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Revolutionary Etude
title
1991
year
Piotr Bikont
author
synopsis

This work is about the scrapping of monuments and meanings.  In the early ’90s in Poland a major-scale dismantling of monuments was taking place.  Practically every town had some kind of statue that it wanted to get rid of; most of them were of great heroes of  the Soviet revolution: Lenin and Feliks Dzierżyński, the founder of the KGB, but other statues took a fall as well.  Some were given “facelifts”: by changing their features and recoding meanings, they were turned into different statues.  But most were dragged from their central, privileged positions to the junkyard.  The avant-garde musician Bogdan Mizerski plays on pipes found in the junkyard.  The pipes are the degraded remains of a statue overturned and hauled from its public place: They used to soar skyward in the center of Sosnowiec, a Silesian mining town, symbolizing a gigantic organ glorifying revolution.  The name of the statue was “Revolutionary Deed”.

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