Richard Buckminster Fuller, an American architect and visionary, once said that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Michael Kurzwelly, who for more than thirty years has been involved in projects at the intersection of artistic and social creativity, effectively influencing the surrounding reality, has chosen this adage as his motto.
For Kurzwelly, a key point of reference is Joseph Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture”. Beuys argued that every person as a social being has the creative power to change themselves and the world. Kurzwelly strives to be an agent of change. The essence of his work is to awaken social energy and involve people and institutions in processes that can positively change reality. The artist says that “in a ‘society of artists’, the basic human position of all citizens is that of the artist: freely designing and questioning the world and creating new connections between different social areas”.
Nowa Amerika project, which gave the exhibition at GaMA its title, is an ironic reference to the colonization efforts of Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great regarding the land surrounding the Oder and Neisse rivers. The title – combining Polish [Nowa] and German [Amerika] words conveys the promise of a better life in the new world. Millions of Europeans, unable to further endure the misery they suffered on the old continent, fulfilled this promise by immigrating to the “real America”. It also brings to mind the hope of creating a new society liberated from the factors such as class, national, and religious restrictions. Nowa Amerika is a project that transcends the ideas of the “old America”, an artistic vision for building a post-state society, an artistic fiction that functions in actual reality, and comes to fruition in concrete actions and submission to artistic imagination.
The exhibition is Kurzwelly’s return to the town where, in the 1990s, he founded and ran the Międzynarodowe Centrum Sztuki [International Art Center] on Jackowskiego Street. It was an independent initiative that provided a platform for exchange and dialogue between artists from the East and West. After six years, Kurzwelly moved to Frankfurt (Oder), where he began the next chapter of his creative work, initiating the creation of the cross-border project entitled Słubfurt. This merger of the Polish city of Słubice and the German city of Frankfurt (Oder), which in the past were one city, situated on two sides of the Oder River. Connected by a bridge, they were once separated by a border, first between Poland and Germany, then between Poland and the European Union. Since 2004, the border has been open, but truly removing it has only been possible through work involving different communities, artists, and academics, both Poles and Germans, as well as a growing number of migrants from around the world who enrich the Słubfurt experience with their global perspective. Thanks to them, Słubfurt and Nowa Amerika have gone from projects that open up new forms of German-Polish integration to being, necessarily, an attempt at a social and artistic response to the multiple crises of the present.
Nowa Amerika exhibition is not only a story about artist-inspired activities along the Oder River, but also an invitation to collaboration extended to the audience and NGOs from Poznań and Frankfurt (Oder). The rich program of events featuring local NGOs that accompanies the exhibition is an opportunity to put into practice the use of the municipal gallery space as a common space, open to anyone who sees themselves as a “social being”.
Marek Wasilewski
