The Debrief

For this episode of The Debrief, we are in Venice for the European Cultural Heritage Summit.

At the summit, John Beauchamp catches up with Agata Wąsowska-Pawlik, director of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków.

With the bells ringing across Piazza San Marco in the heart of Venice, we discuss the latest edition of Herito, the ICC’s quarterly magazine, as well as the role the institution plays within Europa Nostra, an umbrella organisation which connects NGOs across the continent on the protection of cultural heritage.

You can also check out more on the European Heritage Hubs by checking out this episode of The Debrief, as well as this article from The First News on the Wit Stwosz altarpiece.

In this episode of The Debrief, John Beauchamp speaks to Dr Łukasz Bertram, a researcher who has just published a book on the history of Polish communists.

Bertram writes that before 1989, the study of the communist movement was an area reserved for historians closely associated with the Polish United Workers’ Party. Neither they nor their political overseers were interested in going too deep into that history for obvious reasons.

After 1989, there has also been a debate on how far to go when looking at the histories of prominent Polish communists. But no matter which way you look at it, there’s no escaping the fact that they existed and held sway over the country for decades.

More about Łukasz bertram may be found here.

Justyna Kisielewicz is a Polish artist who is taking the world by storm through her novel ways of social critique.

Justyna has been in the US for almost 10 years now, and was originally found by a gallery in California through her Instagram account – talk about luck!

So just how do you become an internationally acclaimed artist with just a pocket full of cash and a plane ticket? Well, being friends with a lawyer helps… sometimes!

Host John Beauchamp is in the studio with Justyna Kisielewicz.

In this episode of The Debrief, we get the inside details on the new Polish History Museum due to open in September 2023.

The Polish History Museum is to show the country’s over-1000 year history in an old Tsarist fortress, the Citadel in northern Warsaw. What was once a symbol of Russian domination – numerous Poles were executed here by the Tsarist authorities – is now set to house a museum of Poland’s statehood.

Host John Beauchamp is joined by Dr Michał Przeperski from the Polish History Museum.

Links

• Polish history portal run by the Polish History Museum
• Polish History Museum
• Warsaw Citadel

Coming up in this episode, we talk to Dr. Katarzyna Jagodzińska, an academic based in Kraków, about new ways of presenting museum collections as well as the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub.

The Kraków Heritage Hub is part of Europa Nostra, a pan-European organisation devoted to the protection of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

You can find out more about the Kraków Toy Museum here.

Host John Beauchamp speaks to Dr. Katarzyna Jagodzińska from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

War-time trauma and direct realism are the keys to a new retrospective of Polish painter Andrzej Wróblewski on at the National Museum in Lublin.

Andrzej Wróblewski is regarded as one of the most outstanding 20th century Polish painters. He died at the age of 29 in 1957 in a mountaineering incident in the Tatras, but his legacy has prompted numerous artists to continue exploring Wróblewski’s themes.

The exhibition presents a cross-section of Wróblewski’s work: from early abstract paintings, through the “Chauffeurs” and “Executions” cycles, to his late works, often done on paper, which are “delicate studies of everyday life, inscribed in the settling and existential mood of the thaw period”.

Host John Beauchamp speaks to curator Marcin Lachowski from the National Museum in Lublin.

For this episode, it’s time to put our feet up for a moment. We’re continuing our trek through Olsztyn in north-eastern Poland, and I’m meeting a British expat who has been living in Poland for a fair few number of years.

Trevor Hill has a background in anthropology, and when you start mixing that with theatre, well you can imagine, things get interesting… Host John Beauchamp catches up with Trevor – and his ukulele – in downtown Olsztyn.

More on the Węgajty Theatre can be found here and here.

More on Gardzienica can be found here.

In this edition of the podcast, we are in Poland’s Mazury lake district to visit the Borussia Foundation – and we aren’t talking football…

While the region has been within Poland’s borders since 1945, much of the area constituted East Prussia before the war, including the city of Allenstein, or what is now Olsztyn, where we are for this episode.

So what does this chequered history mean for the region now? Host John Beauchamp visits the Borussia Foundation at the Mendelsohn House to talk about the region’s Prussian history and heritage with Ewa Romanowska and Alicja Kulik.

In this episode of The Debrief, we meet radio historian Dr Urszula Doliwa from the University of Warmia and Mazury.

The history of pirate radio in Poland is slightly different to the stories many know about the famous pirate stations of the 1960s and 70s such as Radio Caroline. Here, pirate radio was more a fight for free speech than looking for the latest music trends…

Host John Beauchamp is in Olsztyn at the radio studios of the Journalism Institute at the University of Warmia and Mazury, where he meets Dr Urszula Doliwa, the author of “Pirate Waves” to talk about the emergence – and disappearance – of pirate radio stations in Poland.

Wilno, Vilnius, Vilne 1918–1948. One city – many stories is the title of an ongoing exhibition throughout the summer of 2023 on the tempestuous time of the early 20th century in what is now Lithaunia’s capital.

The exhibition is on at the National Museum in Kraków until September, and is curated by the museum’s director Andrzej Szczerski along with Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, who joins host John Beauchamp for this episode on the line from Vilnius.