Portraits of Queer Joy

Welcome to this episode of the Sonic Interventions Podcast initiated by Dr. Layla Zami of the Collaborative Research Centre on Intervening Arts. My name is Adriana Raczykowski. I am a German-Polish graduate student and researcher focusing on topics regarding the so-called “Post-Ost”, or the “Post-East”. I am the guest host for this season on Polish contemporalities in the arts, activism, and across the cultural field. With this season, I take the chance to look to other tools of interventions beyond the Sonic, so to say. Today, I have the pleasure to talk to Ola Kamińska and Wojtek Zrałek-Kossakowski, who are here as curators and co-organizers of a portrait cycle named Sto Lesb (100Lesb) or Hundred Lesbians, an exhibition that took place in 2021 at the Jasna10 Cultural Centre in Warsaw, and which is also an online web project and publication about queer representation in Poland. So welcome, Ola and Wojtek. It's great to have you both here, online and across borders, but nevertheless, seeing and hearing each other well, so I would love to start by asking you to introduce yourselves first who you are, where you are also maybe as well, and what all the many interesting things are that you do.

Hi, can I start? I this is OK, Wojtek?

I guess, sure.

Yeah, my name is Ola and I co-curated the project, 100lesbians.com, or 100dykes.com, as I often sometimes translate it. I am a scholar, I'm the co-founder of the initiative, Girls and the Queers to the Front, which I run with my friend Agata Wnuk, as well as Magda Repecka and Maja Halber, and we, for the past nine years, we've been actually creating space for queer and feminist artists, musicians, writers by organizing gigs, performances, publishing a zine, and recently we also started a small press, queer, DIY publishing press. So, I think actually most of my practices are definitely committed to different interventions in our suddenly queer-phobic society.

So now it's my turn, I guess. So, hey, it's a huge pleasure to be here. My name is Wojtek Zrałek-Kossakowski, don't try to repeat it if you're not Polish. I know it sounds terrible, this name, it is long, and it has many weird letters, but it's not my fault, it's my parents. I'm a Warsaw based artist and curator. I have this huge pleasure to work with the Jasna10 Cultural Centre, which hosted 100Lesb - one of the highlights of our activities - but apart from that we're doing many other things. And apart from being a Jasna team member, I'm mainly in theatre or somewhere in between theatre and music artists. I work for theatres as a dramaturg and sometimes also as a sound designer, and I’m doing a lot of radio plays, which feels like the biggest one ever actually. But yeah, of course I could talk much more about me because this is a topic I love to talk about as much as possible, but actually I think that would be enough – So, Warsaw-based artist and curator, and a proud cost of 100 lesbians project three years ago. Yeah, it's been three years now…

Yes, thank you so much for sharing the details on your projects and insights. I can only encourage all the listeners to look into both your inspiring works and get familiar with it. So Ola, some time ago, three years ago actually, I talked to you about the work of Girls* for the Front Collective, and you told me about this specific project, Sto Lesb, which features exactly a hundred Polish lesbians. Can you maybe tell all the listeners that could not see the exhibition and haven't seen the web project yet? How can we imagine the cycle and how did the initiative for this emerge?

Yeah, so actually the 100dykes.com is a separate product from Girls* and Queers to the Front. The initiator of this was Katarzyna Szenajch, who is also my partner. We've been together for 11 years now. So, we very often kind of think about this project as our baby in a way. And we wanted to see more lesbians in the public space wanted to create space for lesbian representations and lesbians portraits. So, the project encompasses portraits of 100 lesbians. In the publication, the small book that accompanies the project, we can also find interviews with them. And all of the portraits were created by queer women and non-binary people. And I'm very happy that the whole project was created by women and non-binary people in a way that they called portraits, the photographic portrait, the paintings, etc. So, it really was a project that focused on lesbians identity. It was co-created by mostly lesbians and I'm very, very glad with how it came out…

Romance - performed by NANA

We started because we were inspired by this slogan, actually a graffiti that we saw on a building that said “lesbo, nie jesteś sama”, which translates to “dyke, you’re not alone”. It was somehow incredibly moving... You don't see slogans like that in the public space and also it was during an extremely difficult time for the Polish queer community. At the time, it was still under the rule of PiS, so the law and justice party that is very right-wing conservative. And the queer community was targeted at the time. It was, and is still - Wojtek, correct me if I'm wrong - but I think still we had a lot of “LGBT-free zones”, which are local parts of Poland that were adapting as a way of validated queer- and homophobia.

Yes, I think there is nothing to correct and it's a sad truth that it's exactly how it's been done.

Yeah, so to see those kinds of sparkles of more solidarity and encouragement for queer people and for lesbians was just incredibly moving. We saw this “dyke, you’re not alone” slogan, then this local anarchist queer collective created it as stickers that were distributed around town and we knew that this is the slogan that is going to guide our project.

That (collective) was “Stop Bzdurom”, right?

Yes, exactly. Yeah, so this, you know, like really unruly, angry - and rightfully so -collective that wanted to intervene into the Polish queerphobia and what was happening at the time. So we took this slogan, then it guided us to create the 100dykes.com project and that's how it started.

Thank you so much for this insight. Yeah, I think it's a very thought-provoking project. I mean, the exhibition has passed now, but the website and the ideas still remain. And it really makes me reflect on the way of representation and how these portraits serve as a catalogue of testimonies to everyday queer life in Poland that is also joyous, prospering, ever-present and proud. And this motive of queer everyday life is somewhat recurring in Polish contemporary photography. I mean, looking at it especially since the beginning of this millennium on the last 15 years, just to mention, for example, works like “Let them See us”, Niech Na Zobaczą of Karolina Breguła or Hanna Jażąbek’s, Margines Odmienności, “Margin of Difference”, which also specifically portrays lesbian couples in private and public space. But still, this is a narrative that is often dismissed, especially in so many media portrayals that first and foremost deal with the trauma that the community in Poland encounters, which of course is very real, but exactly that joy and solidarity that you speak about is often not centred. So how would you maybe connect this idea about solidarity and the project itself to the term of intervention, which is at stake here? Can you share some thoughts on this?

Yeah, so we definitely wanted to focus on the joy and kind of like the rich community and culture that lesbians create that very often gets lost, because usually when the Polish queer community has to gather, it's for fighting for our rights. A lot of interactions within the queer community are, in a broader sense, focused on fighting for our rights and by proxy, this is also about trauma and to what we're lacking. So, here we actually focussed on like the opposite of that. We're focusing on what we actually have, which is each other and this wonderful queer and lesbian personas that we could share. Like, sometimes my friends were joking like: “Oh my god, how did you find 100 lesbians in Poland?” It is obviously a joke, just to clarify it, but at the same time, you know, it shows how little of lesbian identity is in mainstream media or different projects. I think the intervention was both opposing this queer phobic society that we live in and secondly focusing on how we're actually happy to be lesbian. Oh my god, it sounds so cheesy, but it's true. I mean, I'm so glad that I am lesbian. So yeah, we're actually incredibly happy to share this and instead of focusing on the perspective that centres the trauma - and it is traumatic living in Poland as a lesbian. So as lesbians, we really wanted to focus on and show how wonderful it actually is and how much pleasure comes from it and how rich the community is we create. I think that was that was the intervention. And it really worked like the opening was wonderful. I think it was like 400 people who came.

I remembered it was just in the middle of the pandemic situation. No one was seeing anyone basically. So, you just imagine, having this 400 fantastic people at the very same place at Jasna three years ago… It was such a great evening on so many levels and thank you for that again, Ola.

It was a pleasure. I would do it once again anytime in my life!

Ola, maybe returning to the joke you just mentioned. So how did you find a hundred lesbians? Maybe it's like, yeah, tell us about the process. I mean, not only there are paintings, photographs and digital art of the different persons that you portrayed, but also you asked them what they are proud about to be a lesbian and what they and everything, can you tell us more about that process of this project?

Yeah, we really wanted to focus, or show how wonderful the queer and lesbian community is. We didn't want to only ask only our friends, who were 20, or 30-something, living in the Warsaw. So, we committed to diversity of our participants too. We travelled to some smaller places, smaller cities, more towns. Also for example, different bigger cities like Kraków, Gdańsk, Gdynia. There was a lot of traveling involved, which was extremely fun, because you know, me and my partner, we had like a lesbian tour of Poland. We had participants that I think were still 18 or 19 at the time, and we had participants who are over 60 or around 70. I'm glad that we managed to create this diversity in our project, but obviously reaching lesbians who are in their thirties and living in big cities so much easier, and then through the word of mouth, through social media we were trying to find those participants who were maybe not as easy to find at the beginning, and we're incredibly grateful for the participant who trusted us and took part in the project.

Romance, performed by NANA

Yeah, Ola, finding people participants is also part of other projects that you do. You're also part of the Girls and Queers to the Front Collective, and you publish zines, which have kind of similar topics to this one, the representation, right? Can you tell the listeners what's up with that?

Yeah, absolutely. We've been doing Girls and Queers to the Front for nine years now, which sounds wild when you think about it, because it was just a small project that me and my best friend started. Recently, we just published a new issue that's called Queer Erotica Zine, which was actually also a pandemic project, and when we couldn't meet together, we couldn't gather together, we wanted to create space on pages, where we could again focus on the pleasures of being a queer person. We also wanted to focus on bodily pleasures, especially during the pandemic, when we couldn't dance together, we couldn't gather together, we wanted to focus on the pleasure, and also on bodily pleasures, creating a space on the pages. The last issue is co-created by 100 authors and artists. It's a 200 pages long zine, which is no longer a zine, you know, when you think about it…

It's a book.

Yeah, it's a book. You know, we got submissions from over 300 people, so it's like a really big project that's also translated into English, so it can reach the international community. It's partially co-created by international artists and authors, and mostly Polish authors, and I'm incredibly glad about it, because it's kind of similar with maybe even 100 lesbians when I talk about it to my friends. I think when people, especially from abroad, hear that I am a lesbian in Poland, or that I do queer activism in Poland, the immediate reactions are like: “oh, poor you, being a lesbian in Poland”. And you know, they are right, it sucks - I don't know if I can say this on air - it's not wonderful to be a gay person in Poland, but at the same time we have such amazing queer communities here, and lesbian communities, so creative and so resourceful to each other. And by creating those projects that can reach an international audience, we are also showing that the mainstream image that gets into media of queer people is not the only one that we have, so I'm really committed to showing how actually wonderful the queer community is. And I keep saying this all the time, but I just strongly believe this, how much cool stuff we’re doing together, and that not all this is about trauma,

Returning to 100Lesb, Wojtek would you like to expand more about Jasna10, what the space was that 100Lesb was exhibited in, and what the programs are that you do, because there's a variety.

Oh yes, there is, but I would like to go back to this moment, because you know, on one hand, it was you, Ola and Kasia and 100 other lesbians participating in the project, but there's also this other side, I mean us, as Jasna10. Because the project (100Les) happened within this project that we've had for five and a half years now. Each year we're granting some substantial, probably not enough, but still, some money to artistic social projects, and 100Lesbians was one of them - or Sto Lesb, I like the Polish sound of it actually, because it sounds very like in your face. So yes, that project was one of the things supported by this. But there is one context that I'd love to talk more about, because it's not only saying something about Jasna’s cultural centre, but also the place in which we are now, and where we were five years ago. As Ola said, that was the moment when in Poland we had this radical right-wing government governing the country, being quite strong in some places outside of the big cities. And we're lucky enough to be in Warsaw, I mean Jasna cultural centre is founded by the city of Warsaw. The very first president of Warsaw, who participated officially in the gay pride, was this president actually, and it was a huge change, it never happened before in Warsaw, or actually in any other city. I'm speaking as a white straight guy, so probably I shouldn't talk much about, you know, gay people, what they felt at that point, but you know, the fact that the city of Warsaw had no problem with founding the 100Lesb project, and some other projects that we do - it says something about the city. There was also the thing in Poland that you had this like, you know, struggle between the central right-wing government and far more liberal - maybe not socialist unfortunately - but way more liberal than the central government, the local governments. This is an important context, I guess. You also mentioned that it was far easier for you to find participants for the 100Les project in the big cities than somewhere in the rural areas, and that's an important factor, because Warsaw has been way more supportive for these kinds of initiatives for many years now. Of course it's not a perfect city, but I guess it's way easier to live here than in many other areas of Poland. And this has to be mentioned, because the whole Jasna project is founded by the city, and we're doing really some serious left-wing shit actually, which is really cool of course, and they have no problem with that, and that’s and important context I guess…

I was just thinking because you both mentioned like time and place aspects, which I think is really interesting, because the project you said it takes place, or like the exhibition, Jasna10, is a place in Warsaw, right, and you also mentioned before the so-called “LGBTQ-free zones”, which were a reality for a long time - actually, I'm not really up to date if there are still some remaining or if there were overruled by now - and also time, because PiS is just out of government, but we're not over this, right, like this is something that we very much still deal with as the society itself is of course conservative… So time and place is also reflected within this project, and how it actually impacts representation, and the queer life, especially the visibility of lesbians in that sense, right?

Yeah, absolutely, and you know, definitely any change in the society doesn't happen overnight, and I think what we're focusing in terms of the time and place is that we have now like a beacon of hope, you know? Even if it stays the same, maybe it's not going to get worse because of the government, so I think this is something that we want to focus on, and after eight years of this very, very long ruling of PiS, I think we just all really want to focus on hope in a way.

Romance, performed by NANA

Thank you very much to both of you. We're already at the end of this episode. I would love to ask if there's something left that you would like to mention, this is the space for this.

Yeah, there’s one thing that I would love to add actually. Again, sorry for talking, maybe not about myself, but about Jasna. You asked about this time and space thing, and I think it's a part of “Krytyka Polityczna”, which is the social NGO (behind Jasna cultural centre), 20-something years old. We've been doing this, publishing books, doing cultural events, organizing debates, and so on, for like 20 plus years. So we had this time, you know, to see how not only in Warsaw, as Krytyka is active in other cities as well in Poland, but there is something very interesting, actually if you take this like 20 plus years perspective and see how Poland has changed within that time and Warsaw as well. For 20-something years, we're trying to, you know, develop this left-wing language, motor activism, art, and so on, and it's really been changing a lot. I think we're really in a better place, but there is still a lot to be done. This is what I’d like to add… And Jasna10 and 100Lesbians are part of that (change) and it's an important thing that there are more and more of these kinds of projects. Not only by Krytyka Polityczna, but there is this a very interesting left-wing turn in public institutions of arts as well. I mean, I guess there is much more visibility now to this kind of activism, to identity politics. So, there is something very interesting happening in Poland, not only in Warsaw and we’re hopeful that this change might arrive at some point.

Thank you.

I'm glad that you mentioned this, Wojtek. When I was talking about this beacon of hope, you are absolutely right, it rather comes from, you know, art institutions and from younger generations, and this is where the change happens and not through the government.

Absolutely.

Although, at least, you know, sometimes having a not extremely right-wing government helps in creating this. And the one other thing, that I wanted to mention is when we were working on 100Lesb.com, we also worked, apart from Wojtek, with Ela Zasińska…

She has to be mentioned. Yes, absolutely.

Exactly. It was like a dream cooperation. So I just wanted to mention this. And again, I'm very grateful that we could bring this project to life through Jasna10, because it really was like one of, you know, the most wonderful things that I did with my partner. And I know she also is extremely proud of it.

The feeling is mutual, absolutely.

Yeah. Thank you so much, again Ola and Wojtek. And to everybody that tuned in, you can have a look at the portraits and the project itself as well as Jasna10 cultural centre and Krytyka Polityczna online. The links are all in the description box and in the show notes. And with this, I would like to say thank you to Dr. Layla Zami for conceiving this podcast and providing this platform. Also, to the Collaborative Research Centre. And of course, many thanks to Stefanie Gregor, and her team at Eufoniker Productions. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for the next episode.