Curses and charms

What curses and charms do we encounter in contemporary history and narratives of architecture, urban planning, and city life? Can we name and describe them? Do we admit to the stories about buildings or urban policies that we succumb to: those created by investors, politicians, or officials, spun by architects and designers, but also those that we create ourselves? Which features of these stories allow us to reflect on past ideas about the present and the future? How can we use them when thinking about the fate of our cities?

During this year's MIASTOmovie, we will focus on narratives. The smaller ones that we share on internet forums, discussing our neighborhood or evaluating a new building. The larger ones that have shaped our perception of metropolitan districts and architectural styles over the years. In the films presented, as well as in the accompanying discussions, lectures, and presentations (both in the cinema and outside it), we will highlight stories told even before the foundations were laid, repeated over the years of the buildings' existence in the urban landscape, or reconstructed from memory after they fell into ruin or rubble. Using various examples, we will demonstrate how they influence our attitude towards the surrounding space in many ways. Opinions that are thrown around, intercepted, and reproduced can act as curses, both of success and failure, and influence similar ideas or objects. And despite many efforts to reverse the course of events, the specter of a once-established image or interpretation obscures our actual assessment of the situation. For will the city centers whose image was shaped by the novels of Zola, Döblin, or Prus will always be associated with neglect, and modernism must be inhuman, but always functional? We will also look at what and whom we remember in architecture—how this memory is recorded in the stories that are told, and also whom and what we erase from the history of cities.

Where we still place great hopes and create new, alternative solutions: in the idea of communal, egalitarian, accessible housing, i.e., in models of social housing and subsequent variations on this theme. Why do we romanticize cohousing while devaluing squatter movements? How idealistic are our ideas about Austrian or German cooperatives, and when programs based on them appear in Poland, are they met with distrust? We will examine the illusions that enchant visions of cooperative creation of shared living space. We will look at how and why concepts based on quality, sustainability, and cooperation, using tools of co-management and sharing, can lead to negative phenomena. We will draw on concepts that are well known in Poland: participation, gentrification, and creative districts. How did we talk about them a few or several years ago, what have we lost as a result, and what new faces have we gained? What hopes did we place in their potential to change our country, and what are our expectations of them today? By following the processes associated with them, but implemented in a different geographical and cultural context, we will try to take a fresh look at our judgments about them.

We will consider the appropriation of specific narratives about how cities are created by groups defined by their worldview or politics. Architectural styles and their reception—the ambitions associated with them, decoded by us in the wake of this or that detail of meaning, judgments about durability appearing in the context of the use of materials—can curse an investment. They can hold it back for years, scare off residents, slow down the transfer of funds, and ultimately determine its failure. In other cases, they add (often unexpected) charm to elements of the urban fabric – they build emotional bonds and strengthen a sense of identity, accumulate meanings and significance, and make us care about the building's permanence. The growing right-wing movements use a consistent narrative: neo-modernism as an international style is harmful both in terms of utility (due to the repetitiveness of solutions and the standardization of needs) and ideology (it is associated with bad modernization and the elimination of individuality). Only locally rooted, classicizing styles based on tradition can save the national spirit. At MIASTOmovie, we will examine how historicist architecture can contribute to the popularization of conservative values. And why are ideas such as the revival of urbanity or the 15-minute city, in some contexts, presented in a completely different way than their creators would like?

We will refer to the term “genius loci” (“spirit of place”) and its contemporary manifestations: branding cities or specific areas. What are the consequences of top-down definition of a “brand” and do we know of any current examples of its bottom-up development? How does capitalizing on the image of a city as “poor but sexy” cause it to become “too sexy for the poor”? Is it possible to avoid capitalism hijacking the authentic “vibe” of places and replacing their sincerity with creation? When does illusion replace truth on the road to success?

Finally, we will bring old utopias back to life – what they were based on, how unattainable they were from the outset, and what remains of attempts to implement them – traces of positive changes that we still experience today. Is there still room for them in our thinking about our cities? We will consider possible utopian narratives for cities, ways of tailoring them to our times, full of various threats that prevent us from venturing more boldly into the future. We will look for tactics of change – transforming negative narratives based on threat and producing dystopias into something positive.

The 13th edition—hopefully not unlucky—will provide ample space for reflection on our impact on urban space. Where can we implement it? In what matters are we decisive and decision-makers? And where do we give way to external forces? Is it worth confronting the political system, the free market economy, or... fate, in relation to which our actions often seem predetermined and not worth the effort? We hope that together we will say yes.

In October, we will break the spells together and not let ourselves be seduced by charms (or maybe just a little)!

The festival is organized by the Wrocław Film Foundation. Co-organizers include the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, SARP Wrocław, and New Horizons Cinema

The project was co-financed by the Municipality of Wrocław and Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation.