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
Interior of the International Press and Book Club (MPiK) in Plac Centralny (Centrum D). The clubs, soon present in all bigger Polish cities, mostly sold press published in Poland and other states in the Eastern Bloc, first of all from the USSR, and – from 1956 – in the West. They also housed cafes (coffee, tea, carbonated beverages, sometimes cakes), cloakroom and lavatories, and could stage art exhibitions and after rearranging armchairs that were normally placed around coffee tables meetings with artists or small gigs. The first Club in Nowa Huta was opened on 10 March 1954 on the C-1 (Teatralne) Estate; another one was located on the CD-31 (Centrum D) Estate from 1956. 1950s.
Wnętrze Klubu Międzynarodowej Prasy i Książki (MPiK) przy placu Centralnym (Centrum D). W klubach, których sieć z czasem objęła wszystkie większe miasta w Polsce sprzedawano przede wszystkim prasę polską oraz pochodzącą z głównych krajów bloku wschodniego, przede wszystkim ZSRR a także po 1956 roku z krajów zachodnich. Były one wyposażone także w kawiarenki (kawa, herbata, napoje gazowane, czasem ciastka), szatnie i ubikacje i mogły działać jako wystawy artystyczne oraz, po przestawieniu foteli, normalnie ustawionych wokół niskich stolików, jako miejsca spotkań z artystami i kameralnych koncertów. W nowej Hucie pierwszy Klub powstał 10 marca 1954 roku w lokalu na osiedlu C-1 (Teatralnym), w lokalu na osiedlu CD-31 (Centrum D) został otwarty w 1956 roku, l. 50. XX w.
Photo by Wiktor Pental/idealcity.pl