Pracownia Działań Przestrzennych
Studio of Spatial Activities

Miho Schön died in 1930. He was a relatively unknown Serbian artist, who left behind him fragmentary information and stories about his risky flights right next to the passing trains. During one of such shows, he made a loop right above the ground and died. 

A year later, in 1931, Władysław Strzemiński, a renowned avant-garde artist, Malevich’s pupil and the initiator of the first collection of avant-garde art in Europe, moved to Łódź.

Miho referred to his actions as performative acts, results of his Dadaist experiments. Thus, he changed the meaning of the flight, he created a new value by a new, different use of the machine, and by positioning the viewer many years before performance was defined the way it is defined now.

Shortly afterwards, Władysław Strzemiński tried to domesticate the space of Łódź, to tame the chaos and the structure of the city. The war interfered with his plans, and paradoxically it did not offer a possibility to introduce new architecture on the ruins of an old one. Łódź was not destroyed during the war, hence there was no way to actually design the city anew, to introduce changes that Strzemiński planned before the war in his Łódź Made Functional, a text that described his designs and lamented on the city beset by smoke and disease. 

 (In Strzemiński’s Writings, Łódź appears as a project to be realised, as a unfunctional city calling for improvement. Strzemiński saw the need to introduce changes in the new stage of the city, after the period of prosperity described in The Promised Land. Industrial Łódź developed on a plan similar to the one in American cities, based on a rectangular grid of streets. However, in the period of intense development this plan did not meet the requirements of either Łódź or American reality.  

I was born in 1987, and I grew up in Radomsko, in the Province of Łódź. Łódź is the largest and the closest city to my hometown. As a boy, together with other people, I regularly travelled there, as it was the only cultural centre in the vicinity, accessible after a 1.5-hour journey by train. We yearned for cinemas, theatres, and a momentary metropolitan experience, a different kind of dynamics. We were drifters and stowaways, who collected beer bottles to sell them and buy fries for the money we made. 

When I was at the university, I often came back to Łódź to visit its museum of art, and on my way from the still working Fabryczna Station, later Kaliska Station, I passed Piotrkowska street. 

In December 2012, during one of such visits, I walked looking at this peculiar space, notorious in Poland mainly for its neglected shape and unfriendly aura. I began to wonder what kind of action would be able to work on it. I didn’t find the answer, as if the city did not let me enter its structure, and I myself could not get rid of a feeling of strangeness that is sometimes experienced by unwanted tourists.

In January 2013 I came back to Łódź, still bearing in mind the previous unsuccessful encounter, and I decided to treat the unwelcoming nature of this space as a feature I couldn’t ignore and had to accept. Łódź’s hostility forced me to look for actions that would be superordinate to it. A total kind of action that wouldn’t use anything belonging to Łódź. In this situation, anything coming from it, would be filled with it, marked by it. I wanted to treat the city as a sheet of paper that I can crumple or draw on it, or to mark it with a line. To do something an urban planner would do, or a draughtsman about to design a city.

My treatment of space as a field for action with no limitations brought new connotations. It began to appear as a site of spectacle, where everyone plays his or her role, and is an expert like one in Rimini Protokoll theatre. 

The problem was that the spectacle ceased to be interesting: scenography faded, the actors began to repeat their parts mechanically, and some – as if seeing their position from a distance – gave up on their roles and emigrated, becoming travellers. 

My search and my struggle with the city coincided with a publication in The Sun, where Łódź was described as a lost city. With its trademark exaggeration, the tabloid depicted queues at the airport, leading the future emigrants to their new promised land. Nevertheless, despite the exaggerating tone, the article managed to single out the city’s major problems. Significantly, it was done from the position of an outsider, who doesn’t attempt to defend his own home and offers objective criticism. 

The form I was looking for had to be: external and superordinate to the existing space. It was meant to wake up the residents, to be like a bell in the theatre, where a pause would be meaningful. Up to now, the spectacle has been safe enough, the space offered false comfort, and there were no breakthroughs or critical moments that would allow for a position of detachment and the introduction of negation. 

I was thinking with a scale reminiscent of the utopian scale presented by Strzemiński. I observed the streets and I learnt about their history. Most of them are wide, because they were designed to enable circulation of air in the city space. Since the period when Łódź ceased to be an industrial centre, this air has in a way been stuck there. 

The space needed aerating, yet to make it possible, I needed a form that would move the stagnant air, the surrounding buildings, as well as people. This air, though by nature it is a transparent yet audible and tangible mixture of atmospheric chemical elements, seemed to me like a mass or slime that slows down the movements and excludes dynamics. As if it were a transparent swamp, or a scene where one cannot breathe. After all, the condition for the air to move is the possibility of its getting inside and outside, and this did not take place in Łódź. This scene was stuffy. The circulation stopped and the air was stagnant. Streets were paved with old air. 

To provoke any movement in such circumstances it is necessary to enter given space with certain force, often violent force. 

This kind of invasion was what I needed… Sound and image, superordinate to the city, met this requirement. Therefore, I chose a jet plane and an acrobatic plane.  

In 2013, over Piotrkowska, the oldest street in Łódź, from which the city developed in a linear fashion, a jet flew 200 meters above the ground; when it disappeared, a second one came to the sky, leaving a vapour trail of smog that drew an emphemeral line hanging in space, another first line on the planner’s sheet.