Stadium X

From the Colosseum in Rome to the ‘Bird’s Nest’ in Beijing, stadium architecture has always been about state-building. Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium (the Stadion Dziesiçiolecia; abbreviated as Stadion X-lecia) opened late in 1955, the same month as the Palace of Culture, to memorialise the proclamation of the Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation on 22 July 1944. Literally built from the rubble of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, for 50 years the structure served as a stage on which the history of Poland was acted out.

The first event that it hosted was a football match: a 2-2 draw on 27 July 1955 played between Warsaw and the city of Katowice, then named Stalinogród. Fifty-three years later, the curtain came down on the site with a series of art projects organized by the Laura Palmer Foundation, a Warsaw-based independent arts organization. Starting with A Trip to Asia (pictured below, 2006), which offered a tour of the Vietnamese trading community that had risen improbably in the stadium’s ruins, subsequent projects included a one-man football match and a Sunday radio station. The umbrella name for the actions was ‘The Finissage of Stadium X’.

Two weeks ago in Germany the project was brought to its conclusion, with the launch of the reader Stadium X: A Place That Never Was (2009) at the information service e-flux’s European headquarters, the Building in Berlin. In a series of talks from the book’s contributors, the event itemized the significance of a space that Laura Palmer curator Joanna Warsza described as ‘a post-communist phantom’.

Speakers repeatedly circled three epochal moments, beginning with Ryszard Siwiec’s self-immolation in the stadium on 8 September 1968. A father of five, Siwiec doused himself in petrol and lit a match before 100,000 people, as the Polish socialist leader Władysław Gomułka spoke on stage. (The action was intended as a protest against the use of Polish troops in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous month.) Seven seconds were captured on camera by a Polish news crew and were suppressed, remaining an official secret until 1980. But stories continued to circulate under the radar, and the event eventually gained international attention with Maciej Drygas’ 1991 documentary Hear My Cry. The incident is now available on YouTube, in two different versions, one accompanied by Catholic funeral music, and concluding with an image of Siwiec in the clouds, rendered as a holy ghost.

In 1983, 15 years after Siwiec’s drastic action, Pope John Paul II came to Warsaw and delivered mass in the stadium, turning the stadium’s clock into an altar and planting a crucifix on the crown that would remain after his departure. As Solidarność was gaining momentum, more than a million of the faithful gathered to listen to the Pope’s disquisition on the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Six years later, after Solidarność had won, the stadium hosted a different spectacle: a Stevie Wonder concert.

As socialism in Poland crumbled, the stadium fell into disrepair, before being revived in the ’90s as a gigantic capitalist grey-market. Jarmark Europa took over the site and turned – it to commerce, laying the foundations for the Stadium’s art senescence. Constituting the only multicultural site in the ethnically homogeneous Warsaw, the area became an arena for negotiating cultural and social difference. It was here that the Israeli artist Yael Bartana shot her widely circulated art/propaganda video Mary Koszmary (2007), starring Krytyka Polityczna leader Sławomir Sierakowski as a heroic intellectual calling for the murdered Jews of the Holocaust to return to Poland. ‘We can finally be Europeans’, Sierakowski pleads to the empty stadium.

Foreignness served as the point of departure for half of the finissage’s episodes. ‘The End Of Jarmark Europa’ (2007) was a debate on the Vietnamese question held at Warsaw University, organized in collaboration with Krytyka Polityczna. ‘Radio Stadion Broadcasts’ (pictured above, 2008), a collaboration with Berlin’s Backyard Radio, borrowed a trick from the Danish artist Jens Haaning (who, in 1994, broadcasted jokes in Turkish in Oslo’s central square) to transmit in Vietnamese over the Jarmark public address system. Two months later, for ‘Schengen – Control Observation Point’ (2008), Berlin-Bern theatre group Schauplatz International planted a telescopic monitoring point on the upper rim of the stadium, before staging a performance on the field below, in an action named after the 1985 pan-EU immigration treaty.

The other half of the programme focussed on memory. Judging from the Laura Palmer Foundation website, the documentary theatre show On Site Inspection (2007) seemed to consist in the main of wandering around and talking to people involved in the stadium’s past and future. Palowanie/Pile Driving (2008), a performance by Annas kollktiv, a consortium of Swiss architects, dancers and sociologists, meanwhile put on a funereal performance at night.

In Boniek! (2007), the finest episode of the set, the Swiss artist Massimo Furlan re-enacted the movements of footballer Zbigniew Boniek, as he led Poland to a 3-0 defeat of Belgium in the 1982 World Cup. The similarities with Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait were obvious, part of contemporary art’s ‘footballing turn’, but the presence of a several-hundred strong crowd and the inclusion of ‘live’ commentary by the Polish radio reporter Tomasz Zimoch rendered Boniek! participatory in a way that Zidane was not, suggesting future possibilities in stripped-down spectacles, in rotting white elephants.

Stadium X itself won’t be among them; the structure was torn down last year to clear the ground for the construction of a new national stadium for the European Championships in 2012. ‘We can finally be Europeans’, says Sierakowski. But the creative destruction repeats a question which recurs throughout this book; whether ruins equal the obliteration of memory, or its foundation.