universal

You people don't know what the fuck it's like here, so don't try to be so fucking smart, you come and bullshit about our housing estate, but the truth is you don't know shit about what it's really like, come round sometime and check it out, we don't need people who've never been here fucking write it up, judging people, don't go judging us if you don't know, because you'll hear all kinds of shit from various people and you'll take what they say seriously, how do you know for sure that's what it's like here, get the fuck outtta here!!!!!!!!!

http://naszlaku1.blox.pl/2007/12/Dudziarska.html

True - what do I know about this housing estate? Writing this, I look out the window onto Wilson Square: the street lamps shine brightly, every second building houses a bank and the neon lights on the corner twinkle twenty-four hours a day. It's late, and I'm not planning on taking a trip out to the Dudziarska estate or anywhere else.

I found this place on a Google map over a year ago - we were supposed to be going on a bicycle trip to the Olszynka industrial estate; in the end nothing came of it, and it was Alicja and Grzegorz who took me to Dudziarska in the early autumn of 2010, just as they were completing their "Universal" project there. The whole thing was described in detail and photographed by the press, so there's no need to go over the image again: three low council flat blocks cut off from the city, on which the artists had placed Malevich style hourglasses on one side and paraphrases of Mondrian paintings on the other. Clear references to a modernist utopia and its failures. No more need be said.

Dudziarska is a ghetto, in the literal sense of the word - simultaneously a place of isolation for a group of citizens and a housing estate for the very poor. Almost the whole of Warsaw is underpinned by history's dramatic accents - but Dudziarska emits a particularly depressing aura. Its buildings were never installed with gas or central heating, and its walls suffer from rising damp. The remains of German concrete bunkers stick out of the waste ground around the blocks, the nearby boggy clay-pit called the Kozia Górka pond is all that's left of the forced labour carried out by Russian prisoners of war. A railway embankment cuts the housing estate off to the east, while the litter-filled allotments, incinerator plant and nearby prison.. built on the rubble, ashes and bones of the Muranów district trucked out here after the war, are on a Dudziarska scale, like amusement parks.

This housing estate was thought up in the first half of the 90's, in the times when Poland's political system was undergoing a necessary, but equally soulless change during the presidency of Stanisław Wyganowski, an activist with Solidarity, the Local Democracy Development Fund and the Society of Polish Urban Planners. Its construction took from 1994 to the beginning of 1996; already back then, Marcinkiewicz, the city's president, admitted in a statement for the TVN television channel that its existence was a "crime". The television channels reported on this "housing estate of poverty", fenced off from the rest of the city by railway tracks, the lack of any public transport and filled with the stench emitted by the nearby refuse incinerator plant. Successive city presidents promised changes but nothing ever came of it.

But what in fact can one change here? The well-informed Warsaw Wikia claims that these blocks "came about for the purpose of solving the problem of families evicted from flats in the City Centre and South Praga districts. In the spring of 1993, these district councils concluded an agreement whereby the blocks on Dudziarska were to be occupied by people who had been handed eviction notices and people needing council housing. The money for the estate's construction came from the Warsaw Centrum district."

The establishment of this ghetto was planned by among others Jan Rutkiewicz, the then mayor of Warsaw's Central District, using it as a place to offload difficult residents evicted from his administrative area. In December 2005 he confirmed the legitimacy of his decisions in the television programme "TVN Attention": "This is an isolated plot of land between railway tracks. This was entirely on purpose. It wasn't meant to be for people who want to settle there, who will have demands concerning what the housing estate is to offer. This was to be rotation housing accommodation, places to move on from as quickly as possible. They were to offer the lowest possible standard, so that people wouldn't want to stay there and so that they wouldn't treat it as another present from the public administration, from society. It's possible that this housing estate is now a ghetto. I believe this was the right decision. Something had to be done with these evicted people".

And so everything went ahead according to plan - The people living there are poor, mostly those who have been unable to pay their rents, and often burdened with various other "social problems". Only the policemen and their families, constituting 30% of the residents and placed there in order to "stabilise" the atmosphere and keep a semblance of peace on the housing estate, have moved on. There remain only those who probably are incapable of escaping Dudziarska by their own means.

There are lots of housing estates like Dudziarska in Poland - one can find them in every town and in dozens of smaller localities. These eyesores, cysts of poverty, became swollen in the years of the country's transformation, though most are located out of sight. There are no simple solutions to cure such city ulcers, despite all the debates, solemn pre-election promises and sociological recipes. They lie below the horizon, taking second place to the disputes raging between the country's political parties, the long list of issues so much more important than some social group left to its own devices. The only thing Grzegorz Drozd could do was point them out in the most forcible way.

Grzegorz Drozd applied a technique similar to that of the architects who fathered the ghetto on Kozia Górka - he objectivised the housing estate. Looking at those three blocks from Dudziarska Street and then at photos of the buildings with black squares painted on their surfaces, one sees something similar to model houses made of blocks, the kind that children place next to the sidings on their train sets, miniature railways. Drozd's actions are closer to works such as Zbigniew Libera's "Lego" arrangements than the integrating designs of Paweł Althamer. There aren't too many places in a ghetto for "integration of residents", launching "discourses"; powdering one's nose means something quite different here. Objectivising this nightmarish municipal project and exposing it to public inspection, accomplishing this during council elections - is the only effective strategy.