by Joanna Ruszczyk
We show that the divisions we have in mind created by the media and politicians about Polish society are untrue. These divisions are different. The "Family Care" project is a step in improving relationships. If it were held every year, for example 10 years, I think it would be a very big change.
Joanna Butcher: Project Care family arose as to-order yellow WIENIE, looking at the events of the last week in Poland. This is your reaction to the promotion of nienawiś you toward wasps yellow b LGBT JPIC yellow b becoming more systemic?
Daniel Rycharski: This project was a great experiment and a new way of working. It was not so easy to find an institution, organization, museum, gallery that would want to implement it with me. Therefore, I would like to thank the Museum of Modern Art for help in its implementation, to the curators: Tomek Fudala, Szymon Maliborski, Natalia Sielewicz and Ola Nasiorowska. There were many unknowns.
What unknowns?
I did not know if it would be possible to find farmers who would accept LGBT people on their farms. I didn't know if there would be LGBT people who would not be afraid, especially after the recent events. What will happen when farmers meet them? I didn't know if these people would feel safe ... Lots of doubts and uncertainties. Over family careI started to think much earlier after returning from France at the end of 2019. I was there on a scholarship, doing an exhibition at Villa Arson. Agnieszka Żuk from Paris introduced me to the environment of the La Roya valley near Nice. It is a place in the mountains where refugees try to cross from Italy to the French side and unpleasant things happen. There is a group of French people there who help refugees, although French law does not forbid help, but in practice punishes them. This is called a crime of solidarity. The leader of this group is Cedric Herrou, a farmer who not only saves refugees in the mountains, but also employs them and looks for a job for them.
Inspired you ?
I was then after the exhibition Fears , which I was preparing with Szymon Maliborski at the MSN. It was for me an exhibition about the dying of the religious version of Christianity. I started looking for secular Christianity, but it turned out that Poland is not a good place for such a search. What these people are doing in France is for me the fulfillment of the idea of such Christianity. Fraternity, solidarity, justice and sacrifice for others. I came back from France and I thought that I would like to transfer these ideas, Christianity based on the practice of helping other people, to the Polish countryside. Tomek Rakowski, an anthropologist and ethnographer from the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, helped me. He gave me a book by Andrzej Perzanowski, Futility and Hopewhich describes a psychiatric practice lasting from the 1930s almost to this day in Choroszcz near Bydgoszcz. There was a psychiatric hospital there. When it was overcrowded, peaceful patients were placed in the care of rural families in various villages in the area. The hospital paid farmers for this care. It was a godsend for these people.