Trans-Peripheral Cultural Diplomacy, or the Export of Socialist Modernity: Exhibition Histories of Włocławek 'Fajans'

• In Event: Transnational and Trans-Ideological Connections: Cultural Relations between the Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe and the Capitalist West II

Abstract

The paper re-examines East-West cultural relations during the Cold War from a trans-peripheral perspective, looking at exhibition histories of vernacular objects. It explores the entangled networks of economic and cultural connections between the region's semi-peripheries. The research explores international exhibition histories of Włocławek "Fajans" during the period of détente in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The factory-produced and hand-painted ceramics are interpreted as representative products of socialist modernization.
Based on new archival research, the paper considers the circulation of mass-produced Włocławek "Fajans" ceramics in the context of administrative decentralization in socialist Poland and related cultural regional politics in order to map understudied transnational encounters on a smaller scale. It represents a second stage of research on the peripheral networks and movements that developed in connection with the socialist cultural politics of working-class artistic engagement and artistic practice as labor. The first stage of research on the foreign exhibitions of Włocławek "Fajans" in the Socialist Bloc demonstrated the importance of exchanges that took place within regional cultural and economic infrastructures.
While the circulation of the "Fajans" object in state-socialist countries was realized within the framework of the politics of the promotion of working-class culture, the paper questions the exhibition strategies, rhetoric, and reception of "Fajans" in capitalist European countries outside the centers. Drawing on recent archival research, it problematizes the exhibitions in Austria (Vienna 1979), Spain (Madrid 1978, Salamanca 1979), and Sweden (Stockholm 1985) and develops the notion of trans-peripheral cultural diplomacy, focusing on entangled regional economic and cultural networks.

Author

• Karolina Majewska-Güde, U of Warsaw (Poland)