Trouble in Paradise
The Trouble in Paradise exhibition is a multi-threaded story about the future of community life in the countryside. What problems are the inhabitants of suburban housing estates and villages facing today? Are we properly using the potential of rural life? Or maybe we still marginalize the village and its inhabitants?
In Poland, agricultural areas account for as much as 93 percent of the area and, despite their scale, issues related to them seem to be still left outside the mainstream of architectural and urban discourses. The transformation period of the 1990s strengthened the perception of the countryside through the prism of simplifications and stereotypes or simply excluded it from the sphere of collective consciousness, transforming it into an invisible element of the landscape. The authors of the exhibition - the PROLOG + 1 team - treated its study as an important instrument for understanding the specificity of post-socialist Europe, enabling the identification of problems on a global scale. For them, the Polish countryside is a place where the problems, hopes and paradoxes of the period of socialism and capitalism become clear;
Less and less often the countryside is a promise of autonomy and escape from the city, and more and more often it becomes a warehouse space, a place for bypasses, production halls, farms, all this infrastructure, without which life in large agglomerations would be impossible - says Robert Witczak from the PROLOG +1 curatorial team . - This is mainly due to the belief in the servant role of the countryside, according to which it is the base of cities. We want to reverse this perspective, stop thinking about the province from the "bourgeois" point of view. We want to show the countryside not as a closed, divided, privatized space, but as a space of ideas - community, the shape of which is influenced by each of the inhabitants.
The Trouble in Paradise exhibition was shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia 2020. From February 18, it will be shown in Poland for the first time - at the Wrocław Museum of Architecture. The organizers invited 6 architectural studios from all over Europe to participate: Atelier Fanelsa (DE) , GUBAHÁMORI + Filip + László Demeter (HU) , KOSMOS (RU, CH, AT) , Rural Office for Architecture (GB) , RZUT (PL) and Traumnovelle (BE). All participants of the project had to face the slogan of last year's Biennale - "How will we live together?". The result of their work are architectural models, collages and drawings presented against the background of the village panorama. The diversity of points of view and the juxtaposition of different perspectives was united by reflection on the effects of the exploitation of rural territory, climate disasters or global crises - including those whose impact on the fate of the planet and rural areas is yet to be known.
The authors of the project assumed that in times of increasing local and global crises, it is rural areas that are an important element in building sustainable human environments. Therefore, they treated them as an independent area of research, and the results of their search will soon be on display at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław. It turns out that the ideal of living outside the city has a short shelf life. The pandemic, which intensified the process of migration to suburban areas around the world, brought to light the difficulties that the Polish province has been struggling with for years - including lack of public communication, universal internet access or integration between "newcomers" and indigenous peoples.
The exhibition was divided into two parts: analytical and design. The first of them, made in cooperation with Polish artists, tells about the contemporary problems of the countryside and is presented in the form of a huge, 70-meter, photorealistic panorama. Created by photographers Michał Sierakowski and Paweł Starc and artist Jan Domicz, in cooperation with the PROLOG +1 team, the panorama presents characteristic elements of the rural landscape resulting from the processes taking place there over the last hundred years. After arriving in Wrocław, the panorama will fill the space of one of the exhibition halls of the Museum of Architecture.