Germs

The exhibition “Germs” is part of a “Nowa Huta’s Odyssey”, a journey through the socialist realist “Doge's Palace” in Krakow organized by @laznianowa and @dom_utopii. Set in the control room of the former ironworks of Nowa Huta and in the great hall of the Palace, Germs takes the form of an installation and a film. “Germs are first of all a series of small sculptures related to two, if not more, periods in the history of Nowa Huta. Uniformly black, they oscillate between scale models of specific buildings and abstract pieces of architectural provenance. The clay objects executed by the artist have been inspired by archaeological finds discovered on the grounds that were becoming Nowa Huta in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The vast terrain of the future investment – the city and the Combine – was turned into an archaeological dig drilling through consecutive layers of soil in search of information about the past of the region. Excavated vases and pots with complicated ornaments and only partly fathomed purpose are exhibits at the Nowa Huta branch of the Archaeological Museum. They were discovered along with remains of furnaces and hearths, uncovering a history of steel industry that went further back than one could have surmised. Searching through the museum collection, Tomaszewski explores analogies between the forms of amphoras, pots, or clay receptacles and large-scale building constructions in the Combine, or the urbanism of the city, singling out patterns – ornaments which are similar to it. Unexpectedly, history assumes a circular shape instead of progressing in a linear way; it simply takes another turn. The biggest investment of the Six-Year Plan may seem a breach with the past, but it is only so on the surface. By reaching deeper, like archaeologists who conducted their research before the Combine did, one can go deep enough to uncover a steel-related past as old as 1,600 years, or older. Industry is not new to this agricultural region, and its renewed invasion into this reality is, according to the artist, a reappearance of what should be well-known here, what kept reminding of itself by means of traces, and digs. For Tomaszewski, Nowa Huta is not only a modern creation, but also an amalgam of diverse traditions deposited in the place over centuries like information encoded in DNA. Testifying to a past that goes a long way back they are like seeds, resting spores capable of germinating as well as adapting to whatever conditions are prevailing when they begin to replicate themselves, and to modify. Germs disclose a version of the past hidden in the earth, a probable scenario dating from ancient times. Remaining dormant in the form of traces, pieces of pottery, it lay buried under tons of soil, waiting to be dug out. Like seeds storing information about the future shape of the organism.”