Why all this?
It’s all because of Dwutygodnik.com – the online Polish periodical about culture. A year after Dwutygodnik’s first issue it was clear that its English version is a necessity. Why? Because we wanted to share and communicate with those, who don’t own the knowledge of Polish language, but somehow take a part in what we all experience in culture. Hence Biweekly.pl came into existence.
But why poems, ABCs, notes? Why electric, side effects, views? Why briefly and who’s who and why? Why all this talking and writing? We came upon such a sentence: “Culture is not an obligation, one can do very well without it.” (Kot Jeleński). And we do not dare to state otherwise.
Yet, there are those, who, for some reason, do not want to live without it. Maybe they do remember Witold Gombrowicz and, just like him, they desire culture without all this juvenility and senile atrophy, butterflies and rainbows, dust and exaltation, patriotic and pseudo-intellectual demands. We once read in his Diaries the following words: “Literature is threatened with becoming a soft-boiled egg, while being, which is its calling, a hard-boiled egg.”
I egg your pardon? It’s not just literature that’s endangered. We try not to limit ourselves. We try to be sharp. We are ironic (but not sarcastic), we take it easy (but not painlessly) and, above all, we say: there is no obligation “to be cultured”. And that’s where our slogan comes into play: link with culture. Polish culture, because that’s us, but also with all its unpredictable forms that connect through cultural supranational diversity.
So why all this?
Culture is essential, because one can live without it.
What’s the content of Biweekly#01?
Let’s start from the columns. The first part of the ABC OF NEW CULTURE by Alek Tarkowski & Mirek Filiciak is an introduction to the whole cycle on Culture 2.0. Then there’s Chris Niedenthal, World Press Photo winning photographer, writing about the future of photojournalism, and the digitised photo from his vast analogue archive. Anda Rottenberg, art historian, critic, and curator, tells the story behind the official scenes of intelligentsia life, in which journalists and event organisers lost their sense of good manners.
In WHO'S WHO AND WHY? we begin with introducing Maurcy Gomulicki, visual artist, who’s new exhibition MINIMAL FETISH opens 17 May 2010 in Galeria LETO in Warsaw.
Then there’s Daniel Coyle, Fulbright scholar living in Kathmandu, Nepal, who wrote for Biweekly.pl about hyphenated identities. Katarzyna Tórz, editor of Biweekly’s SIDE EFFECTS section, talks about the movie Beats of Freedom, showing a slightly different perspective then the official press releases do. A piece concerning the Gender Check exhibition in Zachęta National gallery in Warsaw. Alek Tarkowski describes culture in times of the cornucopia, and Andrzej Żuławski, film director, is having an oyster with sugar..
Briefly is reviews, and in this issue we look at Mirosław Bałka’s last two UK exhibitions, books by Wojciech Tochman, and Krzysztof Varga, and the film about Leszek Balcerowicz.
Then there’s the audiovisual content: Anna Kerth reciting the poem “i’m waiting for the enlightenment in the kitchen” by Marcin Cecko, Videonotations#1, and the Icebreaker – a lot of people telling you why they love you.
That’s that. For a start.
Yours truly,
John Biweekly
Biweekly#01. Editor: Agnieszka Słodownik. Cover by Filip Zagórski. Issued 11 May 2010 at 23:00.
