The community which never came - transformations, revolutions, real socialism.
Meeting around the book by Agata Pyzik: “Poor but sexy”

  • The community which never came - transformations, revolutions, real socialism.

The meeting will be devoted to the newly published book by Agata Pyzik – “Poor but Sexy. Culture Clashes in Europe East and West” (Zero Books 2014).

Next to the author, also Michał Kozłowski will participate in the meeting (philosopher, feature writer – “Bez Dogmatu”).

Agata Pyzik – journalist and critic who publishes in Poland and Great Britain, among others, for Guardian, New Statesman, New Humanist, Afterall, Frieze, The Wire, Lampa, Krytyka Politycznea, Dwutygodnik, Midrasz, Notes na 6 Tygodni. Author of the book entitled: “Poor But Sexy” (Zero Books 2014), describing the aesthetic and political history of contacts between the East and the West during the cold war and today.
Details on the book can be found at: www.zero-books.net

The meeting will be held at the eMeSeN café in the Museum’s premises at 3 Pańska Street. 
 

24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is divided like never before. The passengers of the low-budget airlines go east for stag parties, and they go West for work.Tabloids write about “Polish plumbers”, broadsheets about the “New Cold War”, while hipsters look for a new, cool Berlin for themselves, attracted by the sexy history of the city.

Travelling along the roadless tracks of the former Iron Curtain, in her book written for the English publishing house, Zero Books, entitled “Poor But Sexy”, Agata Pyzik makes an attempt at grasping the mutual misunderstandings between the East and West of Europe, trying to step outside of the stereotype of the suffering dissidents, the horror of Stalinism and the “success stories” of the countries on neo-liberal New Europe. More than the low-paid paradise of the wealthy West or the picturesque travel destinations, Pyzik finds an abundant and non-written counter-history.

"Poor but Sexy" is somewhere between Warsaw and Luton, Prague and East Berlin, Ukraine and Romania, searching for trends and other traditions, which have nothing to do with the dominant narrations after 1999.

The book is aimed at discovering the secret stories of Eastern Europe and its complicated relations, e.g. with the West. It tests whether using these categories makes any sense at all now. We come back from labour emigration, sex tourism, exploitation of cheap labour and other exploitation of the West to the past, to another “Cold War’ of the 80s: we fall into the post-punk, synthetic pop and Bowiephile obsession with the Eastern Bloc and vice-versa – into obsession with dreams of the other side, dreamt by the communist punks. Then, we will plunge into the East European Orientalism and the notion of self-colonization and follow the emancipation potential in the hated Social Realism, both old and contemporary. In the end, we will lean over the idea of “different modernity” and futurology, the years of the Thaw – when the Soviet Union could outstrip the West – and over the accompanying social and cultural moods. From Femen to Depeche Mode, from David Bowie to Nikita Khrushchev, form the muscular workers to New Romantics.

Refusing "Ostalgia" for the good old days and the equally desperate desire to join the “new great Europe”, "Poor but Sexy" tries to reclaim the ides of an Other Europe.