building archive /in polish with english subtitles/ 6’56", video, 2008

Film “Archive Building” the product of a three month research trip to Warsaw focusing on the contemporary
past. In his research, he explored archives to collect slogans from protest movements and demonstrations from
the key year 1968 right up until the present. The film records the process of hanging these slogans, each written
on a separate piece of card, on a web of red string, like so much encumbering washing, around the space of
the flat in which he lived in Warsaw. The over 150 slogans that artist collected are from protest movements of
very different kinds, often diametrically opposed to one another, that have taken to the streets or influenced
the collective debate in Poland during the recent historical past. On occasions, they express the same emotions
even if the political positions they come from are implacable enemies. By hanging them in a net, the words
become artifacts with spatial form: in what ways do these verbal phrases, these expressions of ideas constitute
the particular public space of debate (or even a fatigue with it) with which we are confronted in today's Poland?