COURAGE

connecting collections

The collection includes photographs, sketches, drafts, and working materials created by Wojciech Zamecznik from 1949 till his death in 1967. For the next 40 years the collection was rarely displayed and known of, as it was stored in Zamecznik's apartment. In late 2012, Julisz Zamecznik, son of Wojciech, decided to grant the collection to Archeology of Photography Foundation (APF) as he "wanted to do something" with the collection and he trusted one of the founders of APF to be diligent and interested in his father's heritage.

The main idea of the touring exhibition “Women in Society” is to illustrate the transition from traditional to modern ideas of womanhood and to show the full participation of women in social processes, including politics and the struggle for human rights. The theme of the ecological disaster in Ruse and of the active role of women in the protest movement are displayed in this exhibition
The exhibition is a project of the Rousse Regional Historical Museum, supported by the Municipality of Ruse, as part of the activities of Ruse as a candidate-city for European Capital of Culture.

The most important event in the history of the collection was the digitalisation of the items and their publication on the website in July 2012. The www.kulturazrzuty.pl website was created with the support of the City of Culture Foundation (Fundacja Miasto Kultury), founded by Zofia Łuczko and her husband a few months earlier. Most of the materials available on the website come from private archives of the Łódź Kaliska members and other participants of these events: Grzegorz Zygier and Zofia Łuczko.

The push to collect and digitise the archival materials came as a result of two meetings in April and June 2012 dedicated to the history and the achievements of the Pitch-In Culture. Pitch-In Culture was active between 1981 and 1987, while vast majority of works and pieces of documentation from that period, which now are part of the collection — such as the 1983-1985 artistic Tango magazine — came into existence during activities at The Attic (1981-1985) and plein-air sessions in Teofilów (organised in 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1990).

This is the presentation of the collection on the Bulgarian National Radio in 2012 to 2014. An overview and selected materials from the collection were presented in an issue of the radio series Chasat na infoholitsite [Hour of the Informed], led by Kin Stoyanov and Emil Yanev, and broadcast by Radio Sofia of Bulgarian National Radio.

This program started on 17 September 2007 with daily broadcasts (from Monday to Thursday from 16:00 to 17:00, and on Fridays from 16:00 to 18:00). The creators and broadcasters were the Bulgarian journalists Kin Stoyanov (son of the well-known Bulgarian satiric dissident writer Radoy Ralin) and Emil Yanev. In 2008, the program won the Bulgarian National Radio’s Sirak Skitnik annual prize.
The broadcasts were devoted to different cultural subjects, with an emphasis on the state socialist period. By inviting scholars, writers, and artists, Kin Stoyanov and Emil Yanev managed to deepen the critical debate on the totalitarian regime. Within the series, which attracted wide public interest, Bulgarians who opposed state socialism both within Bulgaria and in exile were presented. Through conversations Kin Stoyanov and Emil Yanev had with Boyko Kiryakov, several broadcasts in the 2012–2014 period were devoted to the life and work of Hristo Ognyanov and the Bulgarian political emigration.

In 2013, the Civic Academy Foundation organised an impressive series of events to mark two decades of its activity, which began, practically speaking, in 1993, with the first symposium, entitled “The Sighet Memorial: From Historical Truth to the Judgement of History,” dedicated to the idea of constructing a site of memory of communist repression at the former Sighet prison. The events of the jubilee year were opened on 29 January, when the most important documents and traces of the founding moments were published on the Memorial’s website. On 5 and 23 April, the sixtieth anniversaries of the deaths of Iuliu Maniu and Gheorghe Brătianu were commemorated, two out of the fifty-four leading figures in precommunist political life who met their deaths at Sighet, and whose burial places remain unknown to this day. On 9 May of the same year, a gala concert was held at the Romanian Atheneum in Bucharest, featuring Mozart’s Requiem. On 13 June the Day of Memory was marked at Sighet, and then from 12 to 15 July the jubilee edition of the Sighet Summer School was held, and on 16 July a meeting of representatives of the Civic Academy Foundation in honour of the jubilee was held at the premises of the European Commission representation in Bucharest.

Throughout 2013, key works were published and republished, adding to the Foundation’s already impressive series of publications. 2013 was also the year in which the monumental Cartea Morților (Book of the Dead), a massive work of reference including the names of tens of thousands of people killed by the representatives of the communist regime in Romania, was published. In addition, one of the Sighet Memorial’s most popular exhibitions, “Black Whitsun,” toured various cities in Germany, with numerous echoes in the German press.

The actions that made up the programme of this jubilee year enjoyed very good press coverage. The twentieth anniversary of the first symposium dedicated to the Sighet Memorial closed, symbolically, on 4 December, at the Maison de l’Europe in Paris, headed by Catherine Lalumière, with a colloquium on the theme “Twenty Years of Memory, A Quarter Century of Transition: Towards What?”