Rafał Jakubowicz - Pedagogy of Shame (2)

The location of a former creche of the furniture producer Swarzędzkie Fabryki Mebli, the current Centre of Culture in Swarzędz, used to be a Jewish cemetery before WWII. All of its traces have since been erased.

A photograph of the 1950s Social Realist mansion in a beautiful winter setting was published in the city’s 2011 calendar.

The local government said six year ago it wanted to commemorate the cemetery with a lapidarium presenting matzevot brought from other Jewish cemeteries in Poznań. Nothing has been done since.

A local investor is lobbying for a permit to build a hotel on a plot partly overlapping with the cemetery, yet without success.

Next to a runway leading to a park, which used to be the cemetery, stand information boards reading: “Swimming pool,” “City stadium”, “Ice rink.”

In June 2017, Rafał Jakubowicz illicitly added a fourth board which followed the city’s visual identity guidelines. It did not last a day. It is unclear who took it and why. Jakubowicz did it again in November 2018. That board lasted less than three weeks. Jakubowicz came back with another board in March 2018. It stayed the longest, more than two months. Yet another board, spelling “Cemetery” in Hebrew and put up on 3 June 2019, disappeared the very next day. The final intervention in the project took place on 13 June.

The first part of the project was presented in an exhibition at the City Art Centre in Gorzów Wielkopolski (curated by Gustaw Nawrocki) in December 2018.

*“Pedagogy of Shame” follows the jargon of the “new history policy” which challenges attempts to critically reassess recent history.

**Photographs: Radosław Sto.

*** Acknowledgements: Gustaw Nawrocki (MOS, Gorzów Wlkp), Przemysław Nowak (QL Ramy Michał Sołtysiak) and Radosław Sto for their support and assistance in the project.

Rafał Jakubowicz Born in 1974, graduated from the Department of Art Pedagogy and the Department of Painting, Graphic Art and Sculpture of the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts and the Department of Neophilology (major in Hebrew Studies) at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Extraordinary Professor at the Poznań Fine Arts University of Poznań and Chair of Art in Social Space at the University’s Department of Art Education and Curatorial Science.

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