Robotnik. Performanse pamięci (The Worker. Performances of Memory)

The book present the figure of the worker and its performances of memory from the point of view of cultural studies, philosophy, art history, theatre studies and musicology. It begins with the original scene of the accident in the factory, and then it reviews the Warsaw cabaret scene of the early twentieth century, the theatrical and artistic avant-garde circle, the socialist realist cultural projects, modernist kitchen designs, workers’ sport and proletarian art, to end with a reflection on gestures in films. In this way, the editors wish to propose a multifaceted, and at the same time fragmentary and distracted perspective, which would make it possible to extract from the documents, narrations and visual presentations, the still problematic and poorly recognised figure of the worker in Polish culture. These texts not only fit into the methodological postulates formulated as a performative writing of history, but they themselves become the performances of memory, in which the authors try to reproduce history, where the fundamental medium remains the body and gestures – captured in fragmentary relations, snapshot images and individual scenes.