Read Online Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik - Free Book Online Page B

artist. “Germans can scream from grief for the city they lost. Russians — while looking at the city they have built. And tourists — from the disappointment of Kaliningrad.” Little wonder that the sign was removed by vandals after only a week.
    Enclave
was only one of several major shows on Russian art in Poland in the last ten years. It’s as if enough time has passed now that Poles and Russians are no longer afraid of each other. But that trauma clearly remains strong. Many of these exhibitions still manifest signs of fear and distrust. The banner made for one Russian-Polish show by artist Anna Witkowska read, “BEWARE, ENEMY!” One might ask whether art is the right tool for overcoming these differences. But it is, at the very least, a good barometer of cross-border emotion. If there’s a show about a mutual friendship, you can bet that there are deep-running discrepanciesand inequalities. But in
Enclave
we also see Poles looking at their neighbors with a certain fascination that might just transform into closeness. If anything, this show was a reminder of colonial interdependencies. Poles, at least on the political right, like to see Poland as a besieged, poor, betrayed country where things suddenly got better, at least by comparison. Now at last there’s someone worse off than them.
    Shows like
Enclave
say more about Poles than the place they visited. One fascinating element of the transition after 1989 was the way in which the post-colonial process of “othering” had an effect on the modernizing countries of Europe. Kaliningrad easily becomes a mystified “other” for the Poles. Many of the Polish artists who visit Kaliningrad speak of the “genius loci”, the specificity of the place, but fail to see it through anything other than Soviet clichés. The default reaction of the Polish artist is a traumatic image of the Communist past — and somehow we don’t want that image to be challenged. We like to think of Kaliningrad only as a prison or concentration camp, even though this is not what the citizens themselves see. In the past the norm was from someone to come from the west to Poland, see the Stalinist architecture and say, “Look at these horrible Communist ruins!” Now it’s Poles themselves doing that. We have done our homework on becoming a “normal European country” and now we’re telling our neighbors the news. What will come next? Will there be new quasi-colonial relations in capitalist Europe? East Prussia, which became Kaliningrad, was first an object of desire for the Teutonic Knights, and then became a staging post in the Red Army’s push to the west. It is, in its way, a tragic model of permanently colonized space.

Sexy and Unsexy Countries
    There’s something common between all, even the most emanci-pated/cosmopolitan/hipstery/urban Poles, or maybe especially among them: when asked where we’re from we never say “Poland”, just like that, as if it was normal; we also don’t say it with pride. Most of times, we don’t want this thing to matter. And if we say that, be sure we will immediately start to explain ourselves. “Well, you know, Poland now is not what you think it is. There was some dramatic changes/ we’re a normal European country.” Normal. European. Those descriptions seem to matter to us a lot. We like to see ourselves as a part of something you all recognize (or at least something we see as such), god forbid as something that until recently was very poor, very grey, where no one from the West, apart from expats and stag parties would like to come for a visit, because why? I remember how deeply ashamed of being Polish we were in the 90s. It was a bad word. Once at the very beginning of 2000s I was taken by a friend to a Greek migrants party in Berlin, in a nice tenement, where all neighbors got together. My friend then told me she was asked “who are those half-Romanians?” I didn’t know there was a huge Romanian migration wave at this point, but