Private apartments, artists’ studios, churches, schools, a monastery, and even a funeral home. Participants in the 9th edition of the Open House Gdańsk architecture festival, which will focus on Gdańsk’s Siedlce neighborhood and its residents, will be able to visit all these places from October 9 to 11.
On October 9, the festival will kick off with a photo walk organized by cyfrowe.pl, and an evening walk tracing the neighborhood’s criminal history will set out from Aga Piasecka’s Studio 57.
Explorations of Siedlce are scheduled for October 10 and 11 and will be dedicated to exploring the Siedlce neighborhood in Gdańsk.
A neighborhood strung along Kartuska Street and oriented around it. Rising toward the hills. Opening up dense and surprisingly complex perspectives. Siedlce is built on stories of suburban vineyards, working-class housing estates, artists, and politicians—stories of life in apartment blocks and on small plots of land. The history of the neighborhood and its transformations is recorded here in fragments of plaster, remnants of tram tracks, and a wringer in the courtyard. The present, meanwhile, fills the gaps in the building facades and the open spaces of the courtyards — these relationships are not always easy, though they intrigue and provoke reflection on urban development. Together, as part of the ninth edition of Open House Gdańsk, we’ll try to extract as much as possible from these local layers. We’ll also take the liberty of shifting the festival map toward Śródmieście and Mickiewicz Hill to complete the story of Siedlce. For nothing in urban life exists outside of context
— announce the festival organizers.
Plans for this year’s edition include: visits to numerous private apartments, a meeting with neighbors from the extraordinary Ojcowska Street, visits to artists’ and architects’ studios , to places connected with the neighborhood’s everyday life, as well as in Siedlce’s churches and at the headquarters of the Congregation of the Pallottine Sisters. The program also includes a visit to the Kalia Funeral Home, where a meeting with writer Roksana Jędrzejewska-Wróbel will take place, dedicated to humanist funeral ceremonies, a hip-hop concerton the steps on Ciasna Street, a poetry slam on the field of High School No. 8, as well as workshops on scent, photography, and collage.
As the organizers emphasize, participation in the event is open to everyone (simply arrive on time at the address indicated in the program) and free of charge, except for the workshops, which require registration and a nominal fee.
A detailed festival program and workshop registration are available at: openhousefestival.pl
