Once again, the Polish Institute in Prague cooperated with KomiksFEST, the biggest comics festival in the Czech Republic, to organize an exhibition of works created at the ninth edition of the City Stories international comics workshop. The event featured Marcin Podolec, Robert Popielecki, Joanna Karpowicz and Sylwia Restecka, as well as Czech authors such as Tomas Prokupek. The workshops are organized each year alongside the International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź. The comics created during the event are later published in a post-contest anthology. The exhibition, curated by Agnieszka Kaczmarek, will be on display in Prague until 15 January, 2015.
I am a Łódź native and Marcin Podolec has been living here for several years. We tried to show the Czech guests the darker side of Łódź. Not museums, Art Nouveau buildings or office blocks, not former or contemporary “dreams of power”, but rather streets, flea markets, alleys, and stories which the visitors usually don’t have an opportunity to hear and which often they’d prefer to avoid. In the comic book Koło (Circle), illustrated jointly by Marcin Podolec and Tomas Kucerovski, I spoke about Łódź currently torn between flea markets and old buildings on one side and modern office blocks and omnipresent modernization works on the other, in order to show that some things never change. In turn, Ballada o Tomku J. (The Ballad of Tomek J.) speaks about the real events of 2005, when, due to continuous raising of production standards in Łódź's Indesit factory, it was decided to abandon security equipment, which eventually led to the death of Tomasz Jochan, one of the employees. The management tried to hush up the matter and bribe the worker’s wife, who nevertheless decided to carry out her own investigation. Although suspended sentences were issued and the case basically came to nothing, one can still see graffiti commemorating the event on the street – explains Robert Popielecki, who took part in the project as a writer.
The Polish-Czech edition of the City Stories anthology features 10 comics.
Author: Łukasz Chmielewski, transl. szm, November 2014