Nowa Huta A “perfect city” for the working classes. A socialist town A town of good fate With no suburbs and alleys Friendly to all people The youngest of our towns. In 1949 construction of the planned town of Nowa Huta (which literally means a New Foundry) began on the outskirts of Kraków, Poland. Its centerpiece, the Lenin Steelworks, promised a secure future for workers and their families. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Solidarity movement and the ensuing shock therapy program of the early 1990s rapidly transitioned the country from socialism to a market-based economy, and Nowa Huta fell on hard times. The remarkable political, economic, and social upheavals since the end of the Second World War have profoundly shaped the historical memory of these events in the minds of the people who lived through them. Those who built the town recall the might of local industry and plentiful jobs. The following generation experienced the uprisings of the 1980s and remembers the repression and dysfunction of the socialist system and their resistance to it. Today’s generation has no direct experience with either socialism or Solidarity, yet as residents of Nowa Huta they suffer the stigma of lower-class stereotyping and marginalization from other Poles. Furthermore today’s younger inhabitants are the unwilling heirs of a “dissonant heritage” which generally means “a lack of harmony in time and space between people and their heritage”. The Orwellian settlement of Nowa Huta is one of only two entirely pre-planned socialist realist cities ever built (the other being Magnitogorsk in Russia’s Ural Mountains), and one of the finest examples of deliberate social engineering in the world. In the years 1949 to 1956, Poland’s official aesthetic doctrine, enforced by the Soviets and encompassing all forms of art, was socialist realism. Referencing 19th-century realism, this movement was meant to promote the communist worldview by presenting labour-related themes and employing clarity of form. Its aim was to inspire subservient awe. Nowa Huta’s creators had to abide by its architectural guidelines, preferring symmetry as well as renaissance and classical shapes. The attitude to the recent history and physical space is ambiguous, not static and is transformed due to various factors. Tangible heritage particularly serves as markers in the landscape being a tool to articulate and promote memory. My visual survey, still in process, aims to examine in as much a restrained but equally penetrative approach, the complex and ambiguous heritage that the city has generated through its ambitious planning and building phase, its periods of might and its unavoidable decline. Portraits of present inhabitants of different generations are intertwined with level-headed views of the city’s architecture and informal documentations of every-day life. Photography has become my compass not just to explore a place unknown up until then to the eye of the beholder but to see what might lie under the surface. To discover traces of the past and how these can still somehow shape the future of the place and its inhabitants. The photographs collected in the selection were edited from a larger body of work that was generated during my frequent visits in the city in October 2017. I’m planning a second visit to the city in 2023 to complete the project. Disclaimer : Some of the historical facts presented in the statement were the result of my survey in the history of the place and related articles of architectural and sociological interest. The poem about Nowa Huta was written in 1952 by a young Wisława Szymborska.