Democracy: Do It Yourself

The article analyses one of the most important events to have occurred in Poland in connection with censorship in the arts. The cancellation of Rodrigo Garcia’s production of his Golgota Picnic by the Malta Festival Poznan in 2014 sparked a wave of civil protest across the country supported by dozens of public institutions and NGOs, with many thousands attending the protest events. Throughout Poland, performance recordings of the play were screened, as well as readings of the censored drama. The authors of the article show that this sequence of events, viewed as a whole, reveals fundamental tensions in Polish society. The results of their analysis go beyond issues of freedom of speech and blasphemy laws, and touch upon the very essence of Polish democracy. The case of Golgota Picnic, like no other censorship interference since1989, reveals a distinctive confluence of religious, political and economic conditions, which in an implicit yet extremely powerful way have hampered freedom of speech and determined the interplay in public space in Poland. After recent parliamentary elections and the passing of power into the right wing’s hands, these determinants have become the basis, in turn, of an explicit cultural policy aimed at constraining the public sphere and making culture a tool of ideological indoctrination.