IndustrialTownFuturism

Curated by Jakub Szreder and Martin Kaltwaser

As part of a group of artists, researchers and academics, we have been invited to research and imagine the future centenary of these two industrial towns.

Both towns evolved from the middle of the last century, and both were planned completely around the image and function of the factory. Since 1939 Wolfsburg has been the home and global headquarters of theVolkswagen Group, and since 1947 Nowa Huta grew around the formerly Lenin and now Sendzimira steelworks.

The Fordist-factory has dominated these towns.

So for industrialtownfuturism we turned our attention to the archaic social formation of the informal market. The future disappearance of industrial or monopolized trade elsewhere, will enable ‘street’ markets to reassert themselves; like a virus suppressed by the bodies immune system, markets are always awaiting the optimum conditions to flourish. A market is not designed as an aesthetic object, and yet there is a beautiful logic of practice: markets are self-regulating networks that evolve a familiar structure from heterogonous parts.

Markets endure.

An integral Industrualtownfurturism symposium included contributions from sociologist and urbanists; Wulf Tessin, Jaroslaw Urbanski, Albrecht Goschel, Ewa Charkiewicz, Arno Paulus and Maciej Gdula.

view the catalogue as a PDF file IndustrialTownFuturism

The exhibition is in two parts

Part 1 was exibited at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg

Part 2 was exibited at the Laznia Nowej Theatre Nowa Huta.

At the opening of the exhibition in Nowa Huta we performed a lecture. Here is the amended transcript of The return of Meshwork Markets delivered to the Meshwork of Marketeers, Cracow Middle-Europe 16th October 2049.