installation
feretrons and lighting of the landscaped area

This spatial intervention refers to the visual narratives inscribed in Żabianka’s open spaces. In the 1970s, Jacek Krenz was among those who helped shape them as a member of the Kadyny Group, which brought together visual artists and architects associated with the international Ceramics for Architecture open-air workshops organised in Kadyny between 1973 and 1976 by Edward Roguszczak. The ceramic installations and elements of small-scale architecture created for Żabianka were intended to introduce artistic elements into the estate’s standardised prefabricated architecture.

For the newly built estate, Krenz designed playgrounds that have since become legendary, including Indian Village, Stream and Robinsonade. Over the years, the artistic elements that made up these spaces were destroyed or dismantled. Of the original artistic interventions in the estate, only the works made of stoneware – sculptures and reliefs – survive today. Krenz’s now-lost playgrounds live on in residents’ memories and in traces of the former structures that are now difficult to decipher.

The artist on his work:

I want to recall an initiative that was unique in Poland: the integration of art into residential space. To do so, I use photographic feretrons on canvas, suspended from lamp posts near the remains of the Stream playground. Measuring 240 × 90 cm, the panels are mounted back-to-back on two lamp posts.

The edge of Stream was once marked by an undulating low wall. Only fragments survive today, forming a kind of palimpsest of a design created 50 years ago. I mark the edge of the wall and the outline of the stream on the pavement as a kind of double palimpsest, since the Stream playground itself was built on the site of an earlier watercourse that had been culverted before the housing estate was constructed.

JACEK KRENZ

is an architect, painter and professor at the Faculty of Architecture of Gdańsk University of Technology, the Faculty of Architecture, Engineering and Art of Sopot University of Applied Sciences, the University of the Arts Poznań and Universidade da Beira Interior in Covilhã, Portugal. His research focuses on layers of meaning in contemporary architecture. He is a member of the Association of Polish Architects (SARP), a co-founder of the Wdzydze Art Village and the Association of Polish Watercolourists. His work in sculpture, ceramics and painting has been exhibited in Poland and abroad, including at the Royal Watercolour Society in London. He is an instructor with the international Urban Sketchers organisation.