A single standing house in the city center, in the yard of św. Marcin, a main central street in the city of Poznań. At that time of signing a lease for the following 10 years the building was a ruin, and in 2023 it still is. 

After the transformation of 1989 the building became privatized, later it was taken over by the city due to the debts of the owners, however, the building and its yard were decommissioned by the city and were no longer in use for decades. The building was previously an important cultural site, while for more than 50 years it was a home of the Fotoplastikon – a 19th century machine presenting stereoscopic photography. A polygonal device with peepholes, whose sliding mechanism passes new photos every few seconds. A protoplast of the cinema. It was a collective experience, while it had 25 viewing stations. The building was a cultural space where people met, learned, hung out and in the mid 80s its foyer was the only place where one could buy a movie poster or an audio cassette downtown. 

Decaying ruin with a cultural, social and film history seemed as a romantically proportional space for preserving the unhearable voices of a homogenous society. We decided to preserve the building as a ruin. To root in the uprooted. Preservation of a ruin, not a renovation of the building, as a notion of care, claiming our political territory in a tangible way of ruination. The ruin became a main narrative of our practice. Self-preservation in the face of oppression becomes a deep source of knowledge. Our archives, our foundations. 

A practice of using architecture and its space as a healing treatment, caressing our community in restoring its identity. We welcomed a ruin as a hybrid urban infrastructure that is welcoming our needs. The need of space, the need of A Room of Our Own. The Ruin became a symbol of the society we live in and its systematic oppression. It became a symbol of the state of precarious conditions we are forced to live under. Re-appropriating the ruined common wealth by accountability of its presence as it is. 

We knew we must cherish the ruin. The ruin became a symbol of our own, of our commoning. The fragility of decomposing, the weakness of degradation and the softness of the old plaster. To embrace perspectives of females, queers, senior females, sex-workers, migrants, diasporas while at the same time creating the dynamics of the multitude becoming the common. To queer the homogeneity of the society. We perform, as Ewa Majewska, a great Polish feminist philosopher, calls it, a weak resistance.

Text by Katarzyna Wojtczak, 2023