Anti-Monumentosis: Looking Back at the 11th Warsaw under Construction Festival

warszawa_w_budowie_2019_44.jpg, default, A view from the Monumentomania exhibition during the 11th edition of the Warsaw under Construction Festival, 2019, ZODIAK Pavilion of Architecture in

#photography & visual arts

How many monuments did you walk pass today in your city – and did you even notice what they commemorate? For most of us, these memorials barely register, but chances are that among the ones we overlook, the majority depict men bearing weapons. Why are our public spaces filled with such figures, and what stories have they left untold?

As Poland continues to grapple with the physical and symbolic legacy of its monuments, the 11th Warsaw under Construction Festival set out to reconsider not just who gets commemorated, but how – and to what end. By inviting visitors to reimagine the role of statues and memorials in public spaces, the curators challenged Warsaw’s residents to look past familiar heroics and engage in a broader, sometimes uncomfortable conversation about collective memory, identity and everyday life in the city.

Don’t burn monuments, raise your own

With the exception of monuments that serve as tourist attractions and landmarks, our gaze usually glides only vaguely over the memorials generously scattered around our streets, squares and plazas. When it comes to conventionality of form and subject matter, perhaps only Poland’s locally produced romantic comedies can compete with the monuments in its cities’ streets. However, the curators of the 2019 edition of the Warsaw under Construction Festival – visual culture scholar Łukasz Zaremba and Museum of Modern Art curator Szymon Maliborski – do not propose ridding the cityscape of all those heroic figures on pedestals. Instead, they ponder what ought to appear beside them.

The festival’s eleventh edition, titled Monumentomania and held in and around the reconstructed modernist building of the ZODIAK Pavilion of Architecture, belongs among its comparatively modest iterations. It bears closer a resemblance to the edition from 2017 devoted to Parade Square than to the larger-scale ones, which have been devoted to the matter of rebuilding the capital or, like in 2018, to migration. This time, the monument is a collective protagonist. Here, one would search in vain for stories about Piłsudski Square or Alina Szapocznikow’s Friendship. The curators of Monumentomania have not involved themselves in heated disputes about particular projects. Their cool, detached narration assumes a broader perspective. After all, the raising or knocking down of one monument can be a catastrophe, but when it comes to hundreds of them, it’s just statistics.

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A view from the Monumentomania exhibition during the 11th edition of the Warsaw under Construction Festival, 2019, ZODIAK Pavilion of Architecture in Warsaw, photo: Daniel Chrobak

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Invisible all along

The exhibition curated by Zaremba and Maliborski consists of two chapters. One is an exposition inside ZODIAK basted with a hint of statistics, while the other is a display of speculative monument forms in the square in front of the pavilion. The former focuses on what the cityscape of Warsaw’s centre, sprinkled with monuments, looks like nowadays. The latter looks towards the potential future, demonstrating how the city could look after some light improvements.

The central work for the ZODIAK exhibition is Witek Orski’s photographic installation Podkład (Foundation). On black-and-grey checker pattern – which in the language of graphic design software means transparency – the artist placed photographs of multiple Warsaw monuments clothed in a peculiar camouflage: the figures disappear from their plinths and merge with the cityscape background. We only see their distorted silhouettes. It’s a visual rendering of how ubiquitous monuments are really perceived when there doesn’t happen to be a political row blowing up around them at the given moment. We notice their presence out of the corner of our eyes, without pausing to concentrate on the figures themselves, which seem to have stood in the public space for ages.

Of course, ‘for ages’ actually refers to an incredibly short period of time – around 60 years on average in the case of Warsaw’s Old Town. The unluckier monument creators can’t even boast that many if they happen to have come up against an inauspicious historical moment. A case in point was Stanisław Sikora, active throughout three periods in Poland’s history: the interwar period, the communist regime, and the first years of the neoliberal Third Republic. His now non-existent monuments became the subject of non-verbal narratives by the mime Jerzy Klonowski in Dominika Olszowa’s performative piece Kamyk na Dnie Galarety (A Pebble on the Bottom of the Jelly).

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A view from the Monumentomania exhibition during the 11th edition of the Warsaw under Construction Festival, 2019, ZODIAK Pavilion of Architecture in Warsaw, photo: Daniel Chrobak

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Designer knick-knacks

Gizela Mickiewicz, in her melancholic piece Opóźnianie Przeszłości (Postponing the Past), offers a reverse temporal perspective. Her sculptural ruin was made out of concrete with a vibrating, expressive texture comparable to the sculptures of Medardo Rosso. However, it’s no ordinary concrete but rather so-called ‘self-healing concrete’ – its fissures are home to dormant colonies of bacteria. The moment water leaks inside, the bacteria start to multiply and excrete sandstone, which closes up the resulting cavities. Having been handed over to microbes, Mickiewicz’s piece looks like a farewell monument to a fallen civilisation, left behind by humanity on a planet drained of resources – the first and last monument to truly be eternal.

Although the monument designs in the square in front of ZODIAK represent alternatives to dominant forms, they don’t always go far beyond the horizon of the latter. There’s still no shortage of monumental knick-knacks, even if these are designer knick-knacks coming straight from Warsaw’s top commercial galleries. Examples include: a monument composed only of pedestals, authored by Olga Micińska; a piece hanging over the square by Piotr Łakomy, which, as is typical for this artist, is composed of a metal cocoon with a honeycomb structure and ostrich eggs; or a monument by Karolina Brzuzan dedicated to refugees, in the form of a lighting rod that simultaneously reconstructs the route from Sudan to France travelled by one particular migrant.

A similar subject is approached in a much more interesting manner by Daniel Rycharski, who’s also the author of arguably Polish art’s most intriguing monument of the last few years: Monument to a Peasant. Made for the Vera Icon festival, the piece is closely adjacent to the anti-monuments trend that developed in Germany from the mid-1980s onwards in its negation of traditional materials and monumental forms and its involvement of the viewer’s body in the process of reception. This time, Rycharski stitched together pieces of clothing obtained both from refugees finding their way from Italy to France and from people who provided them with help, often going against the law and societal attitudes. Rycharski’s piece, placed in the window of the clothing chain store C&A opposite ZODIAK, resembles not so much a traditional monument but rather a contemporary iteration of the votive offerings placed in churches beneath images of saints.

11th Warsaw under Construction Festival [Image Gallery]

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Monuments to labour

However, the tradition to which the artists taking part in Monumentomania most like to refer originated in the 19th century, with sculptures such as, on the one hand, Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, which was eventually taken off its pedestal, and, on the other hand, Vincenzo Veli’s naturalist working-class monuments. The silent protagonist of the exposition is, then, the Monument to the Construction of Brzeska Street from 1825 – one of Warsaw’s oldest and at the same time somewhat forgotten monuments, this dozen-metres-tall obelisk towers over Grochowska Street with its black silhouette covered with depictions of road builders.

Thumbnail — A view from the Monumentomania exhibition during the 11th edition of the Warsaw under Construction Festival, 2019, ZODIAK Pavilion of Architecture in Warsaw, photo: Daniel Chrobak

This tradition inspired, for instance, Róża Duda and Michał Soja, authors of Monument to Labour, which depicts a simplified silhouette of a labourer with a sizeable boulder for a head, waving what is simultaneously a neon pickaxe and an arrow from a productivity graph. Raising the object, the figure seems to be using it to hit themselves on the head over and over again. The monument is a symbolic variation on traditional working-class iconography. After all, a contemporary monument to labour would more likely be devoted to cashiers from Żabka [a ubiquitous Polish convenience store – ed.] or the employees of security companies working night shifts for peanuts.

What might speak to these people, however, are the pieces by Alicja Rogalska and Łukasz Surowiec. For the duration of the exhibition, Rogalska set up an obelisk-shaped moneybox in ZODIAK. All the change collected is to be used to create the Monument to the Victims of Capitalism, whose first version the artist designed in Chile three years earlier with viewers’ active participation [although it’s unclear today in 2025 on the status of the project]. Surowiec, in turn, has created what can be considered a parody of one of the symbols of the neoliberal Third Republic – the Public Debt Clock, installed on the roof of the Cepelia pavilion. The parody, however, is underlined with bitterness and dark humour. The streams of numbers on the flickering LED screen show the personal costs of decreasing public debt: the number of evictions and suicides committed due to debt.

The stakes of 2019’s Warsaw under Construction festival, then, aren’t about a radical remodelling of the public space but rather making monuments visible and mildly expanding their representational horizons. It’s not quite about igniting the eponymous ‘monumentomania’ but rather about overcoming monumentophobia. Reclaiming monuments for the inhabitants of cities means that they’re no longer perceived as brown-coloured blocks placed here and there by local or state authorities in accordance with the ideologies driving public history at a given moment. Instead, they serve as tools for representing collective memory and interests.

On the basis of current monument landscape, one could conclude that to deserve being publicly commemorated, one must kill and die fighting for a good cause or, alternatively, hold the office of at least prime minister. Artists such as Rogalska and Surowiec don’t depart from martyrology completely, but in their vision, military martyrology is replaced by an economic one.

In the end, Monumentomania does not call for the outright removal of Warsaw’s countless monuments. Instead, it proposes a gentler, but more radical expansion of what and who is deemed worthy of public memory. By foregrounding the economic, the overlooked and the everyday, the festival’s approach nudges urban history away from the strictures of military and political martyrology toward an open-ended, more inclusive vision. If this ethos took hold, Warsaw’s public spaces could slowly transform from cold stone echoes of victory and loss into living tools for community, empathy and shared narrative.

Originally written in Polish, 2019, translated into English by Anna Potoczny, July 2025

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