W Hour, the annuary of Warsaw Uprising start, 2018.
Ritual memorisation of an annual ritual dedicated to remembrance is being repeated as well. Most of my work – both artistic and academic – revolves around the topic of memory, and the processes of how it’s being formed into the social construct of history. My personal opinion on the Warsaw Uprising doesn’t mean shit, and I truly hope to never be in a situation of deciding about matters with impact that severe. But the fact that partizans fought with Nazis only to serve as an point of reference for both lukewarm nationalist government of Poland and for far right parties and skinheads is somehow puzzling and completely obvious at the same time. So, each year the March of Remembrance starts at the W Hour. There are pyrotechnics done by football ultras, gathering points of National Radical Camp and sometimes flags with Celtic Crosses. But, today the march was stopped and delegalised due to the fact that somebody was bearing a shirt with a forbidden symbol. The Minister of Internal Affairs publicly announced that it was not any obviously far-right symbol, it was a hammer and sickle on an anticommunist t-shirt. History is not only being written actively, it serves a purpose, and there are beneficiaries of this.
