Popularising Poland One Student at a Time: An Interview About Project Campus
Campus Project, an initiative of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, is a one of-a-kind attempt at sparking an interest in Polish culture in large academic centers in the United States. Throughout the 4 years of its existence, Campus Project has established an ongoing collaboration with five universities in the United States: Yale, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Michigan. Culture.pl met its manager, Ewa Bogusz-Moore, to discuss the philosophy and workings of the initiative.
Culture.pl: How would you describe Campus Project? What makes it stand out among other endeavors to popularize Polish culture?
Ewa Bogusz-Moore: I think what characterizes Project Campus is its discretion. It’s a project where we don’t show off, there’s no fireworks, everything is very organic and everything is linked. We try to keep our eyes open for opportunities, and when we organize an artistic event it’s accompanied by workshops, conferences, publications, residencies, co-productions. We offer students, scholars, and artists opportunities to strike up a collaboration with Polish artists rather than be passive recipients. To use another visual metaphor, we act more like bubbles than fireworks!
You mentioned that you operate through a very wide range of activities, could you give us an example of what Campus offers its participants?
Among many other things, we’re currently involved in the creation of an English-language publication about Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy Has, and I’m mentioning this particular item since it’s a great example of how our programme goes with the flow of what is currently happening. Has is still not as well-known as many of his fellow directors from the Łódź Film School, but there has been a sharp rise of interest since Martin Scorsese has begun to promote his films very intensively. So obviously, this is when we try to react and build on what is already naturally happening with a series of closely related and carefully planned events. Earlier this Spring, we organized a retrospective of his films at the Harvard Film Archive, hoping to contribute to this wave of enthusiasm, and to pave the way for when the book will come out. We need to keep our eyes open, and see who is influential, see who creates a reaction. The project is not an end in itself, it’s just a spark to ignite something bigger.
When you work so organically, how do you measure success or failure?
Another characteristic of this project is that our work never truly stops: There’s always another step to take. If we organize an exhibition, then the next step is workshop, and once we establish contact with the people who reacted positively to these events, we can look into the possibility of offering a course about Polish theater at a university, and then we can organize a study visit for students and lecturers, and so on. But the end goal is that things should begin to happen without us. We want to catalyze a process that should keep unfolding on its own.
It’s very difficult to evaluate or measure this type of success. The results we hope for will come in ten or fifteen years. Yet we need to evaluate ourselves yearly to make sure we’re going in the right direction. And in order to do this, I think one of the clearest indicators of our success is the change in perceptions that we witness. It is very perceptible in the student questionnaires we receive, and even more obvious in the new collaborations that our partners begin to undertake with Polish artists and institutions.
What is the average student’s reaction to Polish culture? Are they puzzled, enthusiastic, surprised?
Interestingly enough, they are often surprised by how closely our art and our history are intertwined. We heard this on several occasions recently, from both management and jazz students. Sometimes the discovery of the wealth of Jewish culture that Poland has inherited – and that is currently experiencing a revival – is very overwhelming also.
So there are perceptible changes on an interpersonal level?
Definitely. There are cases when students will modify their academic curriculum to include courses or projects about Poland! Their experience with us is often very eye-opening since it’s often one of their first in-depth cultural exchanges with Europe. For example, I used to think of the United States as a monolithic entity, and then I got to discover the amazing diversity of each of its regions, and I believe that our participants experience a similar epiphany. Our participants go from seeing Europe as a whole to seeing it as a heterogeneous mosaic of culture, and thanks to those visits, they remember Poland as a key element within this community.
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