As part of the project School of Flâneurism (“Academy of Kaliningrad Identity”), initiated and run by the artist Anton Zabrodin at Garage Studios, Artur Nowaczewski will deliver a lecture about the phenomenon of flâneurism in Gdańsk.
The radical transformation of state borders in postwar Central Europe caused massive migration processes which, in turn, entailed assimilating new cultural environments, within which the figure of the flâneur played an important role. Baudelaire compared the flâneur to a child reveling in their ephemeral impressions. This metaphor (child as flâneur) was a key influence on Gdańsk literature from the 1980s onward. The flâneur employs everyday experience to read the urban text without using the maps created as part of the “big narrations” which construct our identities. The experience of writers born in Gdańsk was based on the collision between the post-German environment of the city, which was alien to them, and family traditions defined by completely different cultural and natural landscapes. This led to a peculiar paradox: that which was cognized immediately seemed alien; what was said at school and at home was not confirmed by the space of the city. Official histories contained too many distortions and lacunae. This is how flâneurism became so important: attachment to a certain space, the intention to learn and understand it, to solve the puzzles concealed in the “post-German” streets, allowed the city to be comprehended and conquered while identifying oneself with it in the process. Along with writers, a unique form of flâneurism infatuated city lovers, collectors, antique dealers, and editors of online resources. Today the identity of Gdańsk citizens is defined by their connections with particular sites and urban architecture, as much as by their family roots.
With the help of photographs of Gdańsk streets and excerpts of fiction by authors living in Gdańsk who became famous after 1989 (like Paweł Huelle and Stefan Chwin), Artur Nowaczewski will summarize the phenomenon of Gdańsk flâneurism and explain its role in the process of the construction of identity of the modern-day citizen.
The lecture is organized with the support of the Polish Cultural Center in Moscow.