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
Finishing works in the “lighthouse” of the Teatr Ludowy [Folk Theatre] on the C-1 (Teatralne) Estate. It was supposed to be called the Teatr Kameralny [Chamber Theatre], and be a branch of the Teatr Wielki [Grand Theatre], to be built on the meadows by Plac Centralny (the project was never carried out). The Teatr Ludowy was designed by Jan Dąbrowski and Janusz Ingarden, and constructed in 1954-5. Together with Teresa Wąsowicz, Ingarden also designed the interior of the building. It had marble floors, columns, lavishly decorated crystal chandeliers, stucco ornaments, and fabric on the walls. The amphitheatre had a seating capacity of more than 400. The design contains elements and details imitating Ptolemaic Egypt. The first performance took place on 3 December 1955, it was a production of Wojciech Bogusławski’s “Cud mniemany, czyli Krakowiacy i Górale.” 1950s.
Prace wykończeniowe w „latarni” Teatru Ludowego na osiedlu C-1 (Teatralne). Początkowo miał on nazywać się Teatrem Kameralnym, ponieważ był planowany jako filia Teatru Wielkiego, który według planów miał stanąć na łąkach przy Placu Centralnym (projekt nie został zrealizowany). Teatr Ludowy został wzniesiony w latach 1954-1955 według projektu architektów Jana Dąbrowskiego i Janusza Ingardena. Ingarden wspólnie z Teresą Wąsowicz był także współautorem wnętrza projektu. Budynek wyposażono w marmurowe posadzki, kolumny, bogato zdobione kryształowe żyrandole, ozdoby stiukowe oraz tkaniny na ścianach. Amfiteatralna widownia liczyła ponad 400 miejsc. W projektach widoczne są elementy i detale naśladujące ptolemejski Egipt. Teatr rozpoczął działalność 3 grudnia 1955 roku przedstawieniem „Cud mniemany, czyli Krakowiacy i Górale” Wojciecha Bogusławskiego. Lata 50. XX w.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl