For SoCCoS artists visiting Warsaw, but also for me as their guide, their residencies were not only the experience of moving in space and culture but also an experience of the various aspects of the system of contemporary art. We were trying to find our paths in labyrinths of corridors and galleries, elevators and staircases, rooms, cells in Excel spreadsheets, studios, offices, warehouses, libraries.
We are storming ministries, city halls, courts, offices, embassies, prisons, the prime minister’s chancellery and the presidential palace with sound. We damage our throats in front of the parliament building; we chant during marches, we make noise when we’re protesting in public. We do this for memory’s sake, ‘for our freedom and yours’, for women’s rights, for the constitution; we’re against war, xenophobic nationalism, politicians’ pride, exploitation, the destruction of the environment.
In 2016, the streets of Warsaw became a symbolic battlefield, and sound played a key role in this process. The voices of protest, the sounds of demonstration, and the amplification of resistance revealed the rumblings of power, the noise of disinformation, and the acoustic violence that has infected the sound organism of the city – an echo of both Polish and global political and ecological turbulence.
krzysztof marciniak 