The 10th-Anniversary Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of war and preserved Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders. Since then the area became an open-air market, an Asian inner city, a primeval garden, a storehouse of urban legends, a piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for botanists. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the city, inspired Joanna Warsza’s curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was.

In April 2009, Public Move­ment, from Israel, together with Polish col­lab­o­ra­tors led a walk in the foot­steps of Israeli and Jewish youth del­e­ga­tions through the former Warsaw Ghetto,. The starting point for the project was the hermetic and strictly ritualised procedures of Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland. Public Movement explores the polit­i­cal and aes­thetic pos­si­bil­i­ties resid­ing in the man­i­fes­ta­tions, spec­ta­cles or public marches. They invent­ and re-enact­ moments in the life of indi­vid­u­als, com­mu­ni­ties, social insti­tu­tions, peo­ple or states.

Joanna Warsza is a curator and director on the cusp of the performing and visual arts based in Warsaw, Poland. She runs the Laura Palmer Foundation, which produces actions in public space or conceptual events between fiction and reality. Over the last three years she commissioned projects in the ruins of the 10th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw and in an ex-Warsaw Ghetto based on the critique of Israeli youth trips to Poland. Her work refers to the perception shifts, the unspoken and the ephemeral. Joanna collaborated with, among others, the Centre Pompidou, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Belluard Festival, Warsaw MOMA, PERFORMA NY, The Building in Berlin, CCA Kiev, Marabouparken in Stockholm and Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. She is the editor of the reader Stadion X-A Place That Never Was (2008).

www.laura-palmer.pl

The lectures were supported by the City of Warsaw.

The project Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices project venue is supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, IFA (Institut fuer Auslandsbeziehungen) and Pro Helvetia.

For more information about the X Baltic Triennial of International Art, see: www.urbanstories.lt