Zarzew - Fundacja Urban Forms

This project was commissioned by Urban Forms to repair a pair of damaged murals, originally painted in 2014 on two resident tower blocks by artists Cekas Berger, SEPE, Daniel Chazme, Krzysztof Syruc (Proembrion), and the late Robert Proch. With over one hundred murals the Polish city of Łódź has become renowned for its vibrant street art and culture scene, and residents of the Zarzew towers were keen to work with Urban Forms for the murals in their block to be renovated.

Guido van Helten met with the residents in order to encourage their participation in the project and to generate photographic studies as the basis for the new mural’s design. Residents were asked to share favourite pieces of art kept in their own homes, in response to the question: What is your idea of art in the home versus art in the public space? The artist then photographed residents and the paintings, statues, and other art objects in their possession, while getting to know the personal stories behind the subjects’ selections. Nostalgia, faith, and sentiment were some of the many reasons why these domestic works hold so much value – opening up a dialogue within the community about the value of murals in public space.

Van Helten’s resulting diptych explores this theme of public and private value, depicting glimpses of local residents he photographed as well as reproductions of some of the artworks they shared – including a painting titled “Łeba” by a little boy called Tymek. In line with the public/private theme, the artist also sought to achieve a harmony with the buildings’ existing pastel colour palette – a leftover from the post-Soviet repainting of public housing known as pasteloza.

Following the end of the Soviet era, pasteloza represented a desire for freedom of aesthetic expression in the public sphere. From 1990 Poland’s changing political regime motivated transformations to the urban environment, altering street names and removing sculptures and other symbolic references to the former Soviet occupation of public space.¹ During the Cold War era, Westerners often invoked the ‘greyness’ of Eastern Europe as a shorthand for socialist scarcity, while colour signified the pleasures and possibilities of consumption and choice.² But in Poland and other Eastern bloc countries, greyness came to symbolise an absence of political freedom, more so than a lack of consumer goods – and there was no more potent a symbol than the famously drab, uniform, and monotonous Brutalist Soviet-era housing blocks. When it became necessary to repair and insulate the old apartment buildings in Łódź and elsewhere, many residents opted to repaint their facades in a whole spectrum of colours as another act of reclaiming public space and personal freedom. As Eliza Otto explains, pasteloza became a small act of power for residents deciding for themselves how they wanted their immediate surroundings to look.³

But the evolving legacies of pasteloza are complicated, as indeed are the legacies of Soviet-era Poland. Nostalgia competes with progressivism. For some, the apartment towers (even the repainted ones) are domineering, outdated and even kitschy reminders of the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet past in a rapidly gentrifying city, while for others such dismissiveness overshadows the otherwise extraordinary social achievements of mass public housing and of Poland’s political past.

Such tensions can be discerned in the interventions of murals and other street art in Łódź’s ongoing redevelopment. Van Helten’s mural is itself situated on walls that are simultaneously private and public, containing family homes on the inside and providing artistic and architectural interest from the outside. But through its content and form, the mural was intended to find ways of integrating rather than smoothing over this tension. The existing pasteloza colours are incorporated through the artist’s style within the framework of the image, alongside the more vivid palettes seen in the reproductions of the residents’ private artworks – bringing together both individual and communal expressions of creative freedom in the public sphere.