Traumgutstrasse

The salon was definitely bombed and burnt, yet the furniture stands in per­fect order. The big table in the middle, standing on the carpet along with its matching chairs, has a vase full of dried flowers on top of it.

Figure 3.3 Robert Kusmirowski Traumgutstrasse.

Source: Photo by Jakub Wroblewski/Galeria Salon Akademii, 2014.

Figure 3.4 Robert Kusmirowski Traumgutstrasse.

Source: Photo by Jakub Wroblewski/Galeria Salon Akademii, 2014.

that put it out. Through the salon, one goes further, unexpectedly stumbling upon the front of the building. A fragment of the baroque palace’s faςade is rebuilt inside the gallery in its destroyed and partly burnt state. One can see the sign with the actual address of the gallery hanging next to the door, both with marks of fire and smoke on them (Figure 3.4). The level of care and accuracy in reconstructing the faςade and the palace’s interior makes the viewer confused. It is impossible to see it as an image, a representa­tion of some imagined space. This place is real, and it was really destroyed, although the space presented in the gallery is fictitious and impossible as well. It presents itself to the visitor as a crime scene in a double sense—as a place still holding the traces, fragments, remains of the past event, and as a theatrical podium where everything is staged.

This is Robert Kusmirowski’s Traumgutstrasse, a project he undertook to understand the location.

Traumgutstrasse is the name of a fictional street and a phonetic compro­mise of the words. Traugutt, trauma, traum gut (German for “have good dreams”) and Straβe (German for “street”). The entrance to the Salon Akademii Gallery is located on Traugutt Street. The current legal status of the site was a starting point for my morphological practice, which led me to develop a common denominator that binds all of the above words together and also brings the viewers closer to my artistic intention.

(Kusmirowski, 2014, p. LIII)

The Czapski Palace, in which the gallery is located, was first built in the 17th century and then substantially rebuilt two more times. Between 1862 and 1913, the exact location of the gallery was a library housing one of the most important book collections in Poland. When it became too large, it was moved from the Palace, and the south annex remained empty for the next ten years. Then, at the beginning of World War II in 1939, the Palace was hit by a bomb. Katarzyna Urbanska, the curator of the show, summa­rizes this story: “the library at the Czapski Palace was bombed, instantly transforming the building that had served for decades to accumulate knowl­edge and to preserve the memory of the past, into a ruin” (Urbanska, 2014, p. LXXVIII). This ruin was reconstructed by Kusmirowski inside the build­ing that Urbanska calls “a phantom, a mere reconstruction, an architec­tural deceit pretending to be something that is long gone” (Urbanska, 2014, p. LXXVII).

The Czapski Palace of today was rebuilt from scratch after the war, so it is not the actual palace that was bombed. By putting its own ruin inside it, Kusmirowski plays with time and space, reversing inside and outside, con­fusing the viewer not only in terms of authenticity (which is further inten­sified by his use of both historical and newly forged objects, although it is impossible to distinguish one from the other) but also in terms of the place. Where does this exhibition take place? In Czapski Palace, in its ruin, or out­side of the building, which becomes a part of the exhibition itself?

The artist explains his interest in the ruins:

When I face an intact, unscathed historic house or an entirely new building, I can see nothing in it and I know nothing about it—I fail in getting any information from such a place.

(Kusmirowski, 2014, p. LIV)

Ruins, leftovers, archaeological remains, and evidence of a crime are mixed together in Kusmirowski’s thinking. They become more than just signs of the past; they “speak of death, which, however, coincides with the birth of authentic historical time” (Kusmirowski, 2014, p. LIV). By assum­ing the role of a detective, the artist is not looking to understand tragedy or violence but seeking an aesthetic experience of the destruction, which leads him to a particular experience of the past that allows him to know what hap­pened but never remember it entirely (Kusmirowski, 2014, p. LV). Memory and space enter into a relationship very different from that of Forensic Architecture’s film. Here, the space is rebuilt not to trigger memories but rather to trigger doubt about what it means to remember. Urbanska sees Kusmirowski’s reconstruction as “a fake repository of the past that allows our imagination to move ‘out there,’ to be present and absent at the same time, suspended between fact and fiction” (Urbanska, 2014, p. LXXIX), which she understands as dreaming.

Traumgutstrasse is not reconstructing a past event in order to show how it happened. Its dynamic is quite the opposite: the viewer needs to bring their own memories, knowledge, and image of the past to experience its materialization. By building this space, Kusmirowski is not reconstructing the event of the bombing but its remains, leftovers, and traces. These ficti­tious objects and the aesthetic of destruction that organizes them form a space where the event of the bombing works not as history nor as memory but as a “lucid dream,” a ghost haunting this material constellation of arti­facts even if they’re not authentic.

In Poland, the history of World War II is a field where issues of iden­tity are constantly under negotiation. One’s place on the political spectrum is deeply connected to one’s views on such matters as Poland’s role in the

Figure 3.5 Robert Kusmirowski Traumgutstrasse.

Source: Photo by Jakub Wroblewski/Galeria Salon Akademii, 2014.

Holocaust (whether Poles were victims or perpetrators, whether they helped the Jews or just watched the tragedy), the Warsaw Uprising (whether it was glorious or a senseless event causing death and destruction of the city) and many other episodes, as well as perceptions of historical figures. This con­stant conflict around the cultural memory of World War II determines the political landscape. By staging the remains, Kusmirowski points to the mechanisms of constructing history through his use of authentic and fake things, memories, and evidence, each category impossible to distinguish from the others.

The political potential of such remains is well demonstrated by Dorota Sajewska in her concept of “necros.” In her book Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body, Sajewska defines as “necros” a particular category of bodies “located beyond the dichotomy of object and subject, living and dead, experience and mediation, action and documentation” (Sajewska, 2019, p. 427). Taken from the field of dead body studies, this concept “gained meaning as a category that encompasses the differentiated semantic and interpretational levels of the relationship between life and death and [...] bio­logically and technologically reproducible matter” (Sajewska, 2019, p.

To underline its subversive potential, Sajewska deprives “necros” of gen­der identity by using it as a gender-neutral term—going against its etymol­ogy and the proper use of the Polish language. Sajewska argues:

Archived remains are treated solely as traces, as incomplete representa­tions of the past that must be ascribed with an identity in the form of documentation to be acknowledged as a part of a given culture’s social life. Fundamental to this transformation is the act of removing all doubt as to the remains’ ontological status.

(Sajewska, 2019, p. 432)

This process reveals itself as violence against those who are rejected from society, against those cultures that suffer oppression and, in the words of Cameroonian scholar and philosopher Achille Mbembe, are denied even death as an event worth mourning. Notably, according to Mbembe, the goal of the archive is to surpass the matter of the gathered remains and to produce history as a montage of fragments, a “product of composition” (Sajewska, 2019, p. 430). To counter the power of the archive over remains, Sajewska then proposes the notion of necroperformance, which makes it possible to study remains and documents “outside the rule of representation through a situational, subjective, and sensual experience of matter” (Sajewska, 2019, p. 434). Necroperformance thus enables opposition against the violence of the archive by focusing on the action, situation, and networks of relationships and interactions between subjects of various ontological statuses. From the perspective of necros, history could be understood as a necroperformance happening between different bodies and different remains.

From this perspective, the act of staging the remains, of reconstructing them, could be seen as an attempt to trigger a necroperformative process in which the bombing of the Czapski Palace is repeating itself in the destruc­tion of the material objects. It is not a fact scripted by archival documents nor a story to record and store on the shelves, where it would be prone to ide­ological and political manipulation. The bombing becomes an active force shaping the materiality of the space, of the building, of the city. In that way, the past, “as something to which we can never be present” (Kusmirowski 2014, p. LIV), is impossible to see and fully understand but is still possible to sensually experience anew.