Curatorial concept

Smugglers

The 7th edition of the NARRACJE Festival smuggles in stories and legends related to Nowy Port. It navigates between the narrow streets and backyards, tracking the canal, in whose waters historic experiences and private stories have been reflected. The Festival transcends physical and mental barriers and limitations, collecting sounds and images that – resonating in the past – gently evoke the future. It brings to life and fills with new meanings places that, left to themselves, would have stagnated in inertia.

Smugglers carry the ambiguity of the contemporary world. They are part of the remembered local landscape and today’s global reality, an answer to the increasing social and economic stratification of the world; they are the messengers of the excluded and at times – their only hope for a better tomorrow.

Transferring the phenomenon of smuggling into the arena of contemporary art, we operate amongst contradictory concepts. We look for the accessible and the hidden, the collective and the individual, the material and the ephemeral. Acting under the cover of darkness, we take advantage of a momentary lapse of attention and set out new spaces for encounters and exchange. We penetrate the found boundaries and structures and create new channels for the flow of knowledge, matter and energy. What we leave behind is not so much solid transformation as the potential for it.

 

Anna Smolak