused on the conversation, I did not record these meetings in order to preserve their personal character. I also wanted to respect the privacy of the space I was allowed to enter as a guest. The performative action, in which the residents of Warsaw took part, is a kind of reconstruction, reinterpretation of events - my meetings that took place in Lublin.
A full reconstruction is obviously not possible, the performative action I have prepared shows the specific time and experience of these particular people, the participants of the action, performers who may resemble the residents of the Slowackiego housing estate in Lublin, but they will never be them. A performative action is an excuse to tell stories aloud, which I had previously been told. Speaking to the camera, repeating the received words, written down, remembered during visits. But these are completely different stories, created here and now, true or fictional, spoken by real people and addressed also to people, listeners, witnesses of the event. Stories that can only be heard at this particular moment, unique, one-off.