EXERCISES IN WRITING DOWN THE WORLD

Exercises in writing down the world is an informal academy of reportage and documentary literature. It aims to encourage reading and posing both literal and metaphorical questions about the identity, awareness and attitude towards the world and the people we meet. But also to ask about ourselves, since, as Ryszard Kapuściński wrote, we all know too little about everything.

The project consists of cyclic open meetings, working seminars and lectures conducted by outstanding Polish reportage authors, an open library and audio-library functioning in the Kana Cellar. In the Cellar there is also a selection of documentary books by Czarne editions available for purchase. The aim of the project is to draw attention toward factual writing in its sociological, formal and ethical aspects, as means for better understanding of the world.

Our guests will be:

• Lidia Ostałowska (5-6.X),
• Jacek Hugo-Bader (16-17.XI),
• Wojciech Tochman (7.XII*),
• Agata Tuszyńska (14-15.XII*).

*this dates can change

The project is financially supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

PART I.

5th-6th OCTOBER - Lidia Ostałowska: I write about those, whose lives are harder

• 5th October, 6 p.m./ Kana Theatre
  Open lecture: Recount this - various forms of reportage.
• 6th October, 12 a.m. / Kana Theatre
  Workshop: Choosing the subject for the reportage.
• 6th October, 6 p.m. / Kana Theatre
  Open meeting: Pushed out to the margin. A Gypsy is a Gypsy.

Lidia Ostałowska

Lidia Ostałowska (born 1954) is a journalist and reporter of the Gazeta Wyborcza. She graduated of Polish studies at the Warsaw University. She is particularly interested in disadvantaged and underprivileged people: national and ethnic minorities, women, subcultures of young people and those suffering exclusion. She is a co-author of many collections of reportage.

Farby wodne (Watercolours)

Dina Gottliebova, a talented Jewish student of fine arts from Brno, was deported from the Terezin ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was assigned the task of painting numbers on the barracks. When she had painted the children's barracks with scenes from Snow White, she attracted attention of Dr Mengele, then the chief medical officer of the Gypsy family camp known as the Zigeunerlager, who was looking for someone to paint the portraits of Gypsies as part of his research on inferior race.

The youngest child in the family of an Auschwitz railwayman died in 1942. Three days after liberation the railwayman's son went to the camp to look for an orphan to replace the child his grieving mother had lost. He chose a girl called Ewa, a Hungarian Jew. He also brought back home with him a bunch of watercolours that some prisoner had found in the barracks and gifted to him.

In 1963 the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum bought the paintings from Ewa. In 1970s their author was identified: Dina Gottliebova lived in the United States as a wife to the famous Disney animator Art Babbitt. She visited Poland while on a trip to Paris. At the museum she recounted her experiences of living at the camp and asked for photographs of her paintings. The museum claims that she would not respond to letters after she had received the photographs. In mid-1990s Ms Babbitt demanded the return of the original paintings.

Cygan to Cygan (A Gypsy is a Gypsy)

Lidia Ostałowska has probably visited every single large Roma settlement in Central Eastern Europe. The fruits of these journeys are stories which demonstrate how exotic and colourful the gypsies lives are, a world about which we believe we know something, but which is fundamentally foreign to us. This description brings to light the difficult and dramatic story of a people without land, who are forced on to the margins of society, but who attempt to preserve their identity and feel themselves strongly attached to their traditions and roving way of life, for which there is no longer any place in today's Europe.

"How unusual the Gypsies' world is, about which Lidia Ostalowska writes so exhilaratingly! How many strange fates, how many puzzling stories we come across. These are excellent reports, written with passion and empathy, and they reveal a secret and fascinating reality, which puts us under the spell of Ostalowska's book from the first page onwards."
(Ryszard Kapuscinski)

<<< go back to OCTOBER