FL: You’ve visited Poland many times. How has Poland changed in your perspective?
IN: It’s hard to say. We are coming and leaving and seeing bits and pieces only, but to tell you the truth, when we arrived that first time in 1983, the situation was of course quite desperate. It was right after Jaruzelski's martial law. Empty shops, people were desperate, but on the other hand, we had lots of contact with intellectuals, a young generation, they were full of good energy. Much better than nowadays somehow. They had a really good spirit in terms of: ‘This is a bad time, but we are going to do something and there will be good times again.’
For us in Yugoslavia in 1979, Poland was an intellectually advanced country, especially regarding theatre, film, classical and experimental music. In creative terms, that level was something we were just hoping to achieve. There was lots of inspiration, which I can't say for today that much. We see the country is developing a cultural paradigm like building fantastic venues, which are really great, but we are hoping that it will be possible to build them up with content. On the other hand, there is a lot of commercialisation which is dropping quality for quantity. Politically, we pretty much know where Poland is standing at the moment, it can be an alarming situation. We’re trying to understand the bigger picture in how we understand Polish nationalism, which is obviously very strong, its historical roots, reasons. I am quite sure that sooner or later, Poland will go in the right direction.
LJ: Over the past ten years, I have observed a true blossoming of Polish culture. What you do at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the National Center for Culture, FINA – that's great. Preparing our last programme, Polonia, I used a lot of materials made available online by these institutions. In Slovenia, we can only dream of such initiatives. We do not have knowledge bases in which we would gather knowledge about Slovenian culture. We also lack such support for the organisation of events in the country and abroad. At a concert in Lublin, the Ukrainian orchestra will meet with a Slovenian band and a Belgian conductor... It's quite an amazing event. The cultural support we see here can be compared to that in Germany or France.