Liv at the LKW.s truck where they hold workshops for kids and young people.
Saturday 25.th of July. The weather has been hot, windy and rainy here. We have been walking a lot, because the old town doesn´t have any local transportation.
Wyspa art institute, our cooperation partner here, is situated in the area of the old Lenin wharf. The place is constantly under change, and one swiss artists is doing a project with the walls of the cellar, where the paint is coming loose. In the area there are some activity with building yachts and ships, and some non-activity with houses changing towards destrucion. There are plans to make the area into a “new city” - which will probably throw the artists out. they were already thrown out from a house they got from the municipality, because they wanted to build offices instead.
We have met a cultural geographer Mariusz Czepczynski from the University of Gdansk, who had a lot of interesting thoughts about Polands relation to the Baltic Sea -mainly that Poles are more focused on contacts towards the west and not towards the nordic countries - and that the interest for the water often stops by the sanddunes, in other words where land stops. (soon going to Lithuania and passing outside Russian border we now that they at least care about their territorial water limit and that you should keep out while passing, at least 12 nautical miles from the coast). Mariusz also told us that the water in the Gdansk/Gdynia bay is even sweeter than in the Stockholm area. It doesen´t exchange so much with the rest of the Baltic because of the Hel peninsula.
We had a meeting with Kamila Jezierewska, at educational departement of the Polish Maritime Museum, to speak about the project and to discuss possibilities for cooperation. This museum has been involved earlier in international art project, and they have an impressive exhibition covering a big part of history - but the parts that are not so good memories for the russians are still missing, Kamilla told us. Like that the russians were bombing ships with refugees fleeing over the sea. There was one of the worlds worst seaaccidents in 1945 where 10 000 people went down with a ship bombed by Sovietunion, and there is not a word about it in the museum. We asked if she thought that they would update the information in the future, but she wasn´t sure of that.
By chance we got to know about the International mariners club, Zejman club, that happened to be open this friday night. In this club, which was situated just opposite the marina, was a very special atmosphere, the old house constructed in the 17.th century but now filled with memories from travelling and adventurous poles, mostly collected from the sea journeys as far as we could see. There were items like parts of wales, hundreds of different beerglasses, old beerbottles from the war, old instruments, nets, bones, corals, and just things things things. Even a moose head with a crown on top… A group was playing sailor´s songs, two couples dancing. The place is hidden behind a wooden fence, on a half deserted island in the middle of the city, and open only once a week. When we were about to leave I decided to say hallo to the couple that were the founders of the club, and soon we got to know that the woman was active in Polish Ecological Club - an organization that I had tried to get in touch with for the project but never reached. So here she was, giving us all the adresses and names we could need.
On the same evening, we also met a Polish artist at an opening, where she sang a song that she had translated from polish to swedish, without knowing anything about the language. She gave us the swedish translation.
On the evening, the 22 of July. Tomorrow the first crew member will arrive and we will meet the curator of Wyspa Art Institute, Ola Grzonkowska, who is our contact at Wyspa. We stay with the boat in Marina Gdansk, which is right in the center of the old town, while Wyspa is situated in the old shipyard area. I have been trying to get a grip of the dramatic history of this town, and one thing is that world war II began here - on a place in the entrance to the river leading to Gdansk, where they have now put up a very ugly memorial. We saw it when passing in from the open sea. After that we passed some shipswarfs of which the Leninwarf is probably the most wellknown, where the Solidarity movement began in the eightees - an important start of the big changes in Poland. We saw ships that was half or three quarter of a ship, on land, with contstructions around them, impossible to say if they were about to be build or about to be taken apart.
A visit to the marine museum close to the marina put some more light on the extreme changes this country has gone through. During world war II there were millions of people fleeing away over the sea, but many of the ships were sunk by bombs. The sea we just sailed over is peppered with dead bodies and shipwrecks. We had some nightly thunders and lightning during the passage, and I had a sudden wiew of a war going on, like in a bad dream. The sky cleared up in the morning before we were approaching land, but the wind stayed hard and the seas high. It is not an easy passage./Birgitta