Akademia Ruchu

Akademia Ruchu [Movement Academy] began creating performances in the 1970s and 1980s as part of numerous anti-communist activities in the spirit of social resistance, which ultimately led to the creation of the anti-communist solidarity movement in Poland. Presented as photographs and a video at the Artists’ Street, these performances manifest the mutually reinforcing relationship between public space and mass action, as if one depended on the other to reveal its full potential in and for civic action. Part behavioral theater, part theater of the absurd, this loose transdisciplinary artistic formation straddled a broad range of expressions, from visual to live art, eschewing the art gallery in favor of public space or other non-institutional sites.

Helmed by Wojciech Krukowski (1944–2014), Akademia Ruchu deployed strategies that would currently be deemed civil disobedience. Their peaceful methods of disrupting the typical flow of daily life and its pedestrian activities (pun intended) can be seen in Potknięcie, which consisted of Akademia Ruchu members repeatedly stumbling around before a public of unsuspecting passers-by. Attentive pedestrians may have noticed that this unfolded in front of the former Communist party headquarters.

Realized with stealth and speed a year before martial law, Sprawiedliwość jest ostoją mocy i trwałości Rzeczypospolitej involved performers lifting a banner bearing the motto of the Palace of Justice as a slogan for a silent show of popular support for the registration of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” (NSZZ “Solidarność”). Krukowski’s closeness to Solidarność’s leader Lech Wałęsa would only strengthen the relationship between Akademia Ruchu’s respective movements and their common sense for making history.

Text: Claire Tancons