Curatorial Concept

What Happens Between the Blocks

In the 1970s, the public spaces of Żabianka, then a newly developing housing estate, were shaped through collaboration between artists, architects, urban planners and residents. This approach to working with space became a point of reference for the exhibition-walk What Happens Between the Blocks.*

Art was given an important role in Żabianka’s design, with ceramic works by Gdańsk-based artists including Swetlana Zerling, Jacek Krenz and Edward Roguszczak integrated into the local architecture. Their presence was intended to humanise and individualise the housing-estate environment. As Jacek Krenz wrote, these efforts sought ‘to make the open spaces more attractive and enrich them with a range of meanings that would bring colour, richer experiences and moods into residents’ everyday lives, while banishing greyness and boredom’.**

The concept behind What Happens Between the Blocks draws on this tradition of good practice to ask how we understand the social and aesthetic role of art in shared spaces today. How can artists help create places that not only break up the monotony and anonymity of housing estates, but also encourage social interaction, build relationships and foster aesthetic awareness?

The festival works revisit functions once assigned to art in housing estates: giving the surroundings emotional resonance, inspiring and educating through art, and involving residents in the creative process. By participating in the design, reinterpretation and revitalisation of these spaces, artists once again become co-authors of the urban landscape and of the rhythms of life between the blocks.

In the months leading up to the festival, the artists involved held meetings, workshops and consultations with residents of the Żabianka-Wejhera-Jelitkowo-Tysiąclecia district, inviting them to take part in a collaborative creative process. Drawing on the ideas that shaped Żabianka, they extended this approach across the district as a whole. Works were created in each of its constituent areas and will be presented along the festival route running from Żabianka to Jelitkowo.

What Happens Between the Blocks is an invitation to consider how art can inhabit the spaces of everyday life today – not as decoration, but as an impulse for encounter, collaboration and reflection on our shared surroundings.

Curators of NARRACJE #17
Sarmen Beglarian and Sylwia Szymaniak

* The title is taken from an article about Żabianka by Teresa Zwierzchowska, published in the daily newspaper Wieczór Wybrzeża.

** Jacek Krenz, typescript, Osiedle Żabianka. Gdańsk (1977), p. 179.