Institute of Contemporary Arts

Welcome to Tomorrow

Date: 11 July 2008

Ebenezer Howard, The Three Magnets. No.1, 1902, in 'Garden Cities of Tomorrow'

Nowa Huta spoken quickly minus a Polish pronunciation mutates into what sounds like the greeting from the raffia skirt wearing tribal elder depicted in the film Shrangrila. For some of the current 200,000 inhabitants of Nowa Huta an industrial district in South-East Krakow, Poland, Nowa Huta continues to act as the daily, visible and literally concrete reminder of Stalin's directive to 'purge architecture of its pessimistic formalism', to wipe the slate clean as a 'necessary corrective' to what was then perceived as the class imbalance of Krakow in 1946. What was required was an architectural shock and awe offensive against the very real middle-class resistance to the new regime (which retained its taste for botanical gardens and degenerate modernism).

With a mix of mathematical proportion, Romanesque order and the Cathedral-like symbolism of the foundry, Nowa Huta which translates as 'New Steel Mill' became an architectural model of Soviet Socialism, a blueprint for future cities, a barometer of the Mod-baroque of 'Tommorowville'. The only model towns I'd ever previously visited were unlikely to spark class consciousness in anyone as these scale model towns dotted along the coastal towns of Sussex, though painstakingly constructed, rarely included the pebble-dashed housing estates of the industrial petro-chemical towns of the North.

I received an email asking if I would be interested in being involved a 'kind of' Reality TV experiment / documentary by Polish Director Konrad Szolajski who was seeking participants for a 4 day 'Crazy Guide Communist Tour', in which a disparate group of middle-aged Western Europeans, libertarian politicos, artists, refuseniks, actors, former members of some disappointed 'tendancy' or 'faction' would be filmed as they were confronted with Communism 'as lived' in the early pre-Solidarity Poland. In short,a kind of 'see how YOU like it' thing.

If asked to declare my 'tendancy' at Belice airport,what will I confess to? Having once worn a Mr Freedom T-shirt with puffed up hair in 1969? Mis-pronouncing 'Engels' and 'Camus'. Reading only the more racy sections of 'The little Red Schoolbook'. The undeniable truth that Mandrax pills took precedent over the collected works of 'Marx'. And that I had spotted Astrid Proll of the Red Army Faction in Wood Green Woolworths when it was claimed she was in hiding in Angola.

That was then. On Friday the 11th I enter a televisual 'time-warp' to experience amongst others things Corvée and bricklaying training. With my ipod, mobile, wanfansi wafers and passport confiscated at the airport how will I a 'rootless cosmopolitan, splittist and disappointed Utopianist cope with the simulated privations of Communist Poland circa 1973?

An extract from the approximate tight time-table/shoot schedule provided courtesy of Z Studios, Warswa:

1. Check in at 'Goodbye Lenin Hostel', Krakow
2. Trabi Driving Lessons.
3. Visit to a Serfdom Village.
4. Lunch in authentic Commie Milk Bar (Korova Milk Bar)
5. Guided tour of the Lenin Steel Works
6. Walkabout in Nowa Huta
7 Group readings / analysis of Marx and Engels.