Where the Beast is Buried

By Joanna Rajkowska

WHERE THE BEAST IS BURIED is the first English-language book about Joanna Rajkowska and her unique practice of work in public space, in extremely diverse cultures and geographies: from Konya in Anatolia, through Warsaw and Berlin up to Curitiba in Brazil. A collection of stories, essays, interviews and images covers her best-known projects. The most intimate insight into them offer her own stories, which form a dramatic enquiry into both the personal and the conceptual roots of her work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Dec 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781782791218

Book preview

English.

Tales

Chapter 1. Greetings From Jerusalem

Avenue

Israel crosswise

What lingered from my journey to Israel in 2001 was a profound sense of incomprehension. The longer I was there, the less I understood. The Second Intifada¹ was under way. The level of violence, hatred, monitoring and anxiety was terrifying. I spoke with a translator who had come from a refugee camp in the Occupied Territories. Then with a Russian priest, with Palestinians, with Israelis, and with foreigners. Each of them had a different sense of what was right. The rationale of each was coherent but they were only able to explain logically the motives of one side. However, these stances had no points of intersection. They were like parallel lines, never crossing. It was only seven years later, when I travelled to the West Bank, that the map of the conflict began to become clearer. And even more obscure.

I went to Mea Sharim, the Jewish Orthodox district in Jerusalem, in an ankle-length skirt, a headscarf and boots. Long sleeves covered my elbows. Israeli soldiers were patrolling the area. I felt like I was entering a fortress. And it was a fortress. Its existence was based on refusal to participate in modern life, refusal to recognize the Israeli state, refusal to pay taxes, to enlist in military service. Hasidic Jews cannot look at a female stranger, so they turn their heads, cover their faces with their hats – this is part of the refusal. I went through the district trying to convince myself that this is exactly how the shtetls² were in Poland, that I should be overwhelmed by sentiment. But sentiment did not want to overwhelm me. I felt a growing aversion. And when a dark crowd of young men in bekishes³ streamed out of a yeshiva⁴, a crowd that was faceless because they were all covering their faces with their hats to avoid seeing me, I thought that I wouldn’t last long there. Two Hasids came down a narrow pavement towards me. The old one had a splendid fox-fur cap, the other was just a boy. I lay down crosswise on the pavement, some twenty metres in front of them. I rested a cheek on the paving. They appeared to become nervous, the older one raising his cane. He began to scream and approached swiftly. When he was standing right above me, I felt that the situation was becoming idiotic and slowly got up. The man was shouting in Yiddish or in Hebrew, I don’t remember which. He shouted and looked me squarely in the eye. I began explaining something in English, we had a breakdown in communication, but none of that mattered – he was looking at me. I felt a deep sense of relief.

I travelled with Artur Żmijewski, Żmij, my friend. We spent most of our time in Jerusalem. Bethlehem was under siege. We could hear the distant explosions. They were so frequent that we began to imagine some abstract mechanisms that were setting them off. For example, that I was pressing a hidden button as we sat on a park bench, which was detonating them.

We were staying at the Faisal Hostel, near Damascus Gate, a meeting place for Western journalists, leftists, Israeli dissidents and tourists, or wanderers who had been struck by the Jerusalem Syndrome and were incapable of leaving. It was filthy, everything was slimy and covered in dirt, but the postcards, posters and information on the Intifada glued to the walls testified to the residents’ liking of the hostel and their pro-Palestinian views. I, however, did not know what Faisal was precisely and was left to my own piecemeal observations, to the smell of sweat that came from the blanket I slept under, to the music in the tea-room, to the reactions of the traders gathered outside the hostel and at Damascus Gate, and to the tension building in me. It was neither anxiety nor fear of anything specific, but a tension that was in the very air itself – in the smell of the sweat, in every bus I entered, between people. Sometimes, I lay down in my bunk during the day, closed my eyes and felt myself shaking all over.

We went north. There was a hotel in Tiberias⁵ where the swimming pool was out of use – green slime, rubbish and waste had accumulated at the deep end. I stripped naked and plunged into the muck, face down. I felt the cold water slowly penetrate me, the stench. That was my Israel of 2001. Though it was not my conflict and not my war, it was my misfortune, for reasons I myself could not understand.

At the marketplace people often fell silent when they heard us speak Polish. I looked at the unfriendly, bitter faces. I thought, no wonder, if I were a Polish-Jewish woman, nothing could make me return to Poland. I liked their open hostility. It was an Eastern European hostility, something I knew – a tough, deserved reproach.

Jerusalem Avenue lies empty

I remember landing back at Warsaw airport. It was cold and grey, a cloudy day. And it was empty, terribly empty. No Hasids, not a single Jew on the bus. No one to lie crosswise in front of. I started seeing the void everywhere. Sometime later, Żmij and I wrote a text about our stay in Israel. The going was hard, they were the first sunny days of spring, it was hot and stuffy. We didn’t know how to end the text. I wanted it to be a joke. Instead of summing up our journey, we’d make a gesture – plant a row of palm trees along the capital’s Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue). A few weeks later, I realized that this was a project.

I went to the Public Library on ulica Koszykowa, looking for books on the history of the name ‘Jerozolimskie’. I found several. The name came from the end of the 18th century, when August Sułkowski, a Polish aristocrat, founded a settlement for Jewish people in the vicinity of today’s ulica Towarowa. The settlement was called Nowa Jerozolima (New Jerusalem), and the road that led from the Vistula to the settlement became Droga Jerozolimska (Jerusalem Road). The name, eventually changed to the more urban-sounding Aleje Jerozolimskie, remains to this day, though it briefly became Bahnhofstrasse, as the Nazis charmingly renamed it. The settlement survived for two years. In 1774, Warsaw merchants and craftsmen took Sułkowski to court, the Jewish homes were destroyed, their goods confiscated and the Jews themselves expelled. Nowa Jerozolima had been too prosperous. A very Polish story. A story of levelling downwards. I thought I had a lead. And my intuition had clearly hit on something.

I imagined a person finishing a long journey from Lviv at 6.50 a.m., walking through the dirty underground passages of Central Station, and then along Aleje Jerozolimskie towards Nowy Świat (New World Street). They rub their eyes. They see a palm tree. Or, I imagined a commuter taking the tram every day across de Gaulle roundabout. He catches the tram in Praga, passes most Poniatowskiego (Poniatowski Bridge) and suddenly, still a bit drowsy, sees an odd trunk through the window, and above it something out of the tropics or the Middle East or Mexico, something that doesn’t belong in Warsaw, but is here nonetheless. The palm tree was meant to function like a film, it was to have the same ability to create illusions. The map we have in our heads, particularly the map of the city, is a collection of images. Turning onto a well-known street, we expect to see one of them. If a new element appears to substantially redefine it, we immediately make the effort to assimilate the new image. It involves the work of memory, emotions becoming engaged. I was interested in those few seconds of disbelief.

A miniature palm tree among dying soldiers, tanks,

mortars and barbed-wire entanglements

The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (CCA) took the project under its patronage and provided technical support, and Anda Rottenberg’s Institute for the Promotion of Art Foundation allowed me to use its bank account. Gazeta Wyborcza⁶ printed the first renderings. Even before it was made, the palm tree caused a storm in the press. In spite of their patronage, no art institution or gallery wanted to take full responsibility for the project. I decided to set up the palm tree with my friends. For all these years, a group of dedicated volunteers kept the project alive.

An architect, Michał Rudnicki, helped me calculate the height of the palm tree with regard to the surrounding buildings, using rulers held against a monitor screen. I bought a miniature palm tree at a model shop that specialized in materials for building battlefields. The shop also offered dead or dying soldiers, tanks, mortars and barbed-wire entanglements. It was in the Muranów district, across from the Pawiak Prison Museum⁷, on ulica Dzielna. I stood in the shop and looked through the display window at plaques with the names of murdered inmates nailed to the branches of a cast-bronze tree outside. The display window had miniature models of tanks and self-propelled guns, and impeccably uniformed plastic soldiers.

We spent months building the mock-up, cutting the de Gaulle roundabout and its environs from thick cardboard: the Empik store, the Polish Press Agency building, the Stock Exchange, trams, people, Nowy Świat and Aleje Jerozolimskie. When the palm tree was finally erected at de Gaulle roundabout, a Moscow Watchdog named Benek sat on the mock-up. All that remains now are photographs.

Hot potato

The most important part of the project was getting permission to install the palm tree. A row of palm trees was, of course, impossible. The de Gaulle roundabout marked the beginning of the avenue at the junction with Nowy Świat. The area belonged to the State Treasury and was administered by the Municipal Road Authority. The first response they gave us in June 2002 was negative.

In November of the same year, we received a positive decision – permission for one year. When I spoke to the clerk over the phone, his voice was trembling. He told me he would lose his job for signing the decision. Was this true? I don’t know. Nor do I know why the Warsaw Municipal Council (and thus its department, the Municipal Road Authority) consented to the installation of the palm tree. It was probably because the departing city government wanted to leave a ‘hot potato’ for the incoming right-wing PiS⁸ party, who were devoid of any sense of humour.

I persuaded the Historic Conservation Officer by telling him that we were on our way to becoming members of the EU, a great family of nations, whose culture is rooted in the Mediterranean Sea basin, and the palm tree is very representative of this region. It seemed to convince him.

My acquaintance, Felix Ahlers, a German businessman and a highly imaginative individual, agreed to find money for the project. And so this ‘refugee’ from a Middle Eastern landscape was financed by German companies (and a Norwegian one). We had $28,500, several thousand less than we needed, but we decided to take the plunge anyway.

What then? I don’t know

I found a few companies on the Internet that produced artificial palm trees, but the only one that manufactured products suitable for outdoor conditions was in the United States. A company based in Las Vegas responded to my emails. Perhaps because my great-grandfather had been a passionate gambler who ran his own gambling den at ulica Marszałkowska 59, I signed a contract with them. After many months of negotiations and technical arrangements, the project started to move forward.

And then the problems began. The trunk was produced in Escondido, on the US/Mexico border, in the Pecoff Brothers Nursery, alongside date-palm nurseries that supplied the bark for the trunks of fake palms. It was made by two Mexicans who spoke not a word of English. I received the following email from Escondido, where Michał had gone to monitor their progress:

Rajkowska,

The palm tree will be experiencing the following adventures, as you should have known for a few days now.

1. 28.10: Pick-up at Pecoff’s in Escondido.

2. 31.10: Loading at the terminal in Los Angeles. Onto a train, not a ship.

3. 03.11: Arrival of the train in Houston from L.A.

4. 07.11: The ship sets sail. From Houston to Gdynia.

5. 22.11: The ship docks at Gdynia.

6. What then? I don’t know.

The palm tree will be in Poland on 22nd November. I don’t know by whom/when/how the palm will be picked up at the port in Gdynia. The Gdynia-roundabout route is not at all easy – on Sunday I’ll send you my suggestions. For the time being, go get yourself a drink. You deserve a break. Everything will be fine. But we’re going to go broke. There’s a lot of excitement in San Diego today because it’s supposed to rain this evening. For the first time in two months.

Rudnicki

The trunk was gorgeous, at least in the photographs. It lay at an angle in the hangar at the Pecoff Brothers Nursery, its two ends sticking out of the building. Unfortunately, Michał was unable to see the leaves because, according to the owner of the company (who, instead of updating me on progress, preferred to describe her neurological ailments in scrupulous detail), they would be sent with the trunk and were still being prepared. At the same time, some engineering designer friends of mine in Poland were working on a design for the foundation. It was shaped like an octagonal grate and its eight modules were to be held down with prefabricated concrete parts. We could not even dream of digging a hole in the de Gaulle roundabout – a railway tunnel crossed under there – which meant we had to design the palm tree so that it stood like a wineglass on a table. Two six-metre lengths of steel pipe were bought in Silesia, then welded together in Halinów, just outside Warsaw and thus the skeleton of the trunk was made.

Parsley

The project opening was planned for 6th December 2002. Our American partner, however, did not manage to organize the trunk shipment on time. We phoned the shipper daily, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the ship with the container.

It was with regret that we shifted the date to 12th December. It no longer felt like a St. Nicholas Day present.⁹ I wrote frantic emails every day, anxiously asking if everything was on its way, but received no clear response. At the last moment, it turned out that the leaves hadn’t been sent, which confirmed my worst fears – they simply did not exist. We knew the precise number of pills the owner of the company was taking for her alleged brain tumour, but we never found out exactly how it was that the leaves had not been made. And so I spent many difficult hours calling companies around the world that sold artificial leaves. Eventually, we bought beautiful, real palm tree leaves conserved with glycerine from the south of France. There was one hitch – they were too small. They were only meant to hold out for a few weeks before our unreliable partner decided to send the actual artificial leaves to Poland.

At 2 a.m. on 11th December 2002, in a temperature of minus twenty-two Celsius, a crane and a lift arrived at the de Gaulle roundabout. We had two hours, the length of time the trams stopped each night. The condition stipulated by the Warsaw Tram Company was that the power be shut off while the crane was in operation. A man pushed the button and the power died on all the tracks across Warsaw. That button cost us a fair bit of money.

The crane set up the welded twelve-metre pipe in its vertical position. We screwed the steel collar on one end of the pipe onto the steel collar on top of the foundation. Then the lorry with the trunk arrived. We opened the seal on the container. The trunk was swathed in square kilometres of bubble wrap. The crane pulled the trunk from the container, raised it, and, guided by the workers sitting in the lift basket, slid it onto the pipe. On 12th December, Pejzaż, our faithful ally from the CCA, installed the leaves.

And everything would have been alright, if the leaves hadn’t been a good metre too short. The palm tree was nicknamed parsley. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nineteen months of work, struggles and debates and instead of a palm tree we had erected a clump of parsley. The CCA organized a small opening at the roundabout and, in spite of all his efforts, Vice-Director Jarek Suchan was unable to shout above the noise of the traffic, illustrating the nature of our project very well. Żmij cut the red-and-white ribbon (like a miniature but very long Polish flag) purchased in a haberdasher’s, then someone put a pineapple under the tree. And so the palm tree began what would turn out to be a very hard life in the heart of Poland.

An exotic stranger

The next day Gazeta Wyborcza published a short article entitled: No Christmas Tree, This. I realized something that had escaped me in the chaos of preparations and the trauma over the lack of leaves – the palm tree had replaced the Christmas tree that was traditionally placed there at this time of year. The act was read as a challenge to tradition. In a statement given to the magazine Przyjaciółka¹⁰, City Mayor Lech Kaczyński explained: Consent for the palm tree was given by the previous administration. …A Christmas tree is normally placed in that spot during the holiday season. This is our tradition, which we ought to nurture. We are bound by contract as far as the palm tree is concerned, but when it expires, ideas of this sort will no longer be accepted. At the same time, the mother of a friend overheard one elderly woman telling another on the tram: It’s the Jews who put the palm tree on Aleje Jerozolimskie, because it’s their avenue. With one stroke I had managed to raise the demon of anti-Semitism and strike at the right-wing attachment to ritually defined Christian values. Hard times were ahead.

It was not only the ordinary pedestrians who were sceptical. The art world did not greet the project with a warm handshake either – the palm tree was received with utter silence. It was considered to be a populist stunt to gain media attention. There were no debates, meetings or discussions. The first critical analysis was published six years after the project was unveiled. It remains isolated to this day.

Before the palm tree was installed, I had thought of it as a kind of experiment, a great question mark aimed at the city. I could not anticipate people’s reactions. I did not know if Warsaw’s residents were ready to accept something so bizarre – a foreign tree. It was to be a new neighbour, an exotic stranger, ruffled and in bad style, but at the same time how attractive!

When the first leaf protruded from the top of the tree, I understood something else – the palm tree was funny. Not just funny. It had a great deconstructive power, it bracketed everything. Everything the eye could see. What took place around it became a part of the 24-hour spectacle it produced.

2002, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, photo by Konrad Pustoła

The term ‘palm tree’ is part of an untranslatable Polish expression: a palm tree hit you. You say this to someone who is acting like an extravagant idiot. It describes a moment of loss of control or logic, or madness, from the point of view of someone who has got both feet on the ground.

An escape to warmer climes

The commentary I wrote to accompany the palm tree in December 2002, describing the shock of returning to Poland from Israel during the Second Intifada, was gradually forgotten. Posts on Internet forums, anecdotes, gossip, and events generated by life itself became more important. Like elderly women brandishing their umbrellas at it, or others smiling as they walked by. I often stood near the palm tree, unknown to the crowds of tourists, listening to the tour guides. They always gave a totally different version of what the project was about, though the link with Aleje Jerozolimskie was often mentioned.

I realized that, apart from the after-effects of the Israeli conflict and the void left by the Holocaust, there was something in the palm tree that caused people’s faces to change when they walked around the roundabout. I had produced an image of desire that sent them off into their private dreams – of trips to warm countries, of a better life, of something that is elsewhere. There was clearly a warmth towards the palm tree, and a vague sense that our lives could be different, better, if only we had been born in another place. Definitely not here. Because real life is going on somewhere else. I wondered what was left in the palm tree from my deep passion for the Middle East, and my discordance with what I saw there. Not much, perhaps.

Red alert, a leaf under the palm tree!

Eventually, two months after the deadline, we were sent the leaves. I opened the box and breathed: Wow, they’re so…pretty. They were hideous. A PVC sleeve was stuck on reinforcing wire, on which some strange green shapes were plastered with tape. These leaves were constructed so poorly that any strong wind would bend the bars and leave them misshapen. Moreover, they broke, fell off and eventually left the palm tree bald.

The situation was becoming serious. I decided to raise some money, because our budget had been entirely devoured by the production of the trunk and its installation. I approached the Municipal Road Authority for permission to set up scaffolding and put up an advert. I thought that perhaps the palm tree could support itself if it briefly became an advertising space. A media agency helped me to find clients. The extra funds would have saved the project, but the price was steep – the palm was to spend two months as a bottle of medicinal fluid meant to help elderly people feel more animated.

Anyway, permission was not given. Although in December 2002, we were installing advertising banners on every free inch of space with the full approval of the Municipal Road Authority, in spring 2003 I was informed that no trademarks could be placed within a radius of 50 metres from the roundabout centre. Polish law is very flexible in certain respects.

I was in despair. Every morning, my hands would shake when Pejzaż, riding to the CCA on his bike despite the sub-zero temperatures, sent a text message saying: Red alert, red alert, a leaf under the palm tree. This meant that the wind had blown another leaf down during the night. Then I would have to take the tram to the city centre, tuck the fallen leaf under my arm, and trudge with it through the snow (the longest leaves were four metres long and didn’t fit into any sort of vehicle) to the CCA, which was quickly filling up with fallen foliage. I was losing sleep with the stress and worry.

Still, in 2006, the police were calling me on the phone, addressing me in a harsh voice:

Citizen Rajkowska?

Yes… I replied, panicking.

We have caught another citizen with a leaf. Suspecting theft, an officer has confiscated it. Please report to the station…

Żwirek

One day my neighbour, a young guy, stopped me on the staircase. Hi, he said. Is it you who put up the palm tree? Yes. And that bastard tree is a shitload of trouble, I said. I see, was the answer and he ran down the stairs.

At that time he was a Buddhist. Everyone called him Żwirek. He became my close friend and a father for the palm tree. He worked in all conditions regardless of whether or not we had a budget. He had a genius for sorting things out. Żwirek would ‘conjure up’ scaffolding, organize transportation and people (all Buddhists) ready to expose themselves to freezing winds and merciless sun at the top of the palm tree. We have spent 10 years working together on the roundabout, in the garages and storerooms and in-between. Until now, I don’t know why he does it. Perhaps out of general love for every living creature, or because of his punk attitude. After he became a cameraman, he not only coordinated my projects, but also filmed them. I still call him when something impossible has to be done.

When it got a bit warmer, we decided to take down the remains of the American stalks and recycled them into new leaves. The CCA let us use a small storeroom in the old Laboratory building. It took us weeks, but it turned out alright. Hanging from the scaffolding, 12 metres up, balancing on one leg on wobbly boards, it seemed that Warsaw belonged to us. We saw Aleje Jerozolimskie stretch as far as the horizon. After many hours of work, we drank beer under the palm tree leaves. It was May 2003. We had saved the project. For the time being.

Once, during a long walk through Śródmieście (city centre) district, I suddenly turned around and said to my boyfriend, Przemek: Look… From the summit of most Poniatowskiego, with the palm tree in the background, the city looked something like Beirut. Were it not for the Polish names on the street signs, we wouldn’t have recognized Warsaw.

The palm tree and the Polish question

While I was concerned about the technical state of the project, the palm tree began quietly finding its way into the media: into Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek. These articles were not about art in Poland, more about transformations in its mentality, its attitude to Others, its future accession to the European Union, the development of the economy, etc. The Los Angeles Times journalist wrote of a grey Polish reality, of tired Varsovians crushed into ancient trams, staring through foggy windowpanes at the palm tree – a scrap of a different, better reality. In the Polish edition of Newsweek, the image of the palm tree was used to illustrate an article entitled: What Are We Like? Over the course of a long report, the author queried: How have democracy and capitalism changed the shape of our society, its way of thinking and responding, the Polish value system and symbols? And what relations tie us to the independent state of which generations of Poles could only dream?

The palm tree was apparently supposed to represent these dreams. Underneath, a satisfied Lech Wałęsa clenched his fists in a gesture of triumph, the Solidarity¹¹ banner flying over his head. A few pages later, there was an article, The palm tree and the Polish question, wherein the palm tree occupied the place of the traditional elephant, the proverbial icon of the absurd. The fact that no one from Newsweek consulted me on this collage was less a sign of the customary lack of journalistic manners than a general conviction that the palm tree was not an artist’s project – it was public property.

At first, I was opposed to such practices. I stubbornly added my commentaries, reiterating that this was the fruit of my journey, it was about Nowa Jerozolima, the Middle East, conflict, misunderstandings. But by now, the palm tree had its own life to live. I could not alter the commentaries and appropriations. People began giving the project their own meanings, the media began using the palm tree for their own ends, the first stories associated with it began to appear. And everybody had their own.

Such situations can only occur in public space. A gallery is a place where the context is nullified – the artist gives this place its significance and as such situates it in relation to external contexts. I knew that when I entered the public domain I would be dealing with a wealth of contexts, a million narratives, conflicts and visions. The attempt to introduce one more narrative into this abundance, one more meaning, was condemned to failure. All I could do was suggest a framework within which people would situate their own narratives.

From web forums, conversations and rumours, I deduced that the palm tree divided Varsovians into those who wanted the city to be open to change, responsive, dynamically reacting to migrations of people,