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
Kindergarten on the B-33 estate (Słoneczne). On 18th December 1958, the Kindergarten no. 107 opened by the decision of the Estate’s National Council at the Education Department in Kraków. It was initially managed by Sabina Nur, who was then succeeded by Maria Nasiadka in 1971. The same year, the place was transformed into the Music Kindergarten no. 1, the first childcare facility in Poland adopting a comprehensive approach to music education for young children. In 1973, the “Echo Krakowa” daily held a competition to find a name for the kindergarten. Many submissions arrived, with the winning “Sunny Notes” among them. Second half of the 1950s.
Budynek przedszkola na osiedlu B-33 (Słoneczne). 18 grudnia 1958 roku na mocy decyzji Prezydium DRN Wydziału Oświaty i Wychowania w Krakowie otwarto Przedszkole nr 107. Pierwszą osobą zarządzającą placówką do 1971 roku była Sabina Nur, kolejno Maria Nasiadka. W tymże roku przedszkole zostało Przedszkolem Muzycznym nr 1 i pierwszą tego typu placówką w Polsce ujmującą tak szeroko problem wychowania muzycznego dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym. W 1973 roku na łamach dziennika „Echo Krakowa” został ogłoszony konkurs na nazwę przedszkola. Spośród wielu propozycji wybrano nazwę „Słoneczne nutki”. II połowa lat 50.
Photo by Wiktor Pental/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
5 July 1957
Tagi
children,
education,
kindergarten,
Osiedle Słoneczne,
sandpit,
Słoneczne Estate,
childcare,
nursery school