quarantine

The aim of The Quarantine project is bringing attention to the growing problem of isolation within the urban structure. The traditionally perceived city as a settlement aiming at a feasible self-sufficiency, which is based on exchange of either services, goods or thoughts, knowledge, culture, in which dominates a certain social symbiosis may be displaced by the apparent need of isolation. Isolation, or artificial creation of (predominantly financial) elites in a hardly intentional manner, results in the loosening of the city’s internal social bonds. The groups arising thereby (artificial elites) create boundaries within the city to emphasise their separateness. In Polish cities it is hard to distinguish “good” and “bad” districts, which usually arise throughout many years and are due to the history of the city. In Poland, due to the communist system, such differences have been totally obliterated, creating them after 20 years is, in our opinion, a completely artificial process, which is detrimental to the construction of the city. Creating closed housing estates within the “natural” bounds of the city serves isolation from community, within the boundaries of which they arise and which they in fact use to be able to exist. The Quarantine Project, consisting in surrounding the “closed residential estates” by a symbolic boundary is an attempt to reveal a tangible phenomenon of unjustified isolation, which we consider to be a kind of contagious social disease. On the other hand, the boundary presented that way may be interpreted “to the outside”, that is from the point of view of the communities attempting to enclose themselves from the rest of the city, which, in their opinion, is ill, threatening. Any of the ways of interpreting the phenomenon leads ultimately to the same conclusion, that this phenomenon destroys social symbiosis, at the same time dismantling the city organism. The Quarantine Project, consists in surrounding the chosen “closed residential estates” (along their boundaries) with a yellow warning tape with an inscription: Quarantine

2012 - Cosmopolitan Stranger, parallel event with Manifesta 9, Open University of Diversity, Hasselt (Belgium)
2009 - The Epidemic, Zone of Contemporary Art, Lodz (PL)
2008 - Entopy, harmony of city, Wozownia Gallery, Torun (PL)