MEETING AT THE EXHIBITION: Olga Drenda
What I do in “Duchologia” is discover and organize the everyday reality of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I remind people what surrounded us - what streets, shop windows, posters and covers looked like, but also how we lived and how we wanted to live.
It's a period that combines mass-market, poisonous wall units, “export rejections” - ie. some IKEA models, folk elements, artisan works and DIY - in order to make way for palace-style interiors, antiques and the cocktail colors of a Polish variation on the Memphis style, but also new tendencies in Polish design. I was inspired by the book “Mieszkać inaczej” [“Living differently”] from 1984 - it not only sums up a popular, while also coveted and fashionable style (achievable at a low cost and with some DIY) of the time, but also sets the tone for the following years - reproductions of interiors from the Ursynów neighborhood published in the book appear in many other publications from that period.
Olga Drenda - journalist, translator, author of the book “Duchologia polska” [“Polish hauntology”] and a website by the same name.