Rewriting Memory: Written Performances on the Walls of the Gdańsk Shipyard

Abstract

The Gdańsk Shipyard has many functions in contemporary practices and discourses of memory. It is used as the point of departure for various animation, anthropological and artistic explorations which make over the experience of the Polish transformation and its social and political consequences. Similar ambiguity is found in interpretations of the walls of the Shipyard, construed as a place of meaning particularly dense for the cultural imaginarium: symbolizing either civic initiatives that facilitate open negotiations of the rules of social life or, alternatively, the closed and increasingly culturally distant world of the labor of factory communities condemned, after 1989, to live on the periphery of society. In her examination of the animation-artistic activities related to the walls of the Shipyard after 2012, Marta Rakoczy focuses on the Stocznia jest kobietą [Shipyard Is a Woman] project carried out by the Arteria Association and on Iwona Zając’s animation and mural activities. Rakoczy adopts the perspective of the anthropology of the word and oral history in an attempt to ask questions about the identity-fashioning processes initiated by the Shipyard’s artistic activities related to gender, class, the body and technology, and about the presence and absence of the wall as an important catalyst for these processes.