In the Blog/Varia section we publish project-related news, such as information about conferences, workshops, information about our publications and organised events, curiosities. It is also a place where short notes prepared by students cooperating with us appear.

In June, our team, Natalia Zawiejska, Anna Maćkowiak and Łukasz Stypuła, participated in the workshop (Im)Materiality of the Secular City: Trials and Tribulations, organised by Mariam Goshadze, Margaux Fitoussi and Thomas Schmidt-Lux within the Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities

According to the organisers, this workshop aimed to discuss the materiality of the secular and of processes of secularisation in urban space. Much ink has been spilt on the ideological dimensions of the modern secular nation-state, especially the legal and discursive techniques and realities of managing religious institutions. However, the physical reworking of urban spaces has received less attention even though it is well-acknowledged that grand projects of state-formation go hand in hand with on-the-ground alterations. Whether forced or voluntary, these transformations shape the urban terrain in conformation with visions of a “secular” and/or “modern city.” Inspired by the British Israeli architect Eyal Wiezman’s contention that the materiality of the built world has a life of its own, the goal of this workshop is to probe into the distinctive force of secular architecture and the processes of destruction and construction involved in its production. 

The workshop was planned to include the three thematic clusters of erasing religious pasts, assembling secular futures, and theoretical paradigms.

In our contribution entitled The Ghetto Heroes Square in Kraków: Between construction and erasure of religious heritage, we suggested going beyond established categories of secular and religious. Starting from the case study of The Ghetto Heroes Square in Podgórze, Kraków, we would like to focus on both the fluid character of the religious sphere and the deconstruction of the concept of secular (im)materiality.

The Ghetto Heroes Square is dominated by several dozen large bronze empty chairs. This secular piece of art transformed the square that used to be a marketplace, a bus terminal, and a place of massive deportations and execution of the Jewish population of Kraków. The chairs constitute the monument and counter-monument of the Shoah. This place of memory is in such proximity to the ordinary urban fabric – including bars, shops, and routes – that it is sometimes left unnoticed or misunderstood. We suggest that the Ghetto Heroes Square represents the religious potency of secular architecture. It might be a subversive example of (re)construction rather than erasure of urban religious heritage that blurs the boundaries between sacred and secular domains.

With our contribution, we intended to interrogate the linear process of secularising narrative. We asked several questions on the specifics of the secularisation of the urban space in Poland. Specifically, we reflected on the idea of the Catholic matrix as a generalised public embodied experience that allows defining the urban space in Poland whether as secular, religious or fluid.