Tag Archives: Lodz

Existential Lodz

Posted on by

(Best seen, full screen)

A Short Note.

Testing the title of my short movie “Existential Lodz” on Google I found on the first page a site named “łódź kaliska“. Now on this same first page was also listed a site named “Lodz Ghetto“.

“Lodz Kaliska” is described as, I quote:

“The group Łódź Kaliska was established in 1979 in its namesake town, Łódź. Since its foundation, members have included Marek Janiak, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Rzepecki, Andrzej Świetlik and Makary (Andrzej Wielogórski). Formed in 1979 under a cloud of scandal, it was originally a neo-vanguard art group with an aim of exploring the photo-media aspect of seeing and reception that originated within Conceptualism, in the domain of photography, experimental film and performance.”..see more here .
.

The second site “Lodz Ghetto” describe, I quote:

“Lodz Ghetto is an existential horror movie more terrifying than any fiction. It is a baleful chronicle about a people on the brink of annihilation with no options. Of the almost quarter-million Jews herded by the Germans into a slum within the Polish city of Lodz, barely 800 survived the war.” see more here.
.
My own short movie is a nonsense story with heavy reminiscences of Lodz and Zdunska Wola spoken in Hebrew.
.

Perhaps the Freudian slip analogy,  represented by these two photos (below), the first from a 2006 exhibition the second from the concentration camps in Poland (WW2 years 1940-1945), links the Lodz Ghetto and the new underground Polish pop art “Lods Kaliska” based in Lodz.

.

.From the exhibition “Underground”, 2006, see here.

.

From the Birkenau concentration camp.

Otherwise Poland has produced a vast body of art connected to the Holocaust, see here.  The German after war art scene was also heavily influenced by WW2 , see  here  for an excellent article.