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ShortCut:
Prologue
The Unknown Dimensions
of Cultural Development.
ShortCut: Prologue project
involved launching research
and culture animation efforts
in Ostałówek and Broniów near
Szydłowiec, a continuation of
a number of earlier
ethnographic research and
culture animation projects
carried out in the same
localities. The project was
run by the Mazovian Culture
and Art Centre. Its partners
included Culture Cathedral
Association and the Institute
of Ethnology and Cultural
Anthropology at the University
of Warsaw. It received
financial support from the
National Centre for Culture
and the Culture Observatory
Programme.
F
rom 2004 to 2009 our team
conducted ethnographic research
in Ostałówek and
Broniów near Szydłowiec, rural areas of high
unemployment. As part of the research, we
had intensive meetings and conversations
with residents, lived with them and organised
social life. The new relationships and
common experiences served as the starting
point for preparing and running culture animation
and ethnographic projects there in
2008-2010 (Common Place and Three
Poles). It soon became obvious that these actions
facilitate the emergence of extremely
interesting dimensions of the residents’ cultural
creativity. Identifying these processes,
however, requires a new perspective of culture
animation practice, enhanced with
knowledge, ethnographic participation and
artistic activity.
the project
Our project consisted in designing social and
artistic activities capable of engaging local
communities and unleashing their creativity.
We took an ethnographic perspective
as our starting point, assuming that cultural
activities and events, rather than creating
new qualities of cultural life, provide favourable
conditions for that which is deeply hidden
and valuable in the life of a community
to come to light. A few weeks’ “co-presence”
in the field helped us build a new cognitive
and anthropological perspective. On the one
hand, the project involved ethnographic research
concerning informal activists, community
workers and self-organised groups;
on the other, it included a series of culture
animation and art events (photography, performance,
music etc.). This way we could
check how the new activities affect local
forms of participation – which to some extent
we had researched before – and what new
layers of cultural activity they reveal. Our
next initiatives emerged from the dynamic of
the meeting and were a response to locally
relevant problems.
A movie was made about the project.
The results of the project were documented
at an exhibition in Kordegarda Gallery and
discussed at the 2011 ShortCut Europe Congress,
becoming an important voice in the
discussion on the creative potential of local
communities and an attempt to move beyond
the discourse of “local development”.
The project was created by Tomasz
Rakowski, Ewa Chomicka, Zuzanna
Naruszewicz, Agata Pietrzyk, Sebastian
Świąder, Julia Biczysko, Dorota Ogrodzka,
Paweł Ogrodzki, Piotr Cichocki, Maja Dobiasz,
Agata Bielska, Piotr Bielski, Pola Rożek,
Jarosław Kaczmarek, Gwidon Cybulski,
Łukasz Skąpski, Aleksandar Ćirlić, Elżbieta
Jabłońska, Wojciech Ziemilski, Marcin Śliwa,
and Katarzyna Kułakowska.
target groups / methods
Some projects were aimed at specific age
or social groups (brides, workshops for children,
cooking sessions for local housewives