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Meeting: Friday, 6:00 PM, fountain near Sanatorium “Grunwald”
Book: This Is No Country for Free People: The Polish Case in the Haitian Revolution

Author: Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski

 

Description:

Napoleon sent Polish legionnaires to the other hemisphere, to France’s most valuable colony, to suppress an anti-colonial revolution started by former slaves. They died in battle and from yellow fever, but to their own surprise, the Black insurgents soon began distinguishing them from French soldiers and treating them differently—not as enemies, despite fighting on the opposing side. Their commander, Gen. Dessalines, had ordered it. This book solves an old historical puzzle—explaining why Poles were encouraged to stay in Haiti and why the constitution of the newly independent state recognized them as members of the emerging “Black nation.” The explanation is astonishing and sheds new light on the nature of the Haitian Revolution.

Moderator:

Paulina Januszewska – journalist for Krytyka Polityczna, graduate of Russian studies and documentary studies at the University of Warsaw. Winner of the Dziennikarze dla Klimatu (Journalists for Climate) competition—special prize in the “City of Innovation” category for her article on post-pandemic Amsterdam. Nominated for the Zygmunt Moszkowicz “Person with a Passion” award for her report “You Can’t Shame Any of Us Anymore!”. Author of the book Shit Journalism (2024) and host of the eco-feminist podcast “No Future Without Equality.” In her writing, she covers culture, women’s rights, ecology, and social inequalities.

Guests:

Przemysław Wielgosz – journalist, commentator, and editor. Since 2006, he has headed the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique and curates the Biblioteka “Le Monde diplomatique” book series on alternative economies. Author and editor of key publications critiquing contemporary capitalism, including Opium of Globalization (2004), Welcome to Harder Times (2020), and The Race Game: How Capitalism Invented the Other to Subjugate Everyone (2021)—nominated for the Nike Literary Award in 2022.

Max Cegielski – writer, curator, researcher, journalist. Author of reportages, novels, and biographies, including Masala (2002), Apocalypso (2004), Drunk with God (2007), The Eye of the World: From Constantinople to Istanbul (2009, winner of the Beata Pawlak Award), Mosaic: Tracing the Rechowicz Family (2011), The Great Player: From Samogitia to the Roof of the World (2015), Prince Polonia (2020), My Name is Czogori (2022), and Congo in Poland: Wanderings with Joseph Conrad (2023). Creator and curator of artistic projects in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Mumbai, and Istanbul. Co-founder of Masala Sound System, awarded “Anti-Fascist of the Year 2004.” Journalist for Radio Trójka.

 

Saturday, 5:00 PM, fountain near Sanatorium “Grunwald”

“Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the 20th Century” is Mark Sedgwick’s groundbreaking work, the first comprehensive history of Traditionalism—a marginalized yet influential anti-modernist current of 20th-century thought. The author traces Traditionalism’s three phases: its origins in late 19th-century occult circles, its practical applications in Sufism, Freemasonry, and political experiments (fascism, terrorist acts in Italy), and its post-1960 influence—including neo-Eurasianism in Russia and trends in the Islamic world. Sedgwick also analyzes Traditionalism’s ideological consequences—from its impact on religious studies and Western counterculture to its ties with extremist movements increasingly associated with the radical right.

Moderator:

Dominika Sitnicka – journalist for OKO.press, political commentator, and host of the program “Political Program!”. Specializes in rule of law, media, and public life. Co-hosts the show “State of Affairs” on Polish Radio 24 and “Polish Flowers” on TVP Info. Graduate of philosophy and law at the University of Warsaw.

Guests:

Dr. Marcin Stabrowski – cultural researcher and lecturer at the University of Wrocław. Specializes in early modern Polish and European cultural history (12th–17th c.), theory of cultural history, phenomenology, and axiology. Member of the “Disputes Over Values” research team at the Institute of Cultural Studies, UWr, and co-editor of “Disputes Over Values II: Alternative Worlds” (2022).

Prof. Leszek Koczanowicz – political scientist, philosopher, and psychologist, professor at SWPS University in Warsaw, affiliated with the Department of Culture and Media and the Institute of Humanities. Focuses on political philosophy, ethics, democracy theories, cultural theory, contemporary culture, and art. Conducted research and lectured at institutions including Columbia, Berkeley, Buffalo, Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2024–2025).

Przemysław Witkowski – PhD in political science, twice awarded scholarships by the Minister of National Education and Sport (2005, 2006), assistant professor at Collegium Civitas. Collaborator with the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo and think tanks Counter Extremism Project and International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. Expert for the European Commission’s Radicalisation Awareness Network. Author of “Glory to Supermen: Ideology and Pop Culture” (2017), “Laboratory of Violence: A Political History of the Roma” (2020), “The Coming Fascism” (2023), and “The Russian Party” (2023). Senior Research Director at the Institute of Social Security (2017–2024), advisor to the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2024), and member of the MKiDN political cabinet. Since 2024, deputy director of the Gabriel Narutowicz Institute of Political Thought. Author of hundreds of articles on Poland’s extremist scene. Leading Polish expert on RWE, VRWE, LWE, VLWE, and related acts of terrorism.

 

Sunday, 5:00 PM, fountain near Sanatorium “Grunwald”

The Corporeality of Memory

This meeting will analyze the corporeality of memory in the context of Polish practices of commemorating the Holocaust and the “cursed soldiers.” We will discuss how material forms—sculptures, plaques, monuments—shape collective imagination and social emotions. Special attention will be paid to how the body (both depicted and imagined) becomes a carrier of memory and historical narrative. We will also examine tensions between different forms of commemoration and their role in shaping collective identity.

Moderator:

Emilia Konwerska – literary scholar, journalist, curator, and poet based in Wrocław. Her writings have appeared in Krytyka Polityczna, Gazeta Wyborcza, Vogue, Tygodnik Powszechny, and Znak. Her interests span literary and cultural criticism, queer theory, and contemporary art, blending erudition with sensitivity to identity and socio-cultural nuances.

Guests:

Katarzyna Liszka – cultural studies scholar, philosopher, and assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Wrocław. Her research focuses on contemporary philosophy, memory studies, and Jewish thought and culture. She has translated into Polish works by, among others, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Norman Geras, and Jeffrey Goldfarb. She is the author of the monograph Ethics and the Memory of the Holocaust (2016) and co-translator of Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory (2023). Recently, she has been exploring the significance of humiliation in the lives of individuals and societies. On this topic, she published the article The Power of Humiliation: Avishai Margalit’s Reflections on Humiliation and the Decent Society (2024).

Wojciech Wilczyk – poet, photographer, essayist, art critic, curator, and lecturer at the Academy of Photography in Kraków. Creator of the photo album “Holy War” documenting football fan murals, graffiti, and slogans that have become normalized in Poland’s visual landscape, desensitizing society to visual violence, and “Polish-Polish War” featuring 500 photos of murals nationwide glorifying the “cursed soldiers”—grassroots or state-funded under “patriotic” programs, offering a grim portrait of one form of Polish patriotism.

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sanatoriumdzwieku@gmail.com
It's a matter of the body
Robert Piotrowicz

The first time I said the word 'body', I felt it, I heard it, and I understood it. All of this happened in the very same moment, though only later, when I saw people running toward me, did I grasp the meaning of that process. Were they carrying themselves in my direction, or was it merely their image reaching me? Or perhaps it was the noise they made, pounding their shoes on the wooden bridge, shouting at me. What they were doing, I didn’t know. But I felt it in such a way that it couldn't be more.

 

When we observe qualities — those phenomena and ideas that surround us — we work hard to come to know them. We try to grasp them, assign them meaning, understand their presence. We move in cycles, where experience always precedes the accumulation of knowledge. With each step, we uncover further layers of pulsating elements that surround us, and yet often (perhaps always) we remain unfulfilled — though kindly embraced by what we hear.

It might be an oversimplification, but it concerns those dominant modes of knowing that societies readily adopt — quick, efficient, the kind of attitudes content with superficial perception. And yet, this is often the source of constant frustration. Or excitement. This process has no end. We move, shift directions, always searching — to experience, or to know? Does this question even make sense? Perhaps it’s in this very uncertainty, in the constant motion, that we are closest to ourselves.

One can — and this happens constantly — attempt to domesticate and organize experience. To subordinate it, control it, restrain it. Including that which is audible. The entire theater of sonic events can be subjected — clarity and precision tamed, ready to be repeated, to be performed again. But experience is always here and now, singular, full of affect. We are not merely collectors of data, arrangers of libraries, but just as much — subjects of sensual resonance.

We cannot look both ahead and behind us at the same time — that is obvious. Evolution has given us another tool for spatial control: by being in sound, we listen all around ourselves. We distinctly perceive depths, distances, the complex structure of auditory reality. Is this not clear evidence that sound, existing all around us, is a body — not a flat phenomenon projected onto an invisible dome?

Yes, we are accustomed to associating sound with the image of our surroundings, a landscape with its own kind of horizon encircling us. But sound is like an invisible, mobile architecture, or rather, a sculpture in motion unfolding around us. And in fact, it is we who inhabit the space that it occupies, tracing its structure with moving air.

How does this omnipresence of an active sense, one that constantly scans our surroundings, shape our humanity? We function within this material, though invisible structure, immersed in vibrations — we breathe and move within it. What, beyond the corporeality we share, further enables us to comprehend the world?

Will our virtues benefit from practicing perceptual sensitivity? Will it make us more rational? Will deeper understanding help us become fully aware? Or perhaps becoming more sensitive to sound will instead pull us away from this order of the world — so that our virtues might be released, even for a moment — and push us into that phenomenon impossible to express in words, the phenomenon of sound.

So often we must assign it meaning, compare it to natural phenomena, to familiar practices coded into reality. In doing so, we strip it of its autonomy, because it is — sometimes, though not always — so difficult to treat sound as an element in its own right. We feel compelled to consume it with additions, with other ingredients of reality.

Training the virtues of the body, the qualities that allow one to make space within oneself for another body, may sound like some ultra-esoteric mindfulness. But let us allow ourselves a bit of room for actions that seem senseless!

Does caring for cognitive virtue not expose us to a certain confusion of those virtues? Perhaps an excessive intensification of sensitivity to sound doesn’t benefit other virtues at all — on the contrary, it may sabotage our dispositions.

Will our expanded boundaries of grasping this element help us better orient ourselves in traditional Euclidean space? Does awareness of a new presence around us support us — or does this excess disorient us, over-poeticize our surroundings?

It happens — and I claim it happens almost always, at least for a person even minimally sensitive to sound — that the simplest, most distinct sound (not necessarily a loud one) takes hold of the listener in a way far more significant than any corresponding visual element.

Would the white facade of a garage in a housing estate make the same impression as an equally distinct, self-contained sound — as simple as that expanse of white? This is an idealistic assumption. I have no ambition to arbitrate the dispute between the visible and the audible. I’m only trying to grasp how much, through its corporeality, sound differs from the visual environment.

For sound to begin to distinguish itself, to allow itself to be noticed, silence is sometimes needed at first. In many of our experiences, darkness also heightens this perceptual sensitivity. Do we need a background whose meaning fades with the onset of sound — and is that, for us, a necessary condition? Here, I want to draw attention to that crucial moment — the appearance of sound and the change in status of the environment in which we find ourselves — both in a perceptual and affective sense. This is the moment when space acquires a new dimension, and our presence within it is reformatted by the emergence of a meaningful presence. This change may be barely noticeable, or it may be dramatic and radical. Do we perceive these changes the same way we do changes in light? Likely so, in terms of volume — “it became quieter.” Attentive listening is surely one of those practices that enrich our perceptual virtues — capacities that shape not only our sensitivity, but also our way of being in relation to our surroundings — our perception of ourselves in the world. We are in motion.

In this configuration, the orientation of pleasure — for I do want to think of it decidedly as pleasure — can be understood as occurring in at least two directions. The performing person, depending on the medium they engage with, always attains a certain bodily pleasure; the sound that carries their presence on stage brings satisfaction to the one performing — who, most likely, also wishes to extend this to those who listen. Their bodies, in one way or another, also experience pleasure. This is, of course, a description of a model — of how potential delight might circulate — rather than a guarantee of its presence and distribution during a sound performance. It is precisely this dispersal of pleasure that leads us to ask about its directions and dynamics — about how the body of sound operates simultaneously inward and outward.

What stands out is the duality of the corporeality we are considering — not so much stretched between what is inside and what surrounds, but rather simultaneously rooted in both orders, without the need for paradox or exclusion. Resonating within one of the participating bodies, sound simultaneously spreads outward — permeating space, creating relation. The intensity of this dynamic depends on the listener’s activity — on their readiness to absorb and let pass through themselves that which is materially immaterial.

If we look at this process as an energetic field encompassing the concert space, we see one objective, corporeal being of sound, and around it bodies immersed in the same vibrating cloud — clusters of separate yet resonating centers of tension.

Despite its seemingly esoteric character, this description is grounded in real, bodily experience — it is empirical, even rooted in common sense.

Does somatic experience belong to “higher” aims? Perhaps the everyday experiencing of the body is ordinary, prosaic. And yet — it happens that precisely then, during exercise, running, tension — corporeality exceeds us, becomes something more. Personally, I cannot fully appreciate the pleasure of thinking if it is not accompanied by a physical passage through the body — that marked trace.

so — what does the performer do now?
What position do they occupy?
Are they merely the one who manages the cloud of bodies?
Or rather, should we place the sounding performer
at the center, which instantly disperses, becomes one —
pulsing outward toward resonating participants,
only to receive their returning energy moments later.

This movement in time is so imperceptibly variable
that — giving in to a wave of enthusiasm —
I’ll risk the claim: the center unravels.
Its outer amniotic waters become a shared body —
a single vibrating body is born.

The whole situation ceases to be a spectacle.
It becomes a state.

A state of experience shared by many at once,
each simultaneously feeding their private, trembling affects.
This pre-religious focus
sends us back to the origins of need,
to its rudimentary quality —
archetypes
which, even if we do not immediately recognize them within,
we nonetheless live with
in a constant alchemical process.

This is voluntary, declared participation.
The body of the community can then become saturated with political togetherness —
not through manifestos or agendas, but through the very act of presence.

This symbolic agency — to be together in sound —
creates a space for nurturing values, for being with one another in concord,
for integration that does not need to explain itself.

It’s not only about boundary-line catharsis.
It’s also about subtler forms of how the affective field operates:
a temporary suspension of defense, the resonance of support,
or even — under the right conditions — quiet forms of resistance.

Because shared listening can be a political gesture.
A body that demands nothing — and yet changes everything.

Perhaps it is sound, as a non-representational medium,
that allows us to act together before we even think to do so.

After all this, something remains — and it isn’t always something you can call a memory. Sometimes it’s a tension in the neck, a quiet impulse in the body you don’t recognize, but you know it’s been there before. Something has been inscribed — maybe not the sound itself, but its presence. A vibration that continues to pass through you long after everything has dispersed. Because that community — though it no longer exists — still resonates somewhere. In the background, in the body, in the rhythm of a day suddenly thrown off course. It doesn’t have to be a visual memory — it’s more like a splinter of energy, a fragment of that state that hasn’t gone out. And even if everything has scattered, it still was — and that was doesn’t let go. Sometimes all it takes is a muscle tightening, a sonic afterimage, and it returns. Not the whole, but the phantom. And we, after all, are composed precisely of such traces. A spectral community still trembles within us — as trace, as micro-empathy, as something that cannot be explained, but is known to have been there.

Sometimes memory disperses the community. At other times, the community remains in the body — as a trace, as somatic memory. It is not about history or precision. It is about an imprint in the tissues, a shadow of experience that doesn’t vanish. It stays — like a soft rupture in breathing, like a tension that evokes something more than a memory. This does not need to be understood.
The memory of bodies that once resonated together transforms into symbolic agency. For a wave — even if it has long gone silent — does not fade. It is from this wave that we can draw: to nurture values, to cultivate integration, but also to sustain micro-resistance. The quiet kind — sensuous, untranslatable into any manifesto.

The emotions that were born there do not end with the concert. They spill into everyday life, expand within the body, flow through gestures. The micropolitics of emotion operates beyond declarations — precisely when the community has dissolved, but left behind a radiating transformation. Then the body remembers, even though everything else has long since changed.

Perhaps it is not always necessary to entangle oneself in resistance, choosing instead a freedom beyond the compulsion of constant conflict. This is not an escape — it may rather be a gesture of self-determination, a replenishing of spirit, a cleansing of the body from social toxins. A readiness for more. Our bodily autonomies deserve more.

Almost at the very end, I would like to speak once more about the power of the phenomenon this text revolves around. Not about its meaning anymore, but about its overpowering presence — the kind that draws one in without asking for consent, yet receives immediate consensus. It happens beyond an act of will, and yet it is accepted — often with great joy. This permanent state of bodily susceptibility does not require conscious consent — it is, as it were, already inscribed in us (excluding here, of course, any deliberate acts of sonic violence, torture, or other forms of oppression).

When I lose control and go blindly, carried by its enthralling energy, I drift through a dream taking place in my tangible reality. In the unconscious lies all the power — an immediate reaction, a bodily response of the flesh-envelope, which allows me to feel. This somnambulistic paradox — dispersing presence — blurs the boundary between the ecstatic sensing of the here and now and the oneiric unreal. It is a state in which we move from conscious declaration, from the will to participate — into an almost hallucinatory introspection, where boundaries no longer serve separation but rather a merging into unity.

This regime may seem somewhat violent — I surrender without a chance to respond, without a way to convey the peaceful assent. But isn't that precisely the process of consensual domination, which I myself postulate, aspiring to threshold experiences — not only transitions I undergo alone, but those traversed together with others? It is the response that becomes the reason preventing me from seeing the sonic experience as anything other than a goal shimmering somewhere on the cognitive horizon of the background, always seducing — even when I’m not thinking about it. That is desire. That is the affirmation of somatic courage.

Notice — not once in this text has the word “ear” appeared, nor “ears.” Even “listening” barely slipped through. That was no accident. I haven’t forgotten the process that makes this entire experience possible — the physical qualities of our bodies that allow us to live through sound.

I deliberately avoided that realm — not to exclude it, but to shift the focus. I spoke of perception through space, through air, through our bodies. Through the experiences inscribed in them, through the body’s readiness to experience. This creates a specific image: the image of performing, trembling air. And that is precisely why — at the very end — I can gladly say: sound is also visible.

This is not a metaphor. Not a conceptualization. Not a symbolic transference. It is a description of ongoing physical processes — each with its own volume, shape, and range.
We are surrounded by forms of agitated gas particles. Let us not forget solid bodies, or liquids — everything that can become a medium for the propagation of an acoustic wave.

This physicality of sound is real. It is part of reality. It is objective. It is not a representation — it is a presence. It is here, with us.

And if someone says: “this is unclear”, you may answer:
→ because the experience of sound isn’t clear either. It is bodily, it trembles, it is momentary.” So is my text.

Zdjęcie: Szymon Szcześniak