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An intense week with literature – announcing the programme of the Conrad Festival

Intensity is an attitude towards the world and many of its aspects, including literature, politics and religion. It has multiple dimensions, such as individual and collective one, and it can be understood as a private experience, as well as one of the aspects of the creative process. The reception of art can also be intense, as may be our participation in a discussion about literature. All of these meanings will be reflected in the programme of the Conrad Festival, which we are announcing today. The festival will take place in Krakow from the 24th to the 30th of October. Soon our readers will be able to participate in fascinating meetings with writers, discussions, reading lessons, film screenings, exhibitions and many other events.

The centre of this year’s Conrad Festival will be located in a new venue – all lovers of literature are invited to the meetings, held at the Czeczotka House at the corner of Wiślna and Św. Anny streets.

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The main theme of the festival is, however, not all! The subsequent days of the Festival will have their own sub-themes: languages, beliefs and disbeliefs, emotions, landscapes, tensions, senses and maps. All of them show us the variety of ways in which we can understand the idea of intensity.

Languages, the theme of the first day, brings our attention to the ability to express ourselves and the world. It is the uncertainty of the finality of our language and the accompanying image of the world which encourages us to listen what others have to say and confront our imaginations with them. On the first day of the festival, the members of the legendary literary group OuLiPo: Marcel Bénabeu, Frédéric Forte and Ian Monk will discuss their attitudes towards language. Monday will end to the sound of a concert featuring Andrzej Stasiuk and Mikołaj Trzaska.

The second day of the festival will be devoted to Beliefs-disbeliefs, analysed primarily in their social context. Belief as a factor conducive to creating an imaginary community, may strongly influence an individual and entire societies alike. Michel Faber, a Dutch-Australian-Scottish writer and author of Strange New Things,Ida Linde author of If I Forget You, I Will Become Someone Else and En kärleksförklaring, as well as the outstanding Polish culture scholars Andrzej Leder and Grzegorz Niziołek will join us on the second day.

The third day will be devoted to Emotions. The Peszek family, Jan, Maria and Błażej, will tell us, how to draw upon them and create art. We will also have an opportunity to meet Colm Tóibín, one of the most outstanding contemporary Irish writers, included on the list of 300 most important British intellectuals, published in 2011 by The Observer. The author will tell us about the difficult emotions, which permeate to his literature and shape it.

The landscape is not only a specific place, but also our imagination – including political and ideological one, a memory and the feelings connected with it. The fourth day of the Festival will be devoted to Landscapes. Our special guest, Géza Röhrig, who played the lead role in the Academy Award-winning Son of Saul, will tell us about the place which shaped his identity.

Intensity without Tensions would simply be impossible, which is why they will become the theme of the fifth Festival day. In every lively discussion, one has to take into consideration that they will appear sooner or later. On Friday, we will take a closer look at the lines of conflict, borders and the hotspots of our current reality. Among the most important guests of the day we are going to see Samar Yazbek, a Syrian writer and journalist, author of a moving documentary about the war in Syria titled The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria.

The Saturday with Conrad Festival will be especially exciting! Eleanor Catton, Michael Cunningham and Richard Flanagan will join the events of the day devoted to Senses. Flanagan, who received the Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Catton, Booker Prize laureate from 2013 for The Luminaries and Michael Cunningham, a best-selling American writer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours will discuss their experiences with sensuality and what aspects of it can be found in prose. In the evening, Kino Pod Baranami will present the Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes. The screening is a part of the film programming at the festival.

Maps will be the theme of Sunday, the day of awards and prizes. We are going to witness the Polish edition of the Goncourt Literary Prize titled “The Goncourt List: the Polish Selection”, under honorary patronage of the Goncourt Academy. The jury is made up of students of Romance studies, representing ten Polish universities. The winner of last year’s edition was Alain Mabanckou, who will participate in the Sunday meeting. However, the emotions will be the strongest in the evening, when the winners of the Conrad Award – the first Polish award for literary debut – will be announced. The poll, where people can vote on this year’s debuts is already available. Geza Röhrig will take part in the award ceremony. You can cast your vote here.

This year’s programme of the Festival asks you to take a look on the issue of intensity from multiple perspectives, not only in the framework of literature, but also film, music, art and philosophy. However, first at foremost, it is an opportunity for personal search for intensity. We – the City of Krakow, Krakow Festival Office and the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation – the organisers of the Conrad Festival, encourage you to learn more about the events and participate in this search during the last week of October in Krakow!

CHECK OUT THE PROGRAMME

 

“Pani Stefa” by Magdalena Kicińska, “Uprawa roślin południowych metodą Miczurina” by Weronika Murek, “Dom z witrażem” by Żanna Słoniowska, “Sensu sens” by Marek Adamik and “O pochodzeniu łajdaków, czyli opowieści z metra” by Tomasz Wiśniewski nominated for this year’s Conrad Award. The author of the best debut of 2015 will receive a monetary prize of 30 000 PLN, combined with an opportunity to participate in a month-long residence stay in Krakow and a commemorative statuette; all nominees will be also able to promote themselves during the next Conrad Festival and in “Tygodnik Powszechny”.

The winner will be chosen by the readers themselves, through a vote cast via the Festival’s website. The award will be presented on the 30th of October during the Conrad Gala, concluding the 8th edition of the Festival.

Last year, the Conrad Award was granted for the first time. The readers are attracted to it partially because of its democratic nature – the laureate is selected from among the jury’s nominees in an on-line vote by the readers themselves. And a year ago, Liliana Hermetz thanked the “mysterious readers” for making it possible for her book to win.

“In order to be popular among the readers, one has either to die, to be a foreign writer or to write perversely. The best way is to be a foreign, perverse dead man”, said Julian Tuwim. However, these criteria are not met by any of the five nominees selected by the Jury: Michał Paweł Markowski (president of the Jury), Urszula Chwalba, Inga Iwasiów, Grzegorz Jankowicz, Zofia Król, Michał Nogaś, Krzysztof Koehler, Joanna Szulborska-Łukasiewicz (secretary). Despite that, they already have their literary following and their books, in spite of being published only in the last year, already gained popularity. It is not easy to be a debutant, but in recent years the situation on the market has been changing, partly because of the Conrad Award. Its goal is not only to support the authors, but also to promote young prose in order to stimulate the publishing market, so that it becomes more open to debuts and new novels.

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The writers selected by the Jury were already nominated for numerous literary prizes, and aware of their artistic choices. The first laureate, Weronika Marek, said. “I’m bored with transcribing the world, the precise, draughtsman-like tracing of its contours. My hand always itches terribly with the temptation to add something new to reality, some extra element here or there”. Everything is possible in the stories she creates out of the strange, overheard language, and the interesting title – “The Cultivation of Southern Plants Using the Michurin Method” – is only a foretaste of what awaits the reader inside the book.

The prose of another of the nominees, Tomasz Wiśniewski, contains many “extra elements”. It will be accompanied by a protagonist, who is both heroic and pragmatic, a combination of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, summing up the surrounding reality with irony in his voice. “Everyone can do everything: post-graduate students can empty septic tanks, writers may leisurely sit on stools at supermarket cash registers, and ministers of culture can also be butchers – there is no limit!”. The author of “On the Origin of Scoundrels, or Stories from the Metro” draws upon the tradition of surrealism. Grotesque, irony, a sense of absurd and a great dose of humour – all of this makes the literary miniatures by Wiśniewski the best solution for reality in these difficult times.

“The Sense of Sense” by Marek Adamik is a book created along with the author’s fight for his life. It is not only a journal of a disease, but also a struggle with the language to find words to express the personal experience. The author willingly departs from the confession style, values the writing discipline and finds a unique way to tell the story of his own suffering. As he himself said: “The first version had a thousand pages and was filled with pain”. Adamik emphasises, that his book is primarily for people with a diagnosis, no matter what kind. “I decided not to focus on the atrocities that happened to me while in a hospital”, he added. Agnieszka Holland said about the book that “The whole book – with its graphic layout, with the illustrations – becomes a kind of work of art, an artefact”.

“Mrs Stefa” by Magdalena Kicińska is a story of Stefania Wilczyńska, a character brought out from the shadows. She was the co-founder of the House of Orphans in Warsaw and a close partner of Janusz Korczak, which partially contributed to her disappearance. “She lived in such a way, we hardly knew anything about her”, said Shlomo Nadel, one of the orphans. “She left nothing, like she never existed”. Building a biography out of nothing – postcards, photographs and traces of the past is quite a challenge. And thus a story was created, still shrouded in mysteries and uncertainties, but certainly intriguing.

“The House with the Stained-Glass Window” by Żanna Słoniowska is a story of four generations of women – great-grandmother, mother, grandmother and daughter – whose fates are connected by one of the flats in a townhouse in the centre of Lviv. This family saga, spanning four generations, combines historical and political issues. Thus it allows for a multi-level insight into the past and the present of the city. The cover of the book reads: “During the process of writing of this book, the blood shed for the free Ukraine was still a fiction; in February 2014 it ceased to be such.”

This year’s nominations for the Conrad Award are very diverse – a full-fledged novel and a collection of surrealist miniatures, oneiric poetic prose, intimate narration and biography. The authors create in various registers and genres – from confession through documentary and a novel based on history, to fantastic and surrealist propositions. Regardless of their attachment to realism, the debutants masterfully comment on the reality – the direct one and the one perceived in historic context. They reflect it faithfully or transform it, showing it in a distorting mirror. They use diverse styles – from a parsimonious and raw to a literary experiment.

Their varying distance towards the past and the relation to their own experiences, as well as language – it all connects and distinguishes this year’s debutants, and allows us to hear the multi-faceted reality through their books.

This year’s nominees will participate in everyday meetings during the festival.

The award is funded and organised by the City of Krakow.
Partners: Krakow Festival Office, Book Institute, Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation

VOTE

It can be said that they sometimes took us over or that they got the better of someone. They are sometimes positive, but they can also be a strong and destructive force. If you try to play with them, they might turn out to be dangerous. They help us build relationships and experience the world intensively. Emotions will be the subject of the third day of the Conrad Festival on the 26th of October, during which the audience will be able to participate in meetings with Colm Tóibín, Eustachy Rylski, Maria, Błażej and Jan Peszek, and listen to the traditional Conrad lecture.

“I touched such an intimacy, that if I wanted to go even deeper, I’d have to take off my skin and show my internal organs”, said Maria Peszek in one of her interviews. According to her, the artists’ job is to feel certain shivers and give them artistic form, instead of commenting reality. For the Peszek family – Błażej, Jan and Maria, expressing their emotions and using them to form artistic creations became a foundation of their work. During the meeting, conducted by Katarzyna Kubisiowska they will tell us about the creative freedom, but also about the responsibilities brought by it.

The creative transformation of emotions is just one way of ruling over them. In his project, Roman Dziadkiewicz combined research, literary and artistic practices, which resulted in the Surfaceology, a mini science-fiction novel, telling the story of a utopian world. There, he calls art the most sensitive, refined and in-depth method of navigating the complex reality. The meeting with Roman Dziadkiewicz and Ewa Majewska will be conducted by Anna Kałuża.

The third day of the festival will be also full of discussions regarding collective emotions. Who rules over them… and how? Should literature exert control over them? Eustachy Rylski and Paweł Reszka will discuss the place of writers in public debate, and they will answer the question why they might be a danger to the authorities.

At the end of the day, the audience will meet Colm Tóibin, one of the most outstanding contemporary Irish writers. During the meeting, conducted by Robert Kusk, Tóibin, who is listed on the list of the 300 most important British intellectuals published in 2001 by The Observer will tell us about the difficult emotions which come through to his literature and shape it.

Some will say that it is better to approach them with caution and let the conscious mind decide, other will say that they are what makes us human. Emotions are also an invaluable part of each community, as well as one of the many ways of communicating with others. Is it worth to live them intensively? The third day of the festival will certainly be full of them until the end.

plansza_01_emocje_1920x600More at www.conradfestival.com

We are preparing the most important literary festival in Poland and one of the most important in Europe. In the last seven editions, we hosted the best writers from around the world, attracting thousands of visitors and organising workshops and film screenings. This year will be no different – in the 8th edition of the Conrad Festival, under the motto “Intensity”. However, to carry out all our plans, we need your help.

If you are interested in literature, want to meet the most outstanding and most promising Polish and foreign writers (Michael Cunningham, Richard Flanagan and Eleanor Catton are just the first names announced on the list of this year’s guests) and find out what it’s like behind the scenes of the festival, join our team for the most emotional and intense week of October!

We are looking for young, energetic and responsible people, who aren’t afraid of teamwork, like to show off their creativity, and have an at least advanced knowledge of English (other languages are welcome).

Volunteers will join in the work on the preparation and the course of the event, look after festival guests, operate the festival centre and press office, keep watch over social media and provide Festival audience support.

Are you interested?

Send us your CV to wolontariat@biurofestiwalowe.pl and fill out the survey: https://goo.gl/forms/o44PUJ8taNq3YugD2

Remember to add the following clause to your CV:

I agree to the processing of my personal data by the Krakow Festival Office, based in Krakow, Olszańska 7, to carry out the recruitment process in accordance with the conditions set out in the Personal Data Protection Act of 29 August 1997 (consolidated text Journal of Laws [Dz.U.] of 2002, No. 101, Item 926, as amended).

The expression of the above consent is voluntary and those who give it have the right to access their personal data processed by the Krakow Festival Office under this consent, the right to change it and have it corrected.

The Krakow Festival Office declares that applications which do not include the above declaration of consent to the processing of personal data will not be taken into consideration in the recruitment process.

A literary walk and the screening of The Congress, along with a debate about the Futurological Congress at the ICE Kraków Congress Centre took place in Krakow – the UNESCO City of Literature, in order to commemorate the most famous Polish science fiction writer.

On 10-12 September, the celebrations of the 95th birthday of Stanisław Lem took place in Krakow, including a literary walk in the writer’s footsteps, a screening of The Congress and a debate titled The Futurological Congress, or the world in the system of universal charity. The celebrations were accompanied by a social media campaign, presenting the quotes from Lem’s works and the most important facts about the writer to the general audience.

Not everyone is aware that among all the books written by Stanisław Lem, the author himself liked The Cyberiad the most, that he was a true polyglot, or that when he proposed to his future wife, Barbara, he gave her a cake, because he perceived flowers to be completely impractical. These, and many more facts were presented to the participants of the birthday walk around Krakow, conducted by Elżbieta Binswanger-Stefańska. The interest in the walk was great, so the organisers decided to repeat it for the rest of Lem’s fans. Another edition will take place on the 17th of September.

The celebrations culminated in the evening at the ICE Kraków Congress Centre, with the screening of The Congress (2013) and the debate with Wojciech Zemek, Prof. Piort Popik, PhD and Elżbieta Binswanger-Stefańska, and a surprise for the persistent audience – a performance based on themes from The Futurological Congress. The guests could also see, touch and photograph the Lemachine – the original Mercedes used by the writer. The event was also accompanied by the exhibition of works by Przemek Dębowski, author of covers for Lem’s books, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie. The exhibition will run until the end of September at Księgarnia Pod Globusem (Długa 1).

The celebration of Stanisław Lem’s birthday was organised by the Krakow Festival Office, Krakow UNESCO City of Literature, SWOR Association, Wydawnictwo Literackie and Legalna Kultura.

The works of valued and award winning – not only in Poland but also abroad – Polish illustrators of the young generation will be exhibited in the Art Bunker Gallery of Contemporary Art starting on the 16th of September. This coming Friday at 6.00 PM, join us for the opening of the exhibition “Snakes, Daggers and Rose Petals”. We will see works that build a dialogue with the Polish School of Illustration, which continues to inspire contemporary artists. Illustrations specially prepared for the exhibition at the Art Bunker correspond to the works of the classics of Polish illustration, showing the contact points of all the works presented – while reading the exhibition, visitors will be able to see the similarities in the strategy of working on text. The exhibition can be viewed until the 11th of December 2016.

The Krakow Festival Office and the UNESCO City of Literature Krakow are the co-organisers of the exhibition, while the Conrad Festival is a partner of the event.

In the era of rapid expansion of the Internet, experiencing a mediated and media-based reality, which is accompanied by a certain kind of spontaneity and freedom in selecting the model of communication, illustration is redefining its status among the visual arts. What is characteristic of contemporary illustration is not only the innovativeness of the artists and the resulting diversity of forms, artistic techniques and the change of the function of creating the presented world (illustrations do not show the same thing as the text, but are a certain superimposed value and have their autonomy), but also unusual media. The new illustration is also distinguished by its processuality, intermediality and multilayer character. Illustrators are not afraid of reversing the chronology, first creating the drawings or other visual representations, to which they then fit the words, as it were, “illustrating the illustrations” with the text. The image of this contemporary field of art is completed by the fact that it has many distribution channels – illustrators are equally willing to publish their works in books and press as the Internet, they create animations and fashion, putting these projects on the same level as book projects. The creators of illustrations, juxtaposing words and images with the precision of a composer, adopt a variety of strategies of working with the text, not only those related to its content, but also to its other properties, such as sound or melody.

Wystawa „Węże, sztylety i płatki róży”

Despite the spectacular successes of Polish illustrators – not only those who co-created the Polish School of Illustration, but also the generations of artists of the last decade, who without any complexes are still inspired by the aesthetics of older authors – illustration still has not received the recognition it deserves among domestic art historians and critics. Despite this, artists continue to reach for the medium of illustration, treating it with the curiosity of a scientist and expanding the concept of book illustration.

If we compare the exhibition to a publication that has its own narrative, with the curator as editor, the exhibition “Snakes, Daggers and Rose Petals” is a book of many possible narratives. Its Chinese-box structure is a reflection of the processual and collective editorial work. The mobile arrangement of the exhibition, inspired by the pages of a book, opens perspectives on not only rearranging it during the exhibition, but also creates the possibility of making further “edits”.

As a guest of the exhibition, it is possible to repeatedly read it and interpret it anew, which the organisers strongly encourage.

Artists: Jan Bajtlik, Dominika Bobulska, Katarzyna Bogucka, Tymek Borowski, Bohdan Butenko, Bolesław Chromry, Agata Dudek, Grupa Maszin (Daniel Gutowski, Mikołaj Tkacz, Jacek Świdziński, Michał Rzecznik), Marta Ignerska, Tymek Jezierski, Edward Krasiński, Aleksandra Lampart, Adam Macedoński, Aleksandra Niepsuj, Stefan Papp, Alicja Pismenko, Bianka Rolando, Magdalena Sawicka, Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, Xavery Deskur Wolski, Bartosz Zaskórski

Curator: Anna Bargiel
Collaboration: Jakub Woynarowski, Mały Instytut Polskiej Ilustracji
Coordination: Dorota Bucka
Visual narrative: Agnieszka Piksa, Damian Nowak
Exhibition arrangement: Mateusz Okoński

Funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the “Węże, sztylety i płatki róży. Polska powojenna ilustracja książkowa” [“Snakes, Daggers and Rose Petals. Polish Post-War Book Illustrations”] measure.

 

More about the exhibition opening here.

Faith is the most private of all experiences, and at the same time always inscribed in the social context. By believing in something, we share strong convictions with others. Therefore, faith may be both the source of the sense of community, as well as alienation – it connects and antagonises. The second day of the Conrad Festival will be focused on the sources of the deepest of human beliefs.

“In Poland, so… where?” – Dominika Kozłowska, Michał Łuczewski, Włodzimierz Nowak and Ziemowit Szczerek will ask about the placement of Polishness in the imagined and real space to start the second day of the festival. Their discussion will be an opportunity for a clash between various perspectives of the Polish identity: political, social and geographical.

Another meeting will be devoted to the writing of Joseph Roth. What happens when empires fall and how should their collective identity be managed after their downfall? Works written by Roth, considered to be the chronicler of the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, extend past the context of their times, and nowadays become increasingly current.

Ida Linde, the author of a moving novel about love and mourning titled If I Forget You, I Will Become Someone Else will talk about intimate and private faiths and disbeliefs during a meeting with Justyna Czechowska. They will reflect upon the limitations of sharing experiences with others, and deliberations about crossing the borders – territorial, philosophical and mental.

The audience of the Conrad Festival will also have a unique opportunity to meet the “writer without memory”, who claims he has no childhood memories, and that is why he has to create his worlds anew in his books. After the success of The Crimson Petal and the White set in Victorian London, it took him 12 years to publish another full-fledged story for his readers. In The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber creates a non-existing world, and the story he tells tries to cross the boundaries, set by literary fashions and readers’ habits.

At the end of the day, Eleanor Catton will introduce the festival audience to the world of The Luminaries – the story of the gold rush in New Zealand, which she wrote when she was just 28. The book brought her a Booker Prize, as the youngest laureate of this prestigious distinction. The book will be soon brought to the silver screen by the BBC. The meeting is made even more interesting by the fact that Catton does not shy away from social activism – in 2015 during a festival in India she caused a scandal, when she accused New Zealand’s political elites of greed and lack of interest in culture.

Faith is the most private of all experiences, and at the same time always inscribed in the social context. By believing in something, we share strong convictions with others. Therefore, faith may be both the source of the sense of community, as well as alienation – it connects and antagonises at the same time. The second day of the festival will be an opportunity to discuss the faith that is not closely tied to religion, but close and foreign beliefs and disbeliefs.

 

Read more at www.conradfestival.com

 

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“We want to go to the cellar and wait through the coming of history, like people used to wait through the air raids in the past. But it’s not going to happen. We are too small, and the world has become too big”, diagnosed Andrzej Stasiuk, with whom Aleksander Nawarecki will talk during this year’s Conrad Festival. One of the possibilities of expanding one’s own world is to become open towards diversity. On the first day of the festival, the 24th of October, we are going to look for it in the language, or rather, in languages.

 

The intensity, as the idea of the Festival, will sound even stronger thanks to the overall graphic design, prepared by Fish Ladder and Paweł Marcinkowski of Platige – an artistic conglomerate, cooperating with prominent artists, including Tomasz Bagiński.

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Language is something more than just linguistic skills – it is about a linguistic image of the world, imagination and cultural patterns, which we use every day. Can we ever speak the same language? What is its nature? To what extent is language our own, and to what extent is it a common good? The first day of the Festival will be dominated by these questions.

Ryszard Koziołek, a writer and literary scholar, and Michał Paweł Markowski, artistic director of the Festival, literary researcher and essayist, will discuss how to think literature. We have become used to the bright side – reading, which allows us to develop harmoniously and makes us better. But do we even think about how often it also unleashes our darkest instincts and how often we cannot recognise ourselves because of it? The intensive experience of reading calls for thought and reflection, only then it can make us better. Reading is a great responsibility and – sometimes – a risk.

This risk will be experienced by the participants of the festival, when reading the books of authors nominated for the Conrad Award – the first distinction in Poland aimed at supporting new writers, and encouraging the readers to take interest in young prose. What languages for describing the world are proposed by those who come to the readers with their own new proposals for experiencing the world? The participants will not only be able to see that for themselves, but also vote for the author of the best debut.

Literature teaches us how to look at the world, assigns meanings to reality. It also makes our experiences more intense, allowing us to go beyond the known patterns. How does it happen? We will find answers to that question during the meeting titled “Literature, or the 18th camel”. We will learn the slightly extravagant, and perhaps the most accurate definition of literature among those coined so far, and Agata Bielik-Robson, Grzegorz Jankowicz and Piotr Paziński will discuss it during a meeting conducted by Weronika Szwebs and Jakub Misun.

However, it is not the end of riddles and discoveries during the festival. If you want to know how did the entire modern French literature come to be, come to an exceptional meeting with OuLiPo – a legendary literary group, featuring Marcel Bénabou, Frédéric Forte and Ian Monk. And if you can, just stay with us for the whole day. The programme also comprises a concert featuring Andrzej Stasiuk and Mikołaj Trzaska, and a film programme in the Kino pod Baranami.

The graphic design accompanying the festival every year always tries to reflect the idea of the event in an imaginative way. The vision of the creators expresses the spirit of the Conrad Festival in a specially inspiring way.

The slogan “Intensity” is fascinating and straight up evokes strong associations: movement, change, sharpness, dynamism. These words opened so many interpretations to us”, said Krzysztof Noworyta from Fish Ladder. “Our creation is a dynamic form – partially organic and technological – presenting a combination of veins, threads or digital connections. It seems to be an organism, captured in the moment, which will change its form in a second.”

“The starting point in the design process was the ‘C’ from the Festival’s logotype”, explains Paweł Marcinkowski of Platige. “I multiplied its shape numerous times, which in turn created a dynamic visual structure, referring to the traces left by the pen on a clean sheet of paper. This form accurately defined both the subject and the nature of the Conrad Festival – a constant and dynamic exchange of ideas, meetings and dynamism of experiencing literature together”.

 

The Conrad Festival is a joint initiative of the City of Krakow, the Krakow Festival Office and the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation,

This year’s edition will start on the 24th of October and will run until the 30th of October.

www.conradfestival.pl

 

The project was financed from the funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

A walk in the footsteps of Stanisław Lem, screening of The Congress and a debate The Futurological Congress, or the world in the system of universal charity – this is how Krakow will celebrate the birthday of Stanisław Lem on the 10th and 12th of September. The writer, whose works have been read by generations of readers around the world, and after whom a planetoid and the first Polish scientific satellite were named, would celebrate his 95th birthday on the 12th of September 2016.

Stanisław Lem – a watchful observer of contemporary times and a bard of technological development, who rarely left home. The writer of dozens of novels, short stories, essays and articles, known for his sharp tongue, often compared to H. G. Wells, certainly achieved very much. His novels were translated into 41 languages and sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Some of them were brought to the silver screen and adapted into radio plays. The majority of them were written in his flat in Krakow.

On the 10th of September, a birthday walk in the footsteps of Stanisław Lem will take place, during which Elżbieta Binswanger-Stefańska will tell the participants about the places in Krakow connected with the writer. Two days later, on the 12th of September, a debate on the Futurological Congress – a short story released by Lem in 1971 – will take place in ICE Kraków Congress Centre. The discussion The Futurological Congress, or the world in the system of universal charity about the contemporary political and social contexts of Lem’s text will feature: Wojciech Zemek (long-term secretary of the writer) and Prof. Piotr Popik, Ph. D. (Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences). The meeting will be conducted by Elżbieta Binswanger-Stefańska (SWOR Association), and the fragments of the Futurological Congress will be read by Ziuta Zającówna.

The debate will be accompanied by the screening of The Congress (2013) – an international co-production based on the prose by Stanisław Lem, which won the European Film Award.

The event is organised by: Krakow Festival Office, Krakow UNESCO City of Literature, SWOR Association, Wydawnictwo Literackie and Legalna Kultura.

Programme

10th of September / In the afternoon:

A birthday walk in the footsteps of Stanisław Lem

  • Host: Elżbieta Binswanger-Stefańska
  • Sign-ups: via e-mail at swor@swor.pl (Subject: A walk with Lem)
  • Duration: 60 minutes
  • Number of participants: 25

12th of September, start at 18:00 (admission free)

Screening of The Congress (2013, dir. Ari Folman)

(Chamber Hall, ICE Krakow Congress Centre)

Debate: The Futurological Congress, or the world in the system of universal charity

  • Guests: Wojciech Zemek, Prof. Piotr Popik, Ph. D.
  • Host: Elżbieta Binswanger-Stefańska
  • Fragments of the Futurological Congress will be read by Ziuta Zającówna

Event on facebook – click here

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