In Warsaw

Warsaw is the way to work or school, your favourite cinema or the yellow and red tram, Tyrmand’s The Evil One, or sometimes just a stopover at the train station. Warsaw’s social and cultural contexts that we look at in WOK often elude attempts at description and synthesis. This makes it all the more worthwhile to undertake mapping the different layers of the urban fabric, creating stop-frames and close-ups of specific places and moments. In late 2023, we invited artists with experience of migration or refugeeism to walk around Warsaw, to places that are important to them. Their stories, anecdotes and digressions, opinions and emotions are an attempt to answer the question again: how else can Warsaw be?

We used the technique of the follow-along interview, in which biographical interviewing meets participatory observation. We decided to remain open to its different forms: a drift, a tour with stops, a self-structured story, or a narrative conversation pinned to a place. We interviewed ten individuals and art collectives. Our interlocutors, guides to Warsaw, were people born in Belarus, France, Colombia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Italy, with different identities and approaches to the concept of nationality, for whom Warsaw became a place to live and work as a result of migration or exile.

Until mid-January 2024, an exhibition of sculptures by one of the interviewees, Majid Jammoul, a Syrian-born artist based in Warsaw, could also be seen in WOK windows at 34/50 Marszałkowska Street.

Each of the stories we heard is of great value to us. We have decided not to publish the recorded and transcribed interviews – both for the comfort of each person we spoke to and for the research nature of the project. We are considering them as a starting point for further reflection and as a basis for the study we plan to prepare in the first half of the year 2024. The interviews in the form of transcriptions, as separate units, will also serve as an important resource for the WOK’s archive and a snapshot of the artistic-migrant experience of Warsaw in 2023.

Interview scenario: Miranda Zarzycka

Conducting the interviews: Iwo Maciak, Marta Michalak, Olga Mzhelskaya, Miranda Zarzycka

Photo: Kanapleidiki