A week long residency in Warsaw as part of The Knot - a mobile research and social activation programme between Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest. Beginning in Berlin with main activities in Warsaw and a tour of the produced sculpture to three sites in Bucharest, Romania.

The Ursynów Memorial Ski Lift
Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson

The Ursynów Memorial Ski Lift was a three day event involving durational performance, a participatory workshop and the creation of a public sculpture.

FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE:
The work addressed itself to issues of ownership and public space in post-communist Poland with specific reference to the context of Ursynów Park, Warsaw. Taking the site of a former ski lift (erected in the eighties, became defunct after one season and was stolen for scrap in the early nineties) as a cipher for the shift from communal to private modes of ownership the work represented the history of the site with a single piece of climbing rope. The privatisation of space, buildings and plant remains a contentious and ongoing issue in Poland and the project explored ways in which forms of communal behaviour might be positively imagined in a post communist context.

METHODOLOGY:

Our response to Ursynów Park was informed by research visits to the site to learn about the former ski lift from local residents. During the project we installed a climbing rope up to the site of the former Ski lift and staffed it for one day as a ‘free’ ski lift. The following day the rope was used, in sections, for a public workshop making rope ladders. Onday 3, individual rope ladders were combined to create a climbing net which was attached to The Knot’s mobile stage.

DISSEMINATION:
The work was presented in Warsaw as part of The Knot - a mobile research and social activation programme presented in Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest. The Knot was funded by the Goethe-Institut, the Polish Institute, the European Commission Culture Fund and the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin

The KNOT - An Experiment on Collaborative Art in Public Urban Space (ISBN978-3-86859-115-6) Jovis Verlag 2011.

Archived at http://knotland.net/

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/7115