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Talk in the series 'Producing the Future: Art and Globalization' organized by the Center for Place, Culture (April 24 2003) Sabine Bitter / Helmut Weber |
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Meeting
at the Lot Last fall (2002) we were invited for a public art project, titled CityTransformer, in Gdansk, Poland. City Transformer dealt with the rapid social and cultural transformation which the city of Gdansk is currently undergoing. We searched for architectural and urban sites in which the social/cultural transformation is most evident. The architecture of the LOT building in the very center of Gdansk became our focus due to its important in the urban context and its history. The building is a central meeting point in the city, as our title, Meeting at the Lot refers to. In our research we discovered that the building, when it was built in the early sixties, was the only modernist architecture in the city center. The black and white images shows how it looked then. In the seventies it was transformed into the headquarters of the national airline, LOT. We thought the transformation of the building from a marker of internationalism (modernism) to the symbol of a nation was strengthened by how national airlines inscribe nations into a world system, . Now that Poland is on the way to joining the European Union, the not very grandiose expression of an internationalism, LOT airline, is part of Star Alliance and therefore doesn’t need representative spaces any more. Also, the tourism business in Gdansk is linked with all the reconstruction of the medieval architecture – therefore the Lot building doesn’t fit anymore and will be taken down soon. We used the changes in the function of the building as an index for Poland's past versions of an imagined future – and we also wanted to point out that the production of a city is not only a matter of architecture, urbanism, capital and politics, but is also very much linked with the production of images, and with the control over what is visible and what gets obscured. We produced an image of the LOT building stripped clean of the (again) not very grandiose symbols of globalization -- the competing international and local business signage. This stripping clean of the building addresses its modernist past at the moment at which it will be torn down due to economic pressures from globalization. The image was mounted on billboards and placed throughout the city of Gdansk. |
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