On Wednesday, March 20th, at 6pm, We invite you to a meeting with Olga Drenda, the author of such books as “Produkty. Pomysłowość wokół nas” (nominated for Paszporty Polityki award in 2018), “Duchologia polska. Rzeczy i ludzie w latach transformacji.” The discussion will be not only about books, the reasons for their creation and their form, but also about freedom in creativity, one that is very broadly understood. We will ask questions, where does innovation begin and where does rubbish end? Does kitsch follow the fashion? How do our tastes influence our reality and in which direction do they evolve?
The event will be enriched by an acting performance by Michalina Rodak (an actress known, among others, from the “Belfer” series), and the whole event will be hosted by the director of the meeting – Adam Wierzbanowski.
The “Wyroby” book is a fresh look at the phenomena that some people would like to exclude from our public space, while others consider unworthy of attention. Concrete house mushrooms, tire swans, knights and dinosaurs from nuts and bolts, religious haberdashery – what for some is an uninteresting flowering of bad taste and rubbish, for Olga Drenda is a fascinating material for research on Polish innovation. Tracking products of ingenuity, both those from the period of the People’s Republic of Poland and those that are quite contemporary, Olga Drenda travels around Poland, visits collectors and creators of ordinary, unusual objects.
“Duchologia polska” is a description of the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, told from the angle of objects and customs. (…) When writing about that reality, the author does not fall into nostalgia or irony. With anthropological sensitivity and intuition, she analyses what she has managed to document. The result is a fascinating record of Polish everyday life during the transformation period – a thing that is first read with awe, and then needs to be thought through.
Olga Drenda. Journalist and translator, graduate of Ethnology and Anthropology of Culture of the Jagiellonian University. She published her texts, among others, in “Polityka,” “The Guardian,” “2+3D,” “Glissando,” “Dwutygodnik,” “Lampa,” “Digital Camera Polska,” “Tygodnik Powszechny,” “Szum,” “Trans/Wizje,” “Gazecie Magnetofonowej.” She has collaborated with the Unsound Festival and the Lublin Meeting of Cultures Centre. Co-author of the Polish translation of W.S. Burroughs’ “The Soft Machine” and and “The Ticket That Exploded,” translator of film scripts and excerpts from Małgorzata Rejmer’s Bucharest into English. Lives in Mikołów.

20.03.2018, 6pm
20 Gdańska St.