Document folder, plastic sleeve, paper clip, printer, roller drawer unit, power strip, ream of A4 paper. Reinforcing bar, a cavity in concrete, a pile of rubble, a sheet of metal. The material universe of the interiors and exteriors of office architecture exists in a constant state of disappearance, transformation, and accumulation.
On the one hand, it is a landscape meticulously planned and optimised, governed by the logic of maximum efficiency. On the other, it is continually produced through accidental configurations, collisions, tensions, and improvisations. It is precisely these points of contact between the designed and the provisional, between the planned and the hurried, that most interest Piotrek Kowalski.
The spatial installations that emerge in these moments are ephemeral, banal, and rooted in everyday routine. Yet their forms become unintended records of the processes unfolding within a particular site.
Curtis Plaza, Empark Mokotów Business Park, Saturn. Office buildings erected around the turn of the millennium assumed monumental forms. They were not monuments to the past but monuments heralding the future – materialisations of aspirations for transformation, growth, and limitless development.
Kuba Rodziewicz documents these buildings and their accompanying infrastructure in black-and-white photographs printed on an office photocopier, a medium inseparable from the everyday workings of corporate infrastructure. The method of producing the images becomes integral to the work itself: photography functions here not as an autonomous object but as a document, a record, and an archival fragment.
This is an archive that neither orders nor hierarchises. The photographs have been assembled into a catalogue – a kind of diary recording a space that still exists even as it passes into history. A former industrial district has been transformed into a corporate City, whose monumental office blocks are now giving way to successive residential developments.
The archive captures the moment when architecture ceases to represent the future and itself becomes a historical artefact. The monument is revealed not as a permanent marker of memory but as a temporary carrier of the economic and political imaginaries projected onto the city.
Holes in the ground are inseparable actors of rapidly developing residential and office districts. Alicja Pakosz, however, digs not to prepare the site for another development. She excavates deeper, uncovering buried figures. Monumental human forms emerge from beneath the surface. Raised in Tychy, the artist grew up among Socialist Realist monuments.
Monumental bricklayers, steelworkers, and miners formed part of her everyday landscape. Like today's towering glass office buildings, they are monuments to labour – but to a labour that possessed a face and a body. Alicja Pakosz's illusionistic paintings allow us to look beneath the ground, confronting the very idea of the monument – whether erected, toppled, or dismantled.
Even when removed from public space and buried underground, a monument does not disappear. It remains one of the layers of the city's material fabric, memory, and collective imagination.
