A Village of Dancing Buses: A Different Side of Śląsk

autko_maciej_cholewa.jpg, full-width, photo by Maciej Cholewa, from the series 'Greetings from the Small Town', A Village of Dancing Buses A Different Side of Śląsk

#photography & visual arts

You don't have to visit Upper Silesia to have a clear picture of it. It is at the forefront of areas most mythologised by Polish culture. However, it is worth stepping off the beaten path to look at Silesia from an oblique angle, from the point of view of artists exploring its outskirts, far from the mines and metropolitan areas

Small-town ambassador

Radzionków near Bytom is a town of several thousand inhabitants, where you can see a small neo-Gothic church, visit one of the two bread museums in Poland, go to a match of one of the local sports teams, a catch a performance of a folk song and dance ensemble. In Radzionków you also can meet Maciej Cholewa, an artist who, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, returned to his hometown. In his art, it grew to the rank of a mythical Small Town.

Born on the threshold of the transformational period of the early 1990s, Cholewa is sensitive to what is seemingly unchangeable in a small town and to the shifts brought about by successive political and economic reshuffles. Radzionków itself is to some extent universal. Just as in the former provincial towns described by Filip Springer in The Archipelago City, in small Silesian towns, individual stories and peculiarities also merge with the wider current seizing subsequent cities.

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Maciej Cholewa, 'The Myth of the Small Town', Center for Contemporary Art Kronika in Bytom, photo: Marcin Wysocki

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In 2017, Cholewa presented a small-town synthesis at the A Myth of a Small Town exhibition inside Bytom's Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art. As if on a theatre stage, he marked out characteristic points in it, outlining a map that was suggestive despite its conventionality. Viewers arriving at the ‘Small Town’ were greeted by a coat of arms. It was empty, because it lacked any iconographic motifs – no patron saints, eagles, or knights – and yet it contained the most important thing, because it was cast in the basic building material of the city – rough concrete.

In the scenery arranged by Cholewa, one could find themself in a room entirely covered with a carpet made for children's rooms, the kind you can get in any interior design shop: full of identical houses with red roofs, schools, hospitals, offices, and single trees, between which wind serpentine roads lined with boxy cars. Every step you take on this idyllic-generic carpet, however, has to be careful and well measured, as it covers a thick layer of rubble scattered on the floor. After all, every city grows from some ruins and feeds on someone's blood.

'Fences' by Maciej Cholewa – Image Gallery

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Although, as the Radzionków Silesian-polo band Kiersi sang, ‘there are never any clouds here’, the Small Town also has its dark side. We discover it while reading A Myth of the Small Town, stylized as a local daily with short stories by Cholewa. One of them explains the origin of the concrete pillars scattered around the city. In keeping with the pattern of David Lynch-style thrillers set in idyllic towns with perfectly trimmed lawns and hedges, the nightmare begins the moment someone tries to leave them: either literally or by breaking the rules. The city, we find, is a conscious entity; more akin to Lovecraft's monsters stirring the minds of purely innocent fishermen than to the impassive, unmoved but familiar dragon from Twardoch's novel.

Among the local legends and melancholic anecdotes about the locals, Miasto w osłupieniu (A City in a Stupor) is a story about the dark side of small-town mentality, the essence of stories told with malicious satisfaction about failed social and class promotions, gossip about those who returned from the big city ‘with their tail between their legs’.

Cholewa also directly documents Radzionków and the surrounding small towns in his emerging photographic series Pozdrowienia z małego miasta (Greetings from a Small Town). The work falls somewhere between A-Z German-Polish Illustrated Dictionary by Andrzej Tobis and A Photographic Notebook by Władysław Hasior. Conceptual rigour meets pure enchantment here. Growing out of the trend of new photographic topography, the project marks its side street. Cholewa documents not progressive modernisation, but rather the overlapping layers of time. He is interested in their polyphony, sometimes full of clashing encounters between old objects and traces of Poland under the communist regime and post-EU unification. With his lens, he enters the space between what is typical and what is unique, and he is not afraid to ‘contaminate’ the neutral gaze of a documentalist with sensitive or ironic details.

Cholewa extends his catalogued repertoire of small-town forms with his own. Fences arise simultaneously with the photographic Greetings. They are rooted in self-made wickets from the 1960s and 1970s, welded by hand from leftover materials by their owners or by local locksmiths specialising in specific motifs; from Art Nouveau flourishes to geometric and even op art abstractions. Olga Drenda wrote about them in Wyroby (Crafted Objects):

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Those made of bent and welded rods, when you look at them, often [...] have a folk charm. Some of them are thick and concentric, like Slavic mandalas, others like gingerbread decorated with icing, like Kashubian floral patterns from Lubiana ceramics and painted tapestry-carpets from Białystok. They were modern in their time – like the entire rapidly modernising village [...] – but still somewhat grandmotherly in terms of design.

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Cholewa appreciates this modest lodgement of socialist modernism fused with folk art and combines both elements consciously in his own imaginative designs of gates. The ‘grandmotherly’ forms and colours in them once again gain a modernist peak, and a similar meeting takes place in the iconography – devotional motifs (Blessed Gate) meet with representations straight from the space race era (Gate to the Stars). Cholewa's fences, like their vernacular ancestors, have something new and old in them, but they celebrate this split. The identity of the inhabitants of modernised small towns, no longer rural but also not entirely urban, does not become a source of complexes based on aspirations and a sense of uprootedness, but a separate identity proposition, permanent in its unsteadiness.

From the diary of a bored ethnographer

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Marek Rachwalik, 'Logo and mascots of a country nu metal chapel with a young girl on vocals', photo: courtesy of the artist

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On the northern edge of Silesia, not far from Częstochowa, lies the village of Kłomnice, the hometown of painter Marek Rachwalik. Like Cholewa, Rachwalik was educated in Katowice and chose to return to his native village. The cover of Drenda’s aforementioned book Wyroby featured a fragment of Rachwalik's painting. No wonder – for years the painter from Kłomnice has been the greatest promoter of garden swans made from tyres and mushrooms made from old bowls. In Rachwalik's work, imaginativeness and excess meet with an equally exaggerated and idolised black metal aesthetic. We find not only exotic birds made from cut tyres, but also ‘musicians from a second-rate band playing cyber-industrial metal’ or ‘a prototype guitar amplifier made to order for musicians from the countryside’.

Rachwalik went to black metal concerts as a long-haired teenager with Bartosz Zaskórski, who lived nearby in Żytno. Today Zaskórski, another artist and musician educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, regularly returns to his hometown on the border between Łódź and Silesia. Żytno, as Zaskórski claims:

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…has a limited number of inhabitants and houses and is surrounded by forest from all sides. Because of this, the number of combinations of events, places, and people from which I build stories quickly runs out. To avoid this, I fictionalize the stories I tell.

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Bartosz Zaskórski, 'Kuracjusze', drawing, fineliner on paper, 50x70 cm, 2016, photo: courtesy of the artist

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As in Rachwalik's work, the world presented by Zaskórski is extremely detailed and at the same time unreal. With the patience and precision of a gothic miniaturist, Zaskórski draws with a fineliner every blade of grass by a roadside billboard, every plastic bag and broken PVC pipe lying in a rubbish dump. The isometric view of the countryside resembles maps from old computer RPGs, which become the arena for stories that draw on folk beliefs, philosophies, and games. Whereas Rachwalik's candy-psychedelic paintings represent vitality and aspiration, Zaskórski's stories are full of darkness and rather black humour, also characteristic of folk tales.

While Cholewa roams around small towns, Zaskórski wanders from village to village, not documenting them directly, however, but wrapping them in a mist of fiction. In Villages, a series of radio plays accompanied by short hypnotic videos recorded by hand, the narrator, in a voice heavy with fatigue, records his observations of the villages he visits. These villages do not even have names, only numbers. But their inhabitants and their customs are as colourful as the stories about dog-heads and other fanciful peoples described by Marco Polo of his overseas travels.

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Wieś z dinozaurami // Village of the dinosaurs

In village number five:

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The youngest inhabitants […] are raised to become bus drivers. [...] most of their time is taken up by preparations for an annual festivity whose major attraction is a dance performed by buses. [...] The winner is instantly employed with a local transportation company, but he or she can also choose to leave the village and move to the city.

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And in village number eight:

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Its inhabitants have never built houses or streets, there is no sewage system or pavements, and rubbish is never collected. People live inside the plaster casts of dinosaurs, among the paws, tails, heads, and trunks that belong to the imitations of these ancient animals. The villagers communicate by means of sounds that were allegedly used by the dinosaurs themselves – such as barking and shouting.

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Suspended in an apparent timelessness, the stories told by Zaskórski, like folk tales, in fact grow out of concrete realities, shaped by the local landscape, both natural and industrial.

In the work of Cholewa, Rachwalik, and Zaskórski, we don’t find stories about the fate of mining families straight out of Kazimierz Kutz's films, nor a lump of coal, nor a trace of the icons of Silesian modernism, such as Katowice’s Spodek Arena or the massive Superjednostka residential building. Instead, these artists offer a detailed catalogue of local forms and stories shrouded in myth and legend. From their work emerges a picture of Silesia that is full of details and different from that offered by iconic cultural texts.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Agnes Dudek

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