Warsaw

Secret Heart, 2010

Location: Warsaw, Poland
Size: 517 km2
Residents: 1.716.855

Approach: Locating a specific place/situation in the city and asking participants to interpret historic events related to it
Method: International open call for a short story
Aim: Looking for personal opinions and emotions about a painful historical moment of the city through ficition stories
Output: Installation (sculpture, texts, sound)
Number of participants: 8
Status: Closed

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Exhibition anouncement

Photos from the exhibition

Secret Heart short stories (texts)

Short Story Competition (open call)

Presentation in catalogue TREND 2010 (Slovene version only)

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The idea for the Warsaw project Secret Heart was inspired by an article Searching for Chopin, Finding Poland’s Past by Michael Kikmmelman published in New York Times on October 3, 2009. We learned that preserved Chopin’s heart is placed in a church in Warsaw. We think the fact that it stayed preserved even when everything around it was destroyed in the WWII is a great example and a symbol of survival and resistance. The absurd situation that a German general helped to save a national symbol of the very nation they wanted to destroy brings in an interesting twist. Since the heart’s whereabouts during the hiding are not known we find this secret place of hiding an actual special place of the city of Warsaw. KOLEKTIVA published international open call for a short story. By inviting people to write a story about the hiding place of the heart we were actually asking them for fiction stories about the course of events during the hiding of a heart which might be or might be not intertwined with real facts. In writing the story about the heart we see an opportunity for people to express their opinion and emotions in regards to the painful time of Warsaw Uprising and the WWII which has had a strong impact on the city and national identity.
At the exhibition KOLEKTIVA presented a large instalation of inflatable sculpture of a human heart, received stories from the open call and a sound piece.

Participants (authors of stories): Sheila Bishop & Jacki Derrida, Sandra Blichert Christensen, Thomas Desi, Tomasz Drabarek, Silke Eggert, Nina Höchtl, Kerosinee

Exhibition view

Secret Heart sound piece

Author of the story: Tomasz Drabarek
Narrator: Piotr Bardziński
Music: Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin
Editing: KOLEKTIVA (Vesna Bukovec)