Engagement. Projects’ Bazaar #2 is a 2-day meeting whose aim is to create an opportunity for public presentation and exchange of experiences of people dealing with art (artists and animators) who are involved in the phenomenon of engaged art, as well as to familiarize the wider audience with this artistic phenomenon. Artists, curators, and cultural animators from Poland and abroad will present their projects, their methodologies, and goals. On the second day, after the presentations, there will be an hour-long discussion. The meeting will be translated into English. The participants will be: anthropologist and cultural animator Maja Dobiasz-Krysiak (Olsztyn), artist Alicja Karska (Warsaw), artist Anna Królikiewicz (Sopot) with chef Jacek Koprowski (Gdańsk), artist Patrycja Orzechowska (Gdańsk), artist Iza Rutkowska (Warsaw), curator Natalia Revko (Odesa), artist Anna Witkowska (Gdańsk), artist and curator Agnieszka Wołodźko (Gdańsk), artist Seçil Yaylalı (Orta San Giulio), filmmaker Justyna Olimpia Zając (Gdynia).

Speeches:

Maja Dobiasz-Krysiak will talk about her research project in which she invited people from the field of social art, cultural animation, and social pedagogy to cooperate. This team carried out research residencies in Warmia, relating to the practices of the Interdisciplinary Creative and Research Center "Pracownia" operating in these areas in the years 1977-1986. The aim of the Open Studio is to recall the activities of that group and to include it in contemporary cultural circulation, as well as a new problematization of the topics and methods of its artistic and research work by people working today in the trend once set by the Olsztyn "Pracownia".

Anna Królikiewicz and Jacek Koprowski will talk about the role of contemporary cuisine and art in the context of the crisis of values, images of war and events on the border. Referring critically to the perception of cuisine as only elite entertainment, they will talk about a joint campaign during which, by feeding guests, they participated in the collection for this year's Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity. They want to show how the meeting of two strangers - a visual artist and a chef - resulted in financial value and intangible one – friendship.

Patrycja Orzechowska will present a joint manifesto of animate and inanimate matter entitled We, Flat Earthers. She will talk about the archaeology of the future and flat ontologies. The artist is interested in eco-fiction, SF thinking as a way of describing the present, and scenarios using various speculations that question reality, and a simultaneous deep immersion in the past and the future.

Natalia Revko [UA] will present the results of an audio project implemented as part of the Land to Return, Land to Care initiative, of which she was co-curator. As part of an artistic laboratory examining war experiences, artists from various regions of Ukraine created sound transmissions relating to the sensory experience of phenomena such as silence, danger, and the desire to defend. They analysed how sounds can play a dual role - evoking traumatic memories and, at the same time, transporting us to landscapes that we love and to which we would like to return.

Iza Rutkowska will present the All-Residents’ Yard project, which she has been implementing for eight years in Przedmieście Oławskie in Wrocław, working using the participatory design method. In a multi-stage process, together with the tenants of a local tenement house, she redesigns their devastated surroundings, helps obtain public funds and implement the prepared plan.

Alicja Karska and Anna Witkowska will present their joint project Szare Wrony [Gray Crows]. The first lockdown (2020), isolation and limited access to nature made them realize that it is worth redirecting their creativity to used things to generate a smaller carbon footprint. This is how the Szare Wrony brand was created. They focus their production mainly on vintage woolen sweaters, which they repair and process. In this way, they stave off the climate crisis on a micro scale, generating circularity in the production of clothing.

Agnieszka Wołodźko will present Mud Laboratory – a several-month-long, processual, interdisciplinary artistic project carried out this year as part of the exhibition program of the Halo Kultura Association in Gdynia. It was focused on the problem of human impact on irreversible changes in the natural environment, especially on the topic of mud, swamps and wetlands and their importance for climate balance. It was based on the observation that the current negative reception of these areas results in the disruption of the human-Earth relationship at the cultural level, and in the practical dimension - in the loss of arable areas and shrinkage of drinking and utility water resources.

Seçil Yaylalı [TUR/IT] – her Collect-ive-ing Collective Collection (Cultural Alphabet/Logography) is a visual research project that has been ongoing for several years and raises the issue of longing and the sense of belonging to specific subcultures. The artist explores the new identity of various multicultural societies and elements that create them. During her workshops, participants design logograms that attempt to form the cultural alphabet of a specific society and refer to the visual semiotics of people, culture, and history in relation to their current location.

Justyna Zając will present a set of her short films, made as part of the Mud Laboratory and illuminating the title phenomenon from various perspectives.

Admission is free.

Co-financed by the City of Gdańsk.