made by: Łukasz Pipczyński

Until a few years ago, there was a sculpture/fountain in front of the office building of the Railway and Municipal Rolling Stock Workshop (ZNTKiM) near the Siennicki Bridge. Designed and made around 1979 by the Gdańsk-based sculptor Zygfryd Korpalski, it depicted two seashells on a pedestal facing each other. The external walls of the shells were covered with a structure resembling a shoal of fish. The object’s abstract form did not lend itself to simple interpretations, and one of the more frequent associations was recorded in the piece’s nickname: “lungs of a ZNTK railwayman”.

LUNGS_2022 allude to Korpalski’s sculpture in form and location. Mirek Kaczmarek’s object stands on the foundations of the former fountain, using what’s left of its structure. The work’s title is also an (ironic) reference to the object’s colloquial name. Yet this is where the similarities end. The aggressive form of this piece, at odds with the surrounding architecture and landscape, attempts to draw attention to the environmental crisis and the human right to live in a natural, clean environment.

Photo Tomasz Bocian

Mirek Kaczmarek is a set, costume, and lighting designer and author of video projections. He graduated from the Faculty of Visual Communication of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań (1998) and designed the Polish Pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (2007). In the theatre, he regularly collaborates with Ewelina Marciniak, Jan Klata, Marcin Liber and Grzegorz Wiśniewski, to name but a few. Kaczmarek worked on over 200 productions.