FORMATION
Robert Kuśmirowski, curator of actual edition of the Open City Festival, together with an invited group of artists look at the geometries of the city – the ordinary and the imaginary, the Euclidean and the phantasmagoric, the intimate and the universal. Responding to the existing – formed city, the realisations, temporarily presented in the centre of Lublin, overwrite new meanings and remain in the audience’s consciousness for longer. The intention is to understand the city as an open possibility.
Art in public space gives room for ingenuity. It liberates sensitivity. It allows one to experience the city anew, to talk about it differently. The curator proposes an expedition to the foundations of the city – an intimate experience on the one hand, exposing its foundations on the other. The artists propose authorial topographies of private experience, while directing attention to the material core of architecture – bricks, concrete, joints, details. They attach intimacy to the building concrete, finding symbolism on the construction site. Architectural concreteness collides with the architecture of dreams and oneiric fantasies.
In the discontinuous and patchy historical space of the centre of Lublin, the artists touch upon significant places. They reread the narratives written here in order to leave their marks, to imprint their unique traces. They supplement the mental labyrinth of the city with new corridors, add new thresholds, construct secret passages and unexpected shortcuts. They spin a tale of a hidden, latent and discreet city.
This year’s edition of the festival reveals a city in search of form, in the process, whose senses have become detached from reality and a radical reconstruction is needed. It touches on a city searching for a new self-awareness, yearning for a new story. Robert Kuśmirowski invites you to taste the city permeated by art, to walk along the paths of a rebuilt imagination. After this experience, Lublin will never be the same as before.
