“Journey without a map and passport”
Promotional meeting of Tomasz Szerszeń's book

We are pleased to announce the meeting dedicated to the book „Podróżnicy bez mapy i paszportu” (“Journey without a map and passport”) by Tomasz Szerszeń.

Do the radical, avant-garde gestures of today still preserve their subversive capacity? Can an anthropological journey into tropical zones become an artistic experience? Where are the limits between the art and the theoretical reflection (can we trace limits at all)?

The book by Tomasz Szerszeń offers a kind of a passage between the history and the contemporary reality, anthropology and avant-garde, literature and photography. The protagonists and our guide in this textual journey is Michel Leiris (1901–1990), a French writer, anthropologist, ethnographer, traveler, art critic and collector, poet, surrealist, a symbol of the past age’s intellectual labyrinths with their whole complexity.

Let’s travel together with Leiris, from Paris to Africa and the Caribbean, along the side tracks of the French interwar avant-garde, shown in its complicated relationships with anthropology, ethnography, literature and colonialism. One of the most important stops in this journey is the legendary magazine “Documents”, a paradigmatic phenomenon for the contemporary art.

The book „Podróżnicy bez mapy i paszportu” iniciates a new series “Atlas. Antropologia wizualności”, (“Atlas. Visual Antropology”) by the słowo/obraz terytoria publishing house.