Fragments Index

from TERAZ POLIŻ: our unique story

currently Teraz Poliż are creating:

Alina Gajdamowicz, Dorota Glac, Marta Jalowska, Ada Kornecka, Marta Wesołowska i Anna Zakościelna

It is November 11 when we write this. We are eating cheesecake together, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. A bit proud, and even more scared. A celebration?
Well…
It’s the year 2024, and TERAZ POLIŻ will be 17 in a moment, but it can still celebrate their sweet sixteen for a while.
It’s a Celebration.

The archive that opens up to you consists of materials collected over the years on hard drives and in warehouses, in the back rooms of different venues and in private flats. They have been waiting for someone willing to look at them from a different perspective and draw a new map of this female journey. One that in its chaos and inconsistency opens up new contexts and invites people to join us. One in which the things we find embarrassing turn out to be delightful. And what is difficult remains difficult, and is not hidden.

The collective as a form of coexistence based on multi-personal relationships is dynamically changing, so we thought it would be good to preserve the memory of its parts, but also to understand what our TERAZ POLIŻ elements are. To tell the story in a different way, or perhaps piece together a tale which is made up of pieces that have been traveling independently for years.

The collective as a form of coexistence based on multi-personal relationships is dynamically changing, so we thought it would be good to preserve the memory of its parts, but also to understand what our TERAZ POLIŻ elements are. To tell the story in a different way, or perhaps piece together a tale which is made up of pieces that have been traveling independently for years.

We also took advantage of the KPO funds, which had been waiting frozen for the last few years for our archive. Because, after all, there was absolutely no chance of public funding for this kind of feminist archive between 2015 and 2023.

 

This is our collection and our non-individual story specific to our collective and everything connected to it, around it, under it and what is yet to come. So have fun, at least as much fun as we had co-creating this archive! And keep dropping by from time to time, as it will be changing too.

 

TERAZ POLIŻ

“Fragments” is the original selection of seventeen elements from the archive – objects, photographs, travel recordings, handwritten notes and drawings – traces of many years of TERAZ POLIŻ’s work that introduce various areas of the collective’s activities. Each fragment invokes a specific story through which we position the group’s work in the changing landscape of socio-political processes. The starting point for these stories is our affective experience of contact with the archive – browsing through files on hard drives, touching the notebooks or digging into a theatre prop box. Starting from a personal relationship with the fragments, we hoped to create a subjective, heterogeneous, decentralised story and, at the same time, encourage you to explore the Index on your own, where you can find information about the TERAZ POLIŻ projects, and to freely follow those traces of the past that you find most evocative.

 

Anna Majewska + Marcelina Obarska

from female researchers: towards a reinterpretation of the archive

Initially, we wanted to arrange the archive through multiple tables of contents, creating something like a map or an atlas where different routes could be taken. This idea grew out of the perception that an archive as a medium of power requires reinterpreting and going beyond the limits outlined by traditional archival methodology. However, the story of working on this project is also a narrative about the experience of giving up some ideas and having to transform them in the face of the grant limitations. Confronting the material conditions of working in the cultural field – especially the temporality resulting from the characteristics of digital projects and the time limits of the funding programme – made our curatorial concept more realistic. In the end, archive visitors can move through the archive within two leading paths called Fragments and Index, which are traces of the idea of creating a horizontal structure inspired by a map or an atlas, and a more conventional way of using the archive resources.

“Fragments” is the original selection of seventeen elements from the archive – objects, photographs, travel recordings, handwritten notes and drawings – traces of many years of TERAZ POLIŻ’s work that introduce various areas of the collective’s activities. Each fragment invokes a specific story through which we position the group’s work in the changing landscape of socio-political processes. The starting point for these stories is our affective experience of contact with the archive – browsing through files on hard drives, touching the notebooks or digging into a theatre prop box. Starting from a personal relationship with the fragments, we hoped to create a subjective, heterogeneous, decentralised story and, at the same time, encourage you to explore the Index on your own, where you can find information about the TERAZ POLIŻ projects, and to freely follow those traces of the past that you find most evocative.

 

Anna Majewska + Marcelina Obarska

from designers:
“female type” - i.e. girly fonts

When looking for fonts for the TERAZ POLIŻ archive project, I naively typed the phrase “female type” into a popular internet search engine. The results turned out to be far different from what I was looking for – “type” is short for “typeface”. At the end of the list of the suggestions I found the phrase I had been looking for all along: “female type designers”.

 

The keywords “female type” reminded me that what you can find on the mainstream internet is far from feminist optics, not to mention queer. The internet is heavily dominated by a patriarchal perspective with the “white heterosexual Catholic” model, which is common in Poland. There is no room for gender diversity, sexual orientation, religion or different ethnicity.

The TERAZ POLIŻ archive is a virtual space where you can find narratives that are different from those circulating on the mainstream internet. It is a place where you can express yourself without fear, and that’s why it’s so valuable. It is an original treasury of thoughts, narratives, events, objects and their fragments.

 

In the main section of the website called ‘Fragments’, in addition to the 17 objects that symbolise the 17-year herstory of the TERAZ POLIŻ collective, you will find 17 different fonts designed by women or design teams in which the feminine touch has been an important touch.
These are: Bar Sady (Malgorzata Bartosik + Mateusz Machalski), Chaim & Aviva (Zofia Janina Borysiewicz), Tagger (Zuzanna Rogatty)

 

Typographers, who usually remain on the sidelines, lead the way in this project.

 

jan diehl-michałowski
deal design • studio

currently Teraz Poliż are creating:

Alina Gajdamowicz, Dorota Glac, Marta Jalowska, Ada Kornecka, Marta Wesołowska i Anna Zakościelna

CREDITS:

Curatorial concept i research preparation of the archive: Anna Majewska i Marcelina Obarska
Teraz Poliż: Dorota Glac i Marta Jalowska
Graphic supervision and design of Moth: Dorota Glac
Animation: Zuza Krefft
Production: Monika Balińska i Julia Tyjewska
Promotion: Pamela Adamik
design & development: deal design • studio
Jan Diehl-Michałowski, Szymon Kempisty, Tomek Wróbel

Krajowy Plan Odbudowy Sfinansowane przez NextGenerationEU