PI: dr Dorota Sosnowska
Co-investigator: mgr Łukasz Kiełpiński
Funding body: National Science Center Poland / OPUS grant
Project time-span: 2022–2025
The aim of the project is to examine how the Others appear and act in Polish culture in times of transition. In times of radical social, political and cultural change, new models of identity emerge from existing ones, which not only require new mechanisms of representation, new gestures and behaviors – which I call performances – but also new reactions of the community and even new models of being together. By examining artistic practices – art, literature, theatre, film, as well as the documentation of those artistic activities that can be called ephemeral, looking at them as traces and scenarios of social activities – I want to examine how otherness was performed in times of transition. An important assumption of the research is based on the observation that in the culture of transition different types of otherness are not yet treated as identities and grasped within the framework of what we now call identity politics, the idea that it is possible to trace the emergence of otherness before it is named and included in the figures of Jew, gay, woman, Black, etc. I refer to this transformative otherness as odmienność. It is striking that the word Odmieniec translates into English as Queer. It appears in Polish humanistic reflection as early as 1982 in the famous volume edited by Maria Janion and Zbigniew Majchrowski entitled Odmieniec to denote just such otherness, which today could be described as pre-queer. The project’s objectives also include exploring how these concepts overlap, how they intersect and diverge, and how/to what extent they are within the field of influence of the culture of transition.