'I'm Open to Mistakes & Errors': An Interview with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

trupa_trupa_los_angeles_premiera_mourners_foto_cassanda_church.jpg, default, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Trupa Trupa in concert in Los Angeles, at the 'Mourners' release party, photo: Cassandra Church / courtesy of the artist

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As the Polish Presidency of the EU Council comes to an end, we speak to Grzegorz Kwiatkowski from the band Trupa Trupa about the grand political landscape, intimate private discoveries, and touring the USA during seismic changes.

Filip Lech: The first time we spoke, Trupa Trupa’s successes were pretty fresh. But by now I feel like you must be used to the intensity of all those shows abroad and BBC live sessions. How do you feel about it all?

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski: For us, the most important things are still the compositions themselves, the songs, and our friendships within the band. The line-up has changed though – we’re now a trio. Rafał Wojczal left, but on friendly terms, there were no arguments behind the scenes. But it does seem that subconsciously we were hoping for a more raw sound, one that resonates even deeper.

FL: How did the change affect the band’s identity and approach to creating music?

GK: We’d once again found ourselves dealing with an uncomfortable situation in our lives, which, paradoxically, suits us very well. We love moments that we have to survive. We felt like the band was reborn. Being a trio gives us more freedom. Our concerts have become more intense, wilder, almost trance-like. It’s all or nothing.

I love repetitive things, but in life, something changes every moment and you’re always having to rearrange it all. Not long ago, my wife suspected that our son might be on the autism spectrum. In the end, the specialist said that actually I was the one who was autistic. It suddenly answered so many questions for me – I realised that what I’d considered artistic or formal gestures were often simply natural reactions.

I remember a conversation with my translator Peter Constantine, who said: ‘Poetry is between the lines.’ I didn’t understand him at all, because to me, poetry is the letter and the word – not what happens between the lines.

FL: You really didn’t know you had autism? It seemed pretty self-evident to me after our first conversation. I guessed the diagnosis after your comment about your song ‘Uniforms’. You said: ‘I really love it and identify with it a lot; I’ve been wearing the same shirt and trousers for years (I have around 20 outfits that are all the same)’.

GK: I curate a series of debates at Oxford University called ‘What about Exclusion?’. The first panellist was the philosopher Paul Lodge, a friend of mine. He spoke about a certain kind of exclusion he experiences because of autism. He said that many people see him as an arrogant eccentric who behaves strangely. He explained that he never tries to be offensive, but that’s sometimes how he’s perceived. When I told him I’m on the spectrum, he reacted just like you: ‘I’ve known that for ages.’ So this idea that we communicate best with people similar to us is actually true, not just a cliché.

I also thought about my deep admiration for the pianist Glenn Gould, who many believe was on the autism spectrum. Another example is David Lynch. Their methods of working were mechanical, robotic, absurd, and at times seemingly nonsensical – but thanks to all that, they were able to reach extraordinary psychological depths.

Werner Herzog once said in an autobiographical BBC documentary that he despises psychologists more than anything, because they try to reduce everything to a single word or term, even though life is much richer and more nuanced. Of course, Herzog is being unfair to psychologists and simplifying things himself, but I do believe that labelling with a diagnosis and reducing everything to it is an oversimplification. Psychological reality can’t be unlocked with a single key. Despite all that, I find this new piece of knowledge essential; above all, it helps me in my family life and within the band when it comes to communication and reducing tension and misunderstandings.

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Trupa Trupa at Open'er Festival 2025, Day 4 of the festival, Alter Stage, photo: Tomek Kamiński / courtesy of the artist

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FL: Precisely, let’s get back to the band. Other than turning into a trio, you’ve also changed your producer.

GK: Nick Launay has entered the picture during our new trio-life, the man responsible for the sound of most of Nick Cave’s albums. He’s also worked with Gang of Four and many other brilliant artists. Launay is a genius and a living legend, but most importantly, he turned out to be a wonderful, kind, warm and good person. He came from the Hollywood Hills to our studio in Wrzeszcz, and later to the one in Osowa [both districts of Gdańsk – ed.]. It was extremely hard work from morning to night, but deeply satisfying.

At first, we were needlessly paranoid and afraid that Nick would want to overhaul everything. But the changes he proposed turned out to be minor yet absolutely crucial, transforming the compositions in terms of dynamics and impact.

The first interview you did with me had the English title ‘A Glitch in the System’. I think your intuition was spot on. The things Trupa Trupa has done, as well as my poetry and academic projects, are ‘glitches’. They simply run counter to the way rock bands, literary careers and academic paths normally work. Nothing quite adds up here – and in my opinion, that’s a big advantage. I’m not saying it’s better, or that anything else is worse. But it’s autonomous. And different in its openness to mistakes and errors, through its inconsistent personal and thematic makeup.

FL: You often bring up topics about your identity, including problems accepting it.

GK: It’s only recently that I realised that, for most of my life, I wasn’t really accepted for who I was. Looking back, I kept trying to adapt, unsuccessfully, and trying on different masks, also unsuccessfully.

It’s only now that I’m in my 40s that I feel like the jigsaw pieces have come together in a fully positive way. Earlier, even though I wasn’t afraid, I often wondered if maybe it was my fault, that maybe I was the troublemaker. After all, other people don’t seem to break down as much, so maybe it’s not worth protesting. Maybe you’re just supposed to stay in your lane in this post-Soviet reality?

It’s only now that I feel a sense of liberation. It might not be euphoric, but I feel extraordinarily satisfied that I’ve managed to recover my childhood self. That is, the psychological state where you’re six years old and you see the evil in yourself and others, and it saddens you, but at the same time you have a lot of optimism and joy, and the naivety to try and change it. You accept who you are.

FL: When working in the West, do you feel more accepted?

GK: I think the process of being accepted in the West was just as important for me as the influence of my family. Around 95% of the projects I work on take place either at Oxford or at Yale – very much outside of Poland. I’ve no resentment about that, it’s just how things have turned out. In my opinion, part of the reason is that there’s still this prevailing post-Soviet mentality in many places in Poland – one in which everyone’s expected to know their place in the hierarchy.

It’s also connected to the fact that if what you’re proposing isn’t a copy of a Western trend or movement, or isn’t firmly rooted in the Polish here-and-now, people don’t know what to make of it or how to consume it. And with us, things have always been crooked and different. I’ve never wanted to reformat myself or my art according to the post-Soviet demands of fear and fashion.

That’s not to say that everything in Poland works that way – I’m just speaking from my own experience. And I want to emphasise that I know plenty of excellent Polish artists and great Polish art. I’m aware that by criticising Poland, I’m being a stereotypical Pole – and, with age, that Polish trait does seem to be getting stronger.

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Trupa Trupa in a forest, photo: Adam Pluciński / press

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FL: A stereotypical Polish intellectual. You’re even from Gdańsk.

GK: When it comes to working with Launay, aside from a couple of complaints, I have to say we’ve been very lucky. I never dreamt we’d get to collaborate with a producer like that. I may criticise the Polish approach to some things, but we are from Poland, from Gdańsk – and that’s precisely why we like ‘mission impossible’ situations and serious weighty topics. Gdańsk is something inward, a bit enchanted. There’s a certain kind of artistic magic here. There’s also great tragedy because World War II started here. There’s also hope in solidarity and democracy, which show us that anything can succeed.

Lech Wałęsa is a great figure in my opinion, and it’s a pity that most Poles don’t like him. He’s like a Don Quixote who accomplished a great thing. The fact that his biography is complicated and not black-and-white only makes him more believable as a human, that he’s not a cartoon. Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Gdańsk and lived here until he was 5 – and that fits perfectly, since according to psychology, that’s the most important developmental period in a person’s life. I hold this city in high regard – it probably comes from its port character, which makes it open and less closed off.

I recently persuaded Gdańsk’s city authorities to commemorate the forgotten Jewish ghetto in the city centre; they also approved a Stolpersteine project [pavement plaques commemorating victims of Nazism]. I’m glad the city has the sensitivity and willingness to undertake such important symbolic gestures. When my sons were born, it awakened a sense of responsibility for the world in me – a kind of social activism. At the same time, as an artist, I feel a certain shame about this involvement, about involuntarily lecturing others and being utilitarian. So it creates this inner conflict, because I don’t want art to be used for cynical political purposes. Nor do I want art to be flat, black-and-white and cautious. I truly believe in the power of art. It might not save nations, but it does save individuals – and it does so in unexpected and mysterious ways, not according to a single fixed pattern or formula.

Returning to Gdańsk: I recently learned that my maternal grandfather, whom I thought was Polish, was actually German. I found that out in my usual way, by asking a question one shouldn’t ask. After the war, my grandfather changed his surname from Ziemann to Cyman. This city and its inhabitants have complicated histories, and the artistic apparatus greatly helps in trying to analyse and, above all, understand this territory.

FL: Tell us about your work with Peter Constantine and how his approach to your poetry has affected how it’s been received abroad.

GK: Peter is the director of the Literary Translation Program at the University of Connecticut and head of the New York-based publishing house World Poetry Books. He translates me not only into English but also into German and Greek, and now he’s started translating my work into Odia – one of the languages of India. It’s an amazing collaboration because Peter had never translated anything from Polish before all this. It’s another ‘glitch in the system’.

Peter discovered my poetry thanks to his student, who was of Polish origin and assigned to translate Polish poems. He translated the poem ‘Walter Stier’ from my book Karl-Heinz M.:

my father
a decent office worker in the railways
never took part in any of the shootings
he was just doing his job
organizing transports
eastward and westward
north and south
back and forth

[translated by Peter Constantine]

Peter was confounded about how to interpret this poem and its tone. He decided to read more of my poetry and began to delve deeper into it. This eventually led to our correspondence and discussions. The fragments I create – the voices of executioners, victims, observers – are deeply musical to him. He believes the way I build the landscape of genocide is interesting because of the polyphony, the presentation of different perspectives. It’s up to the reader to decide what comes next and how to face it. This literature doesn’t have any educational or moralistic message, and it’s precisely this kind of neutrality that makes it more powerful.

Peter and I have now been friends for several years. He’s my most important artistic collaborator, aside from my friends in Trupa Trupa. We recently met up in Oxford, where he was a guest at my new series dedicated to exclusion. Paul Lodge spoke about exclusion due to the autism spectrum, and Peter Constantine spoke about dying languages. He studies languages that are disappearing and pushed out of discourse, ones that are spoken by fewer and fewer people until almost nobody uses them.

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Grzegorz Kwiatkowski with a cover of 'Gedichte' [Poems in German], translated by Peter Constantine, photo: selfie

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FL: For the whole of 2025, you’re an artist-in-residence at Yale. Tell us about their project, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Is working with survivor testimonies affecting you and your family?

GK: For the last six months, I’ve been listening to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors archived at Yale Library. I’m working with over a hundred testimonies from Polish Jews. It’s been an incredible year for me so far, and I’m immensely grateful to Yale for this opportunity. An amazing and unexpected thing also happened when it comes to my family life. When I started listening to these testimonies, my wife heard a few fragments and then asked me if she could listen to them as well. Soon enough, she was listening to these testimonies night after night for several months, and was almost unreachable. She heard more of them than I did, and they started to awaken family memories in her – her Jewish family had hid in a forest near Rzeszów during World War II. They also revived a certain kind of fear, but at the same time she gained a better understanding of who she is. It seems like she dug down into some kind of genetic memory, accepted herself, and then came out of the experience stronger. I can see she’s a happier, stronger person now, and she’s also changed many of her views about Poland and Poles.

By the way, many of the Polish voices I heard sounded roughly like: ‘It wasn’t that bad, Poles weren’t so bad, there wasn’t that much antisemitism.’ But the more questions you ask, the longer the conversation lasts, the more they open up and feel safer. And when they really start to open up, they tell such painful, such terrifying things about what happened to them – before the war as children, during the war, and after the war. The result of all this will be a poetic book. Trupa Trupa will take part musically somehow, and Peter Constantine will translate all these voices into English. There’ll also be a visual part, and at the very end, this entire Yale literary-visual-musical project will be presented in New Haven, as well as Gdańsk and other parts of the world.

FL: Seeing as you’re in Yale a lot now, I’m wondering how you perceive American history, especially the colonisation of Native Americans. Several nations lived in what is now Connecticut before the arrival of European settlers. During your trips to the United States, have you had any contact with Native cultures? Does it resonate with you in any way?

GK: At most of the American universities where I’ve given lectures, the host opening the event has begun by saying: ‘On this land there lived such-and-such a people, from such-and-such a tribe, who were murdered.’ It made a huge impression on me – I’ve never seen anything like that before. I saw it as a sign of deep respect and an acknowledgment of guilt.

FL: What sort of differences between Europe and America did you become aware of during your last tours of the USA and Europe?

GK: I have to say that I started to appreciate Western Europe much more than I did earlier – I’m talking about its freedom, democracy and diversity. I’m now more critical when it comes to the United States, but it’s hard to be any other way after coming back from a country which seems to be dismantling its democracy at breakneck speed. And that’s precisely why I’m so proud of Western Europe; even prouder than before, proud of its many voices, of its variety. Of its support for Ukraine.

I remember when Poland joined the European Union. From that moment on, being part of the EU has always felt normal to me. After my last visit to the USA, I’ve started to appreciate it more and think about how unbelievable it is that we’re in this union and how I hope it lasts as long as possible. This feeling of everyday normality has actually changed into wonder. I absorb European culture even more than before. Why? Put simply – I became scared. For the first time in my life, I didn’t reread Doctor Faustus this year, something I’ve been doing annually for a very long time. I decided that I’d had quite enough of Dr Faustus and his proclamations in my real life.

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Trupa Trupa, a recording session at World Cafe WXPN, Philadelphia, photo: courtesy of the band

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FL: Could I tempt you to define this ‘Europeanness’? You live in a very European city with a lot of Polish-German history.

GK: Poland regained its independence when I was 6 years old. To me, Lech Wałęsa was the king of the world, and I was – and still am – very proud of him. That was probably the only surge of patriotism I’ve ever had in life, but I still remember that pride. He connected us to Western Europe and, in a sense, to America. Poland has been free for almost my entire life, and that feels like something essential to me, culturally too.

Then came the Smolensk catastrophe. Up until then, I felt that our integration with Europe had been deepening all the time. But afterwards, things started taking a diabolical turn. And it seems to me that this diabolical path, embodied by Jarosław Kaczyński, has been incredible – incredible even in a literary sense, as Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz wrote. It was as if someone awakened the Romantic ghosts of the past within us. Poland, in a way, is one big cemetery, and stirring up all that hopelessness, quarrelling and war seems to wake us up to life and excite us. In a sense, it’s our true vibe.

Even me, as an artist – what do I write about? I dwell on themes that are extreme, borderline and horrible. I’m clearly a child of this country. Professor Andrzej Fabianowski from the University of Warsaw, an expert in Romanticism, was recently discussing my book Karl-Heinz M. on Radio Dwójka. He said something I hadn’t thought of before: that, according to him, Kwiatkowski isn’t following the path of the American poet Edgar Lee Masters and his Spoon River Anthology at all, but is simply continuing the path trodden by Mickiewicz’s Dziady. All I’m doing is summoning spirits. It’s that tradition of Polish literature that speaks of the dead.

FL: ‘The mysterious wound of our most holy ancestors…’ wrote Rymkiewicz in a poem about Kaczyński.

GK: Precisely. And I want to emphasise that I’m not making fun of Rymkiewicz or Kaczyński here. I can be afraid, but I don’t want to laugh. I don’t want to laugh at anybody at all. For me, the Polish intelligentsia’s contempt for the ‘eastness’ of Poles was and still is pretty pathetic. Mocking the religiousness of Poles, reducing it the caricature of an elderly woman in a mohair beret, was something that started a long time ago but it’s still going strong.

For me, Poland’s bloodless revolution was a great democratic achievement of global significance. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes a debate between Settembrini and Naphta, who are fighting for the soul of Hans Castorp. The former advocates for democracy and education, while the latter is a proponent of political terror. I wholeheartedly side with Settembrini, especially when it comes to education and the need for systemic change. Showing contempt for other people and attacking them is counterproductive. I truly hope that a diverse and free Europe will survive. I feel it’s only now that I’m fully able to appreciate that. Especially when I look at what’s happening in the United States, where our own dismantling of democracy feels like a joke or amateurish by comparison. That’s a country of gigantomania and hardcore politics – they don’t hold back over there.

And it’s precisely in this strange, increasingly frightening and unpredictable time that Trupa Trupa is starting to really resonate. Lots of people are coming to our concerts now: in Poland, across Europe, and in America. We didn’t have that kind of turnout before. The same goes for my lectures at American universities. And it’s a strange, internally contradictory feeling.

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Trupa Trupa, photo: Maciej Olejniczak

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FL: How do you perceive the role of art, especially your music, in times of growing unrest?

GK: The heart of this project is a raw look at humanity, given without moralising. Recently, in the German magazine Ostragehege, there was a review of my two German books. They wrote that the biggest strength of my literary project is that it can’t be appropriated by any one historical or political narrative – precisely because of its rawness, fragmentary nature and openness. But when I talk about love or belief in humanism, I really believe in it. There’s a great resistance in me and I try throughout my life to do everything I can to prove that humans are not the way we probably are. We try to be good, empathetic and help others. I hope that the things I do in poetry and art is a display of this great negativity and that, in some sense, it serves as a wake-up call.

Today’s vast mix of concepts, fear and polarisation makes people more receptive to our kind of gloomy art. Our last British and Irish concerts were real game-changers. That goes for our EP Mourners too. We sing things like, ‘Let the mourners come, let the mourners go’ and other funeral-like lines. That record has a bit of a 1980s atmosphere, but the dark years of the 1980s. It reminds me of Joy Division and the dance-ability that was characteristic of their music. Combining gloominess with fun creates an unbelievable dynamic, a sort of dark vitality.

FL: Joy Division was a band that directly referenced fascist aesthetics. Our conversation now also seems to have recurring themes linked to totalitarianism and democracy.

GK: It’s interesting you mention that because Trupa Trupa features in Daniel Rachel’s antifascist book This Ain’t Rock and Roll, which is coming out in October. The book’s cover is that famous album cover from Joy Division. But these themes keep coming up, because it’s simply our – my – bread and butter. Art fascinates me because it poses questions and provokes reflection, it awakens us from totalitarian lethargy. For me, the greatest value of democracy lies in reflection, dynamism, uncertainty and diversity. When times filled with extremism appear, and people stop wanting to discuss things and choose violence instead, things become less interesting. I have the feeling that we’re at a decisive moment, where it’s still unclear which way the pendulum of history will swing. Or maybe, unfortunately, it’s already clear, and I’m just comforting myself? Coming back to the point, to art: the only certainty is that art will always be wiser than its creators.

That reminds me though, I was recently reading an old interview with David Lynch from The Guardian. He said a couple of sentences about Trump which sounded like he was voicing his support. He just said that he admired how much Trump had shaken up the global establishment during his first term; that he’d turned it upside its head. There wasn’t actually any apology there for Trumpian ideology, and Lynch had openly supported Obama. But there were still attempts to burn him at the stake, although he turned out to be too big a character for that to happen. He was also criticised for portraying women in his films as victims of violence, and that is indeed the case, but I see that as a completely empathetic gesture and a critique of violence itself.

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Trupa Trupa in Washington, DC, Photo: Bob Boilen / courtesy of the band

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FL: His movie ‘Inland Empire’ was three and half hours about violence against women and their suffering. It’d be hard to read that film as anything other than a huge criticism of patriarchy.

GK: I also see the film that way, but I accept that others might see it differently or some other way – and that’s okay. After all, Lynch famously avoided interpreting his own films. Some of his friends said that he simply didn’t know himself what they were about, because the most important thing for him was to follow his intuition. I really like that approach.

Coming back to Trupa Trupa: we really try to preserve our democratic status. That means it’s not Kwiatkowski’s politicised band, but the band of Wojtek, Tomek and Grzegorz. But politics does sneak into our studio and probably around 25% of our rehearsals become a political discussion corner. And that’s okay, because we’re close friends, we see what’s happening in the world and analyse it and experience it in our own way. At university lectures, I often talk about these things publicly and then there’s a risk that what I’m saying as me will be read as a statement by the entire band, but that’s not true. The truth is that we don’t want political interpretation to flatten how our music is received. The love of multiple voices, polyphony and multiple readings – that is the quintessence of art for us.

FL: I remember talking to you about Lynch on the eve of his death, a few days before you headed off on your American tour.

GK: His death followed us on tour. Our producer Nick Launay knew David Lynch and appeared in the third season of Twin Peaks. The premiere of Mourners took place in Hollywood, and afterwards Nick took me to Lynch’s favourite restaurant. It was a wonderful tour, but a weird one. Every day, there was troubling news coming out of American politics, combined with the radical reception our concerts were getting, and then there was the even stronger reception of the lectures at UCLA, UC Berkeley, American University and the University of San Francisco.

When we played in Washington, we met up with our friends from Dischord Records and Lovitt Records. Our friend Bob Boilen from NPR and Tiny Desk was there too. It was February, a month after Donald Trump had come back to the presidency – you could feel a completely different atmosphere. Americans are very optimistic, sometimes almost absurdly so. But this time you could feel the disorientation in the crowd and their search for a community, a need to find solace in art.

We live in strange times: a person might want to talk about art, but it just turns into a big conversation about politics. But let’s be grateful for what we had just before all this: until quite recently, it was considered good form to support integration, to go on Erasmus exchanges, and you didn’t feel proud of yourself if you said something negative about immigrants. Today, every side of the political divide uses migrants to stoke fear. I can’t agree with that, and it’s hard for me to support anyone politically in a clear-cut way. These times are being polarised in such a primitive way that, without love, there’s really no point in living. Simple as that.

Do you remember how The Holy Mountain ends? ‘And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round – will love someday rise up out of this, too?’ Evoking a literary image of a World War I battlefield in the context of 2025 could only be done by a pampered and detached citizen living in 2025, a year that’s heaven compared to 1914. But that love triumphs one day, or in just a moment – that’s what I wish for you, for myself, for all of us. I also wish that our next conversation won’t touch on politics at all, but simply on art and – why not? – on love as well.

Interview originally conducted in Polish, translated by Adam Zulawski, June 2025

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