A hacker is someone who produces an unprecedented transformation. The area of their action is a gray zone—a hole or gap in defenses—and the results of their operation are always tied to some excess: supplying content where there was a lack emerging due to neglect or omission, and adding “something extra” from oneself—modified content. Deciphering, breaking the code, gaining access to information that is for various reasons concealed, and using it for different ends—these are the basic premises of hacking. As a result of such action everything that up to this point we called private property, belonging to us (and only to us), undergoes—by degrees—collectivization. In June 2017, a hacker's attack was conducted in the Kraków Ethnographic Museum. Only a few hours were required to pose a threat to the formula of the exhibition. In the tone of Andrzej Leder's “exercises in historical logic,” the authors of the artistic intervention My Museum, a Museum about Me: Or who owns the legacy of the Polish village? offered visitors the opportunity to wake up, because—as Walter Benjamin observes—“so must every presentation of history begin with an awakening.” Viewers needed to abandon, at last, the silver dreams of Salome—the great Polish phantasm—and turn to the ethical project, whose bet is—fulfilling the historical function of being-in-the-world (In-der-Weltsein)—the Heideggerian experience of the truth. This truth refers to the capacity to remember (to be a subject and a part of the post-war collective) events that do not possess—in the case of the exhibit—precise caesuras of time. The point here then would be a movement into the space of the social revolutions of which the contemporary subject has been unconscious, resulting in a phantasm of the Polish village. Exercises in historical logic (conceived by Leder and realized by the authors of the intervention) have the task of restoring “stolen” meaning. Deciphering (via hacking) figures and spaces which have been permanently darkened, pushed completely from contemporary consciousness. The intervention My Museum, a Museum about Me—which I treat as a technique of memory—was intended above all to make us aware of the stakes of our work.

Tadeusz Nowak's story Mojżesz [Moses], the source of the above quote, evokes many questions and doubts. In a remarkably suggestive way it demonstrates, above all, the complexities of interpersonal and multicultural relationships; their dialectical tensions based on closeness and distance at the same time. It inclines us both to ask questions about the paradoxical form of coexistence based on clear social divisions and hierarchies, and about shared experiences, which are sites of simultaneous division and separation. It invites us to think about the status of the story as regards the delayed recognition of loss or absence, as an account by a child narrator, a Polish boy, who was a passive observer of the Holocaust in a rural village.

In Nowak's story the moment of premodern difference is grasped—visible on the basis of external appearance, distinctive clothing, or social behavior. From the perspective of Polish Christian peasants, the Jewish Moses’ difference is recognizable in his appearance (clean, neat, and above all, better dressed), but also behavior and gestures recognized as not rural. The difference divides, creates distance, but also elicits care and the impulse to protect.

1. CHANGES IN THE GALLERY

In the gallery on the first floor of the Kraków Ethnographic Museum (MEK), in the exhibit describing winter rituals, there are various objects used in holiday carolling. In Poland, carolling is practiced in cities and villages during the winter solstice, and involves groups of boys and young men, usually dressed in various costumes and carrying props, visiting local homes to bring success for the new year. A pre-Christian custom, it was later combined with Christmas and the nativity plays propagated by Franciscan monks. In the gallery there are photographs of carolling masks worn by people dressed in a costume representing a Jew. A demonic-looking figure, frequently situated in proximity to that of the devil, this “Jew” is present in carolling and carnival processions across Europe, in performances reaching back to the Middle Ages. The photographs at MEK are accompanied by my commentary:

At 4:30 pm on 27 June 2017, a curator's tour of the permanent exhibition in the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków began. It was different from the usual tour—a portion of the objects had been “interrupted” with commentaries, literary texts, and additional items that changed their initial impact and broadened the context of thinking about the legacy of the Polish village. What exactly was this innovation based on, where did it come from, and what was its goal?

The idea of a curatorial intervention arose during Professor Roma Sendyka's graduate seminar in the Polish Department of the Jagiellonian University; the discussion was prompted by the museum's announcement of a project to update their permanent exhibition, a large part of which has been unchanged for nearly 70 years. It comprises several exhibition halls, among them a Krakówstyle interior, whose furnishings come from various joineries in Lesser Poland, with wall decorations done by painters from Zalipia in 1949, a Podhale-style room with costumes of górale [inhabitants of Poland's mountain region], a schoolroom with a crucifix hanging on the wall and a portrait of President Mościcki (1926–1939), and a gallery of ceremonial folk costumes. The museum advertises itself as a place where we can see the “‘cradle’ of peasant culture,” and its director, Antoni Bartosz, writes that:

The metaphor of the museum as a mirror, in which we can gaze and see our roots and the shared, though increasingly distant, legacy of the Polish village, is also linked to the slogan advertising the museum: “My museum, a museum about me.”

How, in the museum's narrative, does the “‘cradle’ of peasant culture” look, and does it actually realize its promise of describing many coexisting cultures? What does the slogan “My museum, a museum about me” really mean?

Curatorial Dreams are, paradoxically, both ephemeral and concrete. In our volume Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, my co-editor Erica Lehrer and I cajoled academics to translate their social science and humanities research into imagined exhibitions, or, more precisely, fragments of exhibitions—what we call “exhibitionary moments.” This was an exercise in imagination, but it was also terribly concrete. We asked our contributors: Where is your exhibit located? What are its key objects, images, artifacts, or artworks? Who is the presumed audience? How will it be developed? What curatorial strategies will be deployed? Contributors positioned themselves theoretically, but did so as a starting point for constructive, three-dimensional, multi-sensorial engagement. They could not hide behind theoretical scaffolding or critiques of other exhibitions. We discovered that the curatorial maxim “show don't tell” is challenging for scholars who are trained to write. Despite these demands, Curatorial Dreaming's suspension of typical constraints (financial, political, logistical) emboldens scholars and museum professionals to play, ponder, and plan.

I had the honor and pleasure of conducting a Curatorial Dreaming workshop with Dr. Roma Sendyka's graduate students in Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in March 2017. Every Curatorial Dreaming workshop is unique: some are oriented toward translating research into exhibitions. Others engage curators, educators, artists, and community activists who seek to enhance and challenge museums and galleries. In Kraków, the students with whom I worked had already embarked on planning an intervention for the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum of Kraków (MEK). We toured the nineteenth- century ethnographic museum led by curator Magdalena Zych, and then convened at the fourteenth-century university to workshop the collective project of pluralizing the vision of Polishness offered by MEK's permanent exhibition. The students, several who are emerging curators, began by communicating their project proposals to me—an engaged but outside interlocutor—as well as to other Canadian colleagues, and peers from the local university and arts community.

“Workshop” can be both noun and verb; the sense of active workshopping was most apparent in this instance, as we exchanged ideas about Polish history, identity, legacies of the past, and strategies of representation.

In 1752—we do not know the exact date—a peasant named Jędrzej Skorupa from Gumniska, now a district of the city of Tarnów in southern Poland, sent a letter containing a heartbreaking plea for mercy to the owner of his village.

A few weeks earlier Skorupa had made a deal with trader Jakub Wróbel from Kraków, most probably of Jewish origin, but the deal quickly turned bad for the poor peasant. Skorupa sold a number of pigs—which were the property of the absentee village owner—but instead of money, he took from the trader only a note promising payment. Wróbel told him (over a beer) that Grotkowski—a manor official, almost certainly a landless nobleman, whose main job was to discipline the serfs and oversee their work—trusted him with credit.

The next chapters of this sad story are both easy and difficult to imagine today. When the money promised by Wróbel did not materialize, Grotkowski expected Skorupa to cover the owner's losses. Skorupa wrote:

However, a higher-ranking manor official intervened and sent both of them—scared Skorupa and furious Grotkowski—to Kraków to look for the dishonest trader and the money he owed. Predictably, Skorupa could not find Wróbel in Kraków.

Other traders promised to pay for the dishonest member of their guild, but said they needed time to collect the full amount. Grotkowski lost his patience. As the peasant told it:

After returning to the village Grotkowski confiscated Skorupa's property—nine cows and oxen. When his wife asked for the animals’ return, she was also beaten by Grotkowski. The desperate serf then tried to commit suicide: he cut his stomach with a razor.

Reading the first words of this sentence during the intervention, my voice trembled. Before its contents had sounded out, a somatic reaction signalled the resonance between the words and the surroundings. Although the intervention was preceded by lengthy preparations and intellectual work, the response to it came through an entirely different channel—a bodily one.

What were the premises of the action which took place in the Małopolska hut in the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków? The reconstructed interior of the hut was displayed as a somewhat generalized model in which traces of a person's presence, or how someone might live day-to-day, were lacking. The interior is presented in its formal decor. Finding yourself in such a space it is easy to believe in the truth of this image, or to forget how the peasantry normally lived. The image evoked doubts in me, and provoked questions among others, whether this is a true image of the village, whether it would be hard for us to acknowledge a village displayed in a different way, whether we are ashamed of the village, that is our (difficult) inheritance. Recognizing that a different image of the village than the one on display in museums exists—one which it is difficult to be proud of, what I was offering to the audience was the opportunity to reflect on the above questions. I decided to introduce Stefania Różewicz's account, entitled “Wieś mojego dzieciństwa” [The Village of My Childhood], included in Tadeusz Różewicz's book, Matka odchodzi [Mother Departs]. The village is described there as a dirty place, where the living conditions are very difficult, and people are not aware of the basic principles of hygiene, they live their lives based on superstitions. The village is not “like a picture,” the conditions of existence are very different from what we imagine, based on museum discourse.

I have had curatorial dreams for the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum of Kraków (MEK, est. 1911) since my first visit there in the mid-1990s. Just beginning my graduate training in cultural anthropology in a moment of deep disciplinary self-criticism, I understood my task as to highlight and seek creative solutions to unequal power relations between observer and observed, and the resulting distortions and silences in representations of culture that long defined the craft. I was also “returning” to Poland as a Jew. It was less clear what to make of the affective force that accompanied my encounter with the awkward traces of this long-suppressed, severed history.

How was it possible, I wondered, for masks displaying classic anti-Jewish caricatures to hang on the wall in a state-run museum—in post-Holocaust Poland—with no critical commentary? Why was a Catholic Holy Week rattle (Polish: terkotka) that is identical to a Jewish one (Yiddish: gragger) used for the spring holiday of Purim not labeled to highlight this object's cultural hybridity, but instead framed so as to erase mutual influences among Poland's diverse ethnic cultures? How could the massive Jewish presence in the pre-war Polish countryside be invisible here? And in a museum standing in the middle of Kraków historical Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz, no less.

Perhaps my shock was naïve—Indigenous people and those from the “developing world” have long been used to—if not numbed to—the pain of seeing their cultures distorted and misrepresented on museum walls throughout the Western world. And it is only in the last few decades that critical, long-marginalized voices have begun to be heard in and by museum institutions, primarily in societies that once had settler or overseas colonies. This “decolonial” sensibility driving museum critique in my home in North America has colored my gaze on MEK. Like Indigenous objects in Canada and elsewhere, many Jewish- related objects were rendered mute in places where once-vibrant “source” populations were destroyed or disempowered. But due to global movements of people—and movements for justice—such objects are being re-encountered and recognized by members of present-day “heritage communities” and other implicated subjects, setting the stage for their historical and cultural re-contextualization and social re-animation.

Indigenous and other subaltern approaches to museological justice have also inspired my approach to pursuing change.

In one of her feuilletons published on dwutygodnik.com, Joanna Tokarska—Bakir included—as an illustration—an image of a Polish village or a small town. The drawing—made by the hand of a child—depicts a road, houses, a horse pulling a cart. What differentiates this cultural text from the sketches of other children drawing their environment?

This horse, these roads, these houses would not be in this picture if it were not for Jewish culture. The composition of the picture is literally based on the Star of David, whose edges are demarcated by the contours of the roof, and the animal. It easy to speculate that the drawing, centering the symbol of a society whose historical existence was denied in the Polish collective consciousness for years, and “did not enter into the canon of thought,” might be a classroom illustration, created for the educational needs of the youngest members of the cultural group. This hypothesis becomes stronger when Tokarska-Bakir mentions that the drawing was found not far from a trashcan near the memorial to the Heroes of the Ghetto. Isn't this “strange drawing” a reflection of the Polish cultural imaginary and the role Jewish people play in it?

It has always been possible to treat museums and cultural events as an indicator of the historical imagery of a given society in a particular moment in time. The “museum boom” that took place in Poland after 2004, when the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising was created, makes this even more evident. The idea of “universal” museums devoted, for example, to rural culture, the history of a city, or a stage of social development like feudalism was abandoned in favor of museums addressing narrower themes, identity groups, or event horizons. Examples of such institutions are the Museum of Emigration in Gdynia (2015), the Przełomy [Upheavals] Center for Dialogue in Szczecin (2015), the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk (2007), the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (2005) and the Galicja Jewish Museum in Kraków (2004). How did the “new museology” movement influence the way cultural life is presented in museums that followed an older, Enlightenment- era paradigm?

The Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum of Kraków was founded in 1911 on the initiative and passion of its namesake.

Looking at the gallery of costumes which Halina Bittner-Szewczykowa designed for the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków in the first half of the 1960s, we noticed that in the cabinet there were only beautiful, colorful, ceremonial peasant garments on display. The clothing that we can admire in this striking vitrine forms a key part of Polish rural tradition, but the absence of other village garb seemed like a crucial oversight as we planned our intervention.

Based on historic photographs from the museum's archives, we considered a few key questions: Is “costume” generally associated only with Slavic, Catholic, and Polish tradition? Were forms of attire other than the sukmana—a traditional peasant coat visible in the village? What, for example, of Jewish or Roma attire? We wondered about the museum's aesthetic vision—is MEK supporting a social imaginary in which rural costume means eye-catching, ceremonial clothing? What of more humble daily attire? And why overlook the rest of the village social structure, with its own distinctive wardrobe? Where is the nobleman's cloak, the kontusz, the priest's cassock, or the Jew's long black belted chałat?

From the photographs we selected figures representing groups whose clothing we felt also belonged in the exhibit. We decided to crop the figures and print them as partially-transparent decals at a scale matching the mannequins in the display cases, and pasted them to the glass to create a kind of palimpsest. Our goal was not to completely block out the permanent exhibit, because in doing so we would obscure the representations of peasant life that did describe a slice of social reality. Our gesture—beyond simply adding in missing social actors—was meant to draw attention to the gap that we had noticed in the museum. Admiring the ceremonial clothing, it is easy for visitors to walk away thinking that this represents the totality of the village's social and sartorial landscape. We asked ourselves and our audience why we struggle to acknowledge these other aspects village life? Are we ashamed of them? Is the village a difficult legacy? Do these other outfits—and the village denizens they represent—invoke in us shame, fear, embarrassment, or simple ignorance We decided to leave our audience with these questions.

I had never dreamt about the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków (MEK). Nor had I had any wishes about it, either when I visited it, as required of students in the Polish People's Republic (PRL), or when I began to work with the collections, out of interest in forms of memory culture (with the exception, perhaps, of a pragmatic desire for fuller and more complete access to its archives). My own family roots among provincial craftsmen did link me to rural realities and myths inherited from pre-war society, but in accordance with the dominant attitudes of later, now urban, generations, I ignored this inheritance as dated and distant, so not really “mine.” I also shared my generation's impatience with the “folklore” that was irritatingly omnipresent in the times of communist Poland, intuitively perceiving its artificial and obnoxious form (simultaneously too strenuously fabricated and too strongly tied to very real ruralness). It was only the unexpected desire expressed by Erica Lehrer to reveal that which was hidden behind the trappings of Cepelia (PRL Poland's state-run arts and handicraft stores), making use of the Kraków museum's permanent exhibition as a ready-made laboratory for such thinking, that I was mobilized to ask the question: who am I, coming from a Polish village?

The slogan, “My museum, a museum about me,” welcoming visitors at the entrance to the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum of Kraków since 2008, prompts us to examine identity on an individual level. The permanent exhibition, however, depicts an idealized (rather than a specific) Polish village, thus the invitation to self-analysis can be understood in a general way: as a stimulus to consider the identity of a certain portion of society.

From the first time I visited the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków in 2010, I was acutely aware of what did not appear in the permanent exhibition. The displays seemed to present a never-never land of Polish folkways, a Poland without history, politics, poverty, resistance, and also without ethnic and religious minorities, especially Jews––my own people. Where Jews did appear, it was in the caricatured terms of Polish folklore, whose antisemitic qualities seemed lost on the museum. Today it still seems to me that the museum holds to a narrow and tendentious conception of its mission. For this reason, I was glad to participate in the limited and brief intervention to which the museum agreed in 2017, and to make photographs that might prolong that intervention––as photographs do––toward the possibility of deeper change in coming years.