Ideal City employs instrumentallythe phenomenon of Nowa Huta (Poland), a town imagined and made concrete from above, as a holistic urbanistic and social experiment, aimed at outlining prospective scenarios for the evolution of the concept of city. This time developed at grass-roots level by the community laying down its rules.
The case of Nowa Huta is altogether exceptional because the experimental concept of the city created for the purposes of social engineering accumulates an infinite number of previous urban scenarios, universalising in this way the experience of city in the broad sense.
The experience of Nowa Huta’s unfinished utopia goes along with an equally multilayeredvisual archive. Although it only has two authors [Wiktor Pental (1920–2013) and Henryk Makarewicz (1917–1984)], their photographic practices occurred on diverse planes, thus representing a number of simultaneous policies on working with the image. As a consequence, the mutually complementary and discursive character of specific narratives or single images constituting the collection makes it a perfect instrumentarium to be used in the investigation process of what the city is today or may be in future.
Therefore, Ideal City juxtaposes two experiences: a city designed from scratch—a laboratory not only in urbanist and architectural but chiefly in social terms, and its representation. Apparently a coherent whole, it is still based on a number of a number of overlapping views: strictly documentary, humanistic, propagandist, private, more or less directly involved in the sphere of art, frequently constituting afterimages of concurrent visual trends. Deconstruction of such multilayered and equivocal collection of photographs dedicated to the city, a product of intersecting views from above, private convictions and synchronic aesthetic regimes, gives rise to a laboratory where prospective scenarios for how the concept of city may evolve are drawn, but this time from the grassroots perspective.
Ideal City is an open proposition, and merely a leaven for a broader progressing discourse. Bordering on a display or a publication at first, it provides a platform for further research offering a living repository for interested researchers/artists to delve into within the framework of the website/exhibition, and suggest new ways of interpretation.
Curator: Łukasz Trzciński
Authors: Agata Cukierska, Dorota Jędruch, Marta Karpińska, Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak, Szymon Maliborski, Ewa Rossal, Stanisław Ruksza, Katarzyna Trzeciak, Magdalena Ujma, Michał Wiśniewski
Supporting voices: Christophe Alix, Piotr Bujak, Łukasz Błażejewski, EBANO collective, Nina Fiocco, Tomasz Fudala, Marek Janczyk, Kacper Kępiński, Paweł Kruk, Yan Kurz, Piotr Lisowski, Lukáš Machalický, Krzysztof Maniak, Tomáš Moravec, Wojciech Nowicki, Jan Pfeiffer, Agnieszka Piksa&Vladimir Palibrk, Aleka Polis, Tomasz Rakowski, Dominik Stanisławski, Stach Szumski, Yan Tomaszewski, Matej Vakula, Jaro Varga, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Paweł Wątroba, Rafał Woś, Julita Wójcik, Ewa Zarzycka
Production: Imago Mundi Foundation in partnership with The Museum of Photography in Kraków
Staff of the Municipal Sanitation Department (renamed as the Department for City Sanitation on 1st February 1951) removing waste from one of Nowa Huta central estates. The Star 20 truck is visible in the picture. Its design had been developed in various design offices across Poland since 1946. The first prototype vehicles Star 20 were made in Starachowice in 1948. On 15th December 1948 the first five trucks were presented at the Union Congress of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) which took place in Warsaw. In 1948, mass production of the model began, generating 10 vehicles in the first year (or 20 according to other sources), and the number kept growing to almost 5,000 ones in 1957. 1950s.
Pracownicy Miejskiego Przedsiębiorstwa Oczyszczania (do 1 lutego 1951 roku nazywanego Zakładem Oczyszczania Miasta) wywożą śmieci z podworca jednego z nowohuckich, centralnych osiedli. Widoczny samochód ciężarowy Star 20. Jego projekt realizowano w różnych biurach konstrukcyjnych na terenie Polski od 1946 roku. Dalszy rozwój konstrukcji prowadzony był w Starachowicach i doprowadził do powstania pierwszych prototypowych egzemplarzy Stara 20 w 1948 roku. 15 grudnia 1948 roku pierwsze pięć egzemplarzy produkcyjnych tego modelu zaprezentowane zostało w czasie Kongresu Zjednoczeniowego PPS i PPR, który odbył się Warszawie. W roku 1948 rozpoczęto seryjną produkcję tego modelu, która w pierwszym roku produkcji wyniosła 10 sztuk (według innych źródeł 20) i stopniowo rosła osiągając w 1957 roku prawie 5 tysięcy sztuk. Lata 50.
Photo by Wiktor Pental/idealcity.pl