…I’m very, very tired. The reason for this is purely physical – I hardly got any Z’s last night, as I was on public transit between 11.30pm and 3.30pm and then waiting at the Poznan airport, drinking coffee at 4am (as soon as the airport cafe opened), and then flying, and I happened to have sat by the window in the front of the plane, so what I could see was the airplane wing and that massive tub-shaped engine thing, and the clouds below, and it was absolutely terrifying. I am terrified of flying – yes, me, who had spent the better part of the last nine years flying back and forth between two countries (Poland and the United Kingdom) – so being reminded of just how high above the ground I am, suspended in a metal box, every time I opened my eyes, was rather a terrifying prospect, so I tried to keep my eyes closed at all times and listened to the extended soundtrack from OBX (the Netflix masterpiece show).
At last, after landing, disembarking from the plane into the rainy atmosphere of Edinburgh, passing through passport control (‘Are you travelling alone?’ ‘With my mum, but she’s a bit behind,’ ‘Do you live here?’ ‘No,’ ‘So just for the weekend then?’ ‘Yes, it’s my graduation,’ ‘Congratulations,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘Thank you.’) and a bus ride on the 100 Airlink bus, my mum and I arrived in the centre of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, that is. Shandwick Place, Princes Street, they’re all familiar views, and none of the places we went today were new to me – I had been to literally all of these places before. And it felt utterly bizarre, considering the fact that I don’t live in Edinburgh anymore, I’m not a student at Edinburgh University anymore, and in fact, I first started studying at Edinburgh University almost seven years ago. Now, that’s a shocking number. (It also made me feel a bit emotionally numb, since I’ve no idea how to cope with such information!)
My attendance of the University of Edinburgh is a direct consequence of me receiving a scholarship to study abroad for the last two years of high school. At the time the fulfillment of my wildest dreams! Now? I simply cannot comment, because that was nine years ago. But I do believe I was extremely lucky and the experience gave me loads of, well, experiences and stuff, so it was a very good thing to have happened. Of course with hindsight you can say whatever you want about past events, you can even say something poetic like ‘the best thing that ever happened to me was the worst thing that ever happened to me’ or vice versa. I’m in no position to say any of such things because I’ve no divination skill and I believe most of the time, what happens is what was meant to happen, and there’s no other chain of events that could have taken place instead. (Not, really, due to fate, but rather due to the impossibility of changing the past, so what has already happened is the only thing that could have happened because any stretch of time can only happen once). (Of course, if we dig into parallel universes et cetera, maybe this statement is wrong. But I’m only a meagre geographer and a historian of design and material culture, so my education when it comes to bending the timespace is severely inadequate to discuss such matters).
Now I’m at the Library Cafe, putting what I’m thinking and feeling into words to try and get my head around the whole situation. After wandering around the campus, where hardly anything’s changed, I’ve resigned myself to the hope that tomorrow, at and after my graduation ceremony – for my undergraduate degree, which I had received nearly two years ago, five years after first starting out – I will feel different. Maybe with a more organised mind, finally feeling accomplished, complete, like I can permanently acknowledge the fact that I went to the University of Edinburgh and got a First Class degree here. I’ll leave the fact that I studied geography at university for consideration at a different occasion; the middle school me thought I would’ve studied modern languages or something like that. Anyway. The laptop’s running out of battery, and I’m getting hungry, so it’ll be time to feed this sleepy stomach of mine soon and maybe leave the campus and head towards our hostel.
Hope y’all are having a great old time and your minds are organised and not confused xxxxx
So long folks – it’s been almost a month since I posted, so it’s high time I pop in and do an update.
I’ve been in Poland for three weeks now and life’s been good, though the weather has not been merciful. It snowed a little here in my town, which was awesome, but today I wake up and it’s this weird mixture of snow on the ground and rain on the windows and I’m not quite sure what it’s meant to be so I’m just sitting at home enjoying lofi music for the first time in forever and, obviously, typing. I did a bit of French duolingo – finally – and enjoyed delicious Polish apples I got at Polomarket yesterday. (Polomarket stan forever).
Re the post title, Wrocław and Breslau are the same thing, it’s just Wrocław’s the Polish name for the city and Breslau’s the German name. I went there on Tuesday morning and returned on Wednesday afternoon, in time to eat the rest of my brother’s belated birthday cake and celebrate both Women’s Day and my dad’s birthday (he’s super old, will be turning 70 in too small of a number of years). Well, the celebrations were not elaborate, but let’s just say I celebrated them internally. Or maybe I didn’t. If I did that internally, how would you ever know?
I’ve got to head to the post office before it closes today but before I go, please have this little description of my trip, and a small selection of photos. The weather, again, was not too great, as it was cloudy the whole time, and cold. But Wrocław’s far enough away and I’d not been there since 2007, so I needed to document the things I (a) had not, and (b) would not have paid attention to back when I was 10 years old.
Proper post starts here
All in all, over the 24 hours in Wroclaw I visited:
National Museum in Wrocław,
Museum of Architecture in Wrocław (the only museum of this kind in Poland),
Plac Grunwaldzki, the home to four residential towers designed by Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak in 1967-1970 and constructed in 1970-1973,
The site of WUWA – Wohnen und Werkraum Ausstellung, in English meaning Living and Work Space Exhibition, organised in 1929 by the Silesian branch of Deutscher Werkbund (see more here: https://culture.pl/pl/wideo/drugie-zycie-osiedla-wuwa-we-wroclawiu-wideo). It consists of buildings that were built very quickly for that exhibition, and are still functioning, mostly fulfilling their original function, which is residential.
Below you’ll find the photos of Plac Grunwaldzki residential towers, snapshots from the WUWA site, and a few other buildings I encountered that I found interesting, including the three yellow residential blocks which I entitled “Zbyszko Trzy Cytryny” (Zbyszko Three Lemons, which is the name of a popular fizzy lemon-flavoured drink sold in Poland). I think it’s rather quite witty.
I was going to write this one earlier, but other things took over and I’m writing this now, better late than never!
A few weeks ago I decided to withdraw from the teacher training course I was doing at the University of Sussex. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but one of the reasons I can disclose here is that it just felt like the right thing to do at this point. I loved teaching at my placement school, I loved the work preparing the lessons and working with the students, and it was really fun getting to know all these special people. But when something doesn’t feel right to me, I can’t really just stick with it and ignore the gut feeling, so I found myself in a situation where I thought it was better to cut the course short rather than continue.
Eventually, I didn’t end up withdrawing permanently from the course, but taking a temporary withdrawal, which means that if I want to, I can come back on the course next January (2024) and pick up where I left off. I’m not sure at this point (it’s mid-February!) what route I’m going to take, whether I’m going to go back on the course or not. Only time will tell! But I thought it appropriate to share on here, as clearly I won’t be sharing any teaching-related content and/or you might be surprised I’ve got time to do non-teaching-related things if I share such things on here. C’est la vie. Sometimes things go the way you didn’t expect them to go!
Last Friday, on February 10th, I attended my first graduation ceremony ever. The weird thing is, this ceremony is just the first of two I will attend this year – the second one’s been lined up for months in a bit over a month, at the end of March. And the one I attended last Friday was not for my first, but for my second degree!
So, dressed in this heavy gown and a stupid hat with a frill to top it off, I walked across the stage, intimidated by the blasting lights and being so exposed to hundreds of people sitting in that very room at the Brighton Centre, just on the Brighton seafront. I shook the hand of the University’s vice-chancellor and walked off, and backstage I received my degree certificate, which joined my little gift bundle every graduant found on their seat, which most importantly included a cool alumni tote bag and an enamel pin with the uni’s star-shaped logo I always found adorable.
And the sunset right after the ceremony – around 4.30-5pm – was gorgeous, so my mum and I took a walk on the beach and generally enjoyed a very nice-weathered day in one of my favourite cities.
So now I’m officially a Master of Arts in the History of Design and Material Culture!
To bash behaviour and not the person, let me say – Dylan Mulvaney’s TikTok videos and ‘rise to fame’ based on a series of videos titled ‘Days of Girlhood’ are a sick joke. Why? Because they’re a mockery of women, in plain sight.
Some thoughts on the change of feminism
Gone are the times when I considered myself a feminist. Back in February 2015, during half-term holidays, I visited my friend who at the time was in her third year of studying economics at the University of Warwick. I made great use of my time there going to Tesco and buying Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (Phish Food was a must!) and frequenting the university campus, trying to take in all the studious, academic atmosphere that being around university students granted. I remember I felt freedom and wondered endlessly what university will be like for me – I longed to finally be done with my A Levels and go to university!
One day I visited the campus bookstore and bought a book – “Reclaiming the F Word” by Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, with its white cover with purple and green bold typography. I remember feeling bold – that day I also bought Fairtrade Clipper coffee, and thought of myself as a fighter for a better world, educating myself on serious matters such as gender inequality and Fairtrade bananas. (I also bought a book about the history of the Fairtrade movement. I never finished reading it, though).
The book talked about what used to be considered feminist issues – pay inequality, celebrity and diet culture, cosmetic surgery, domestic labour, sexual freedom… generally, things that affected women.
Feminist today concerns itself with a rather different set of problems. More and more visibly, feminism is concerned with the problem of men – specifically, men who seem to have decided that they want to be girls. A perfect example of such specimen is Dylan Mulvaney, an overwhelmingly popular TikToker who for almost a year now has been posting on their account a series named ‘Days of Girlhood’.
‘Days of Girlhood’ are a manifestation of delusion
What Dylan Mulvaney presents in the ‘Days of Girlhood’ videos are a one-dimensional caricature of what they perceive girls to be. I’m nothing if not open-minded, but I don’t believe that such passion Dylan displays for becoming a girl is healthy in any way. Dylan started putting on make-up, wearing pink clothes, high heels, and tight clothing that is meant to reveal their body in a stereotypically ‘feminine’ way.
If you’ve read some of my other views on ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, you’ll know that I don’t like using these words, mostly because I haven’t figured out yet how to use them without propelling the stereotypes of how women and men ‘naturally’ behave or dress. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word ‘feminine’ means “having characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for a woman”. Therefore, it would be theoretically appropriate to say that Dylan Mulvaney dresses in a feminine way. However, generally any person could rephrase this as “Dylan Mulvaney dresses like a woman” and this would be accepted as a correct paraphrase. But I don’t think this would actually be correct. You can’t just say that “women dress this way”, “women dress that way” – so you can’t dress like a woman! There are many women who don’t dress in high heels, tight, revealing clothes, make-up, and colorful childish hairpins (see pictures below). But for people like Mulvaney, this doesn’t seem to matter – a woman is defined by the clothes she wears, the make-up she puts on, and the way she acts and behaves. Nothing else, because apparently trans-women are women – and there even appear claims that trans-women are biological women, which just clearly isn’t true. But that’s not the point of the post today.
Dylan Mulvaney presents themself as a sick caricature of a woman who is delusional enough to think that by changing the way they dress, they can somehow alter both their chromosomes and their biological age and magically become a girl. To whomever would like to approve this – know that this isn’t possible. It’s an unhealthy way to reinforce the stereotypes surrounding the two sexes in the society and limit the perception of women as creatures who can’t walk straight in the woods, mostly because they’re wearing an outfit totally inappropriate for their environment, and spend much of their time being overdramatic and caring about their make-up and clothes.
Don’t let people like Dylan Mulvaney keep boxing women into these harmful stereotypes and spreading behaviours based on delusions and clearly an unstable sense of self.
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw – or what I like to call “MoMA Warsaw,” though its actual shorthand is MSN (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej) – has a new building under construction. That building is located in Plac Defilad, slap in the middle of central Warsaw. Plac Defilad, meaning ‘Parade Grounds’, is a communist urban fossil created in 1955 as a central square in Warsaw for the purpose of public gatherings – for example, parades. It is adjacent to the eastern side of the infamous Palace of Culture and Science, a ‘gift from Stalin’ to Poland, built in the early 1950s in the Socialist Realism style, designed by Soviet architect Lev Rudnev.
Part 1 – What should the MSN look like?
I happened to see the said building under construction in back on New Year’s Eve, when I visited my brother in Warsaw. Being used to the sight of construction sites – after all, I live in Brighton, and I visit London quite often – I think I paid attention to the building primarily because it was obstructing my view of the Palace of Culture, my favourite building in Warsaw, which I am used to seeing from all sides – the eastern side included.
MSN obstructing the view of the Palace of Culture, from the eastern side. Photo taken 31 December 2022.
This museum is not to the taste of almost anyone, and I am very happy about that.If everyone liked this building, it would even mean that something went wrong in its design.
Paweł Mrozek, Museum of Modern Art of All Poles, Architektura i Biznes, 23 January 2023.
I disagree and agree with that. I don’t think there’s any known building that is to the taste of everyone. But if a building existed that was to the taste of everyone – everyone liked it – would that be such a bad thing? I think that’d be a very good thing. A resolution of a conflict between the different tastes. Of course, a natural want of a human is to feel comfortable in their surroundings, and potentially even find beauty in their environment – whether built or ‘natural’. So if a building is built that I like the look of, that’s going to make me happy – seeing it is going to bring me pleasure. (I hope I’m not saying something outrageous here).
The project that won the competition was designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, an American architecture firm based in New York City. The firm’s realised projects are located largely in the United States, primarily Maryland and New York. On the firm’s website, you can find more ever more flattering digital renders of the project. I suggest you go and take a look. They look pretty – but also many of them don’t look earthly. You rarely get a colour palette or lighting present in these renders in the real world!
The renders Mrozek (or A&B) decided to include in the article are below – the facade of the ‘white part’ of the Museum from the east, and the design for the renewed Plac Defilad:
Of course, the trick architectural firms always use for renders of green spaces is that they are always presented as actually green – meaning, it’s either late spring or summer. Occasionally, you get some gorgeous golden colours of autumn, some colourful leaves decorating the ground like an all-organic rug, and the trees still largely covered in abundant amounts of leaves.
Looking at the render of the proposed new Plac Defilad, I have to say – I really like it. It looks pretty – the slender trees with a sufficient volume and joyful shades of green (of course made possible by the lighting made by the computer, not the Sun), their long shades, the interesting black facade of the TR Warszawa theatre, created along with the main MSN building in the same project. And, importantly, the view of the entrance (one of four) to the Palace is unobstructed when looking straight at it.
The white facade in the photo on the left? Well… It’s a pretty facade. It looks interesting, though its reference to Le Corbusier’s pilotis is more than obvious. Does it fit this space? I’m not sure. I’ll have to see it when it’s built. The lighting in the render, again, looks better than life. But the more often I look at it, the less I mind it.
About the MSN architects – Thomas Phifer and Partners
I took a minute – or actually, many, given the length – to have a read through Thomas Phifer and Partners’ “philosophy” (available on their website). It starts with the author’s description of how they’re sitting in front of a painting called Abstract Painting by Ad Reinhardt. I found out that . In this philosophy, the author explicitly makes some arguments about the purpose of the art gallery or museum:
A museum gallery should, then, by the action of its formal and expressive qualities, lead the viewer to that contemplative state, inducing the body to rest in silence while simultaneously opening its pores—just as I widened my eyes in front of Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting—in order become a fully quiet and attentive body.
I’m not an expert on art galleries or contemporary art even less, and I can tell you now that when I last visited Tate Modern, I left after 20 minutes because I was totally bored by the things on display. Of course I plan to go again and see the whole exhibition, to find things I will consider more interesting. But this supports the point that contemporary art isn’t easy to read. Mrozek uses this notion in arguing that the MSN building isn’t meant to appeal to the average Pole, because – and here he leverages statistical data from GUS (Central Statistical Office, Glowny Urzad Statystyczny) – the average Pole does not frequent art galleries.
Mrozek states:
Ninety percent of Poles are artistic troglodytes and cave paintings.
Paweł Mrozek, Museum of Modern Art of All Poles, Architektura i Biznes, 23 January 2023.
And now, who can argue with that?
Now, it’s obvious that Mrozek’s exaggerating in this sentence. So let’s turn to a more proper argument of his:
Most people like only the tunes they’ve heard once before. If we don’t commune with art on a daily basis, don’t live in cities full of good contemporary architecture, then any new foreign melody in the space only irritates and frightens us. But this is not an argument against the tune, but unfortunately only a testimony to limited horizons.
Paweł Mrozek, Museum of Modern Art of All Poles, Architektura i Biznes, 23 January 2023.
Here, he states that familiarity is a condition for most people to like something (though, of course, being familiar with something does not automatically mean one likes it – in this case, it’s simply a prerequisite). His article is quite long, but generally the point is that the point of art is to make new, unfamiliar things, and try new approaches, otherwise it loses all its purpose and meaning. Which is fair. His argument stands well. If the MSN’s role, and art’s role, is to push the new and unfamiliar into the everyday lives of ordinary people, it’s setting off to be doing its role quite well. We’ll see how it looks when it’s finished, and what people’s reactions are then – one month, six months, twelve months after it’s opened.
Mrozek’s Museum of Mocking Art
Mrozek’s mocking proposal for the Museum of Modern Art Reconciling the Taste of All Poles looks like this:
Not gonna lie, the building looks quite cool in the second picture from left – golden hour, the tall tower echoing the pointy silhouette of the Palace of Culture. The ferris wheel also looks impressive – like the London Eye, in the centre of the country’s capital, but elevated several storeys above the ground level. And the attention to detail in this render is praiseworthy.
There are lots of familiar sights all merged together in this render. And after reading Mrozek’s entire article, it makes sense why this should look funny. I just want to say that it doesn’t look that bad in the render, though of course it would look tragic in the physical, real fabric of Warsaw. So let’s leave it where it is – on the computer.
Part 2 – Bright colours mocked by Mrozek, & Yinko Ilori
But to refer still to Mrozek’s mocking proposal for the “Museum of Modern Art Reconciling the Taste of All Poles”, I found this part truly funny:
… the top floors will provide escapades for toddlers, including classrooms for classes in designing the cheerful colors of the blocks’ thermo-modernization …
Aside from the sad examples of the “cheerful colors” themselves (sorry for the American spelling on behalf of the A&B English version… I stand for British/Canadian spelling when English is used on this side of the Atlantic!) that I have witnessed time and again in my short but cheerful and colourful (clearly) life, this made me think of Yinka Ilori. Yinka Ilori is a British Nigerian artist & designer whose selected works are currently on display on the first floor of the Design Museum in London.
I visited the Design Museum with my friend who’s primarily Finnish and is doing a PhD in some mysterious (to me) field of mathematical physics or computer science – I think it’s some form of a crossover of these fields, but I’m not really sure. My friend really liked Ilori’s work, and as he said, it was primarily for the colour palette. I, however, really disliked the work for its colours, and thought that maybe if they used a different colour palette, I would’ve disliked it less (or maybe even liked it). Ilori’s work makes heavy use of really bright colours and simple shapes – squares, triangles, circles, semi-circles, simple curves. For example, the photo below shows a mural Ilori was commissioned for and created in Harrow, a district of London:
I am no stranger to bright colours on flat building facades. My whole childhood, I was surrounded by them. I remember vividly when I was in elementary school and my school was undergoing a thorough project of repainting the whole building – the grey facade that had been the same (just dirtier and more worn with each year) since the school’s opening in 1974.
I have two juicy pictures for you, of a vocational school I pass on my way from home to my grandma’s flat. The pictures have not been augmented – they show what the school looks like on a nice, cloudy day. This school had been subjected to being painted in bright colours sometime in the last 20 years.
These photos show why I’m not a fan of bright colours. There are buildings with facades that fight for themselves, without people’s intervention, particularly in their colour schemes. Particularly in Poland, this tendency to paint flat facades of thermo-modernised buildings in different colour combinations – whether pastel or stronger in tone – looks particularly absurd, even infantile, childish. So I agree with Mrozek’s sneering treatment of the bright-coloured thermo-modernised buildings.
I’m not a fan of Snooper’s Paradise. I never was. But I go there from time to time, to see what’s new, to see what’s being sold and get some food for my eyes – searching for inspiration and whatnot, things like that.
Snooper’s Paradise is a pretty well-known shop in Kensington Gardens, a very narrow and usually overcrowded pedestrian street in Brighton, in North Laine. I hate walking down (or up) that street because it takes a lot longer than it should. There’s a bunch of overpriced shops in this street which are a magnet for visitors and trendy residents of B&H (Brighton & Hove) alike. And Snooper’s a nest for pretentious vintage fashion fans and other people in their early 20s who clearly don’t have anything else to spend money on, not even charity. Whatever.
But sometimes, as I said, I go there, and sometimes I take pictures. Last time I went, I took pictures. And I put them in this post, below this text.
Just what it says on the tin – long story short, I was in a boring lecture on the first Friday of the term (and of 2023 as well) and I was surfing the web, then an ad popped up advertising cheap flights within Europe, so I started looking. There still are many countries in Europe that I haven’t been to, and after searching for the best deals I decided I’d go to France. Yes, I’d been to France before – on my Paris trip in September 2017. But that was over five years ago, so I decided I’d go again – to Lyon this time!
The advantage of Lyon is that it’s very close to one of Le Corbusier’s most known architectural designs, namely the Couvent de la Tourette in Eveux – a Dominican monastery in the hills just a half-an-hour ride from Lyon’s city centre. The design for the building began in 1953, construction started in 1956 and finished in 1961. In 2016, the monastery was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for being “an outstanding contribution to the modern movement” – among 16 other buildings designed by Le Corbusier.*
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1321/ UNESCO World Heritage Convention. The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement. Accessed 21 January 2023.
Yeah, I know, surprise! As I’m writing this, it’s just past 10pm and I’m sitting on a Southern train to Brighton from East Croydon. I spent the last two weeks in Poland, mostly chilling at home, buying books, drinking coffee with various people in various places, and marvelling at how brown, grey, and yet still very intense everything looked back in Torun.
Warsaw, where I arrived on Friday, was a different story – way more sunny, and not as vivid brown, mostly because I was mostly in the very urbanised, concretey parts of Warsaw while I was there – until today. I got to see all of my family, some friends, and eat a lot of Polish food which should be enough to last me several months! Haha.
This time I haven’t done anything in the area of rounding up a year, reflecting, making resolutions, etc. etc. Maybe I’m getting old, I just turned 25 about a week ago (I had an amazing birthday cake!! made by my Mum, see photo below – I did the decorations on top, it was inspired by Taylor Swift’s album Midnights which I love) and now I can technically say I’m in the second half of my twenties which almost makes it late twenties which is insane. Anyway, here’s to me turning officially more adulty every year.
Hope you had a good time wherever you were and whatever you were doing in the last few weeks, and let’s make this January a good one x
PS I also took some photos in Poland, I may upload some to the blog later, keep an eye out.
As I sit down in the Jubilee Library to write this post, WordPress prompts me: “What is your favourite cartoon?” Dude, what does this have to do with my greatest success?
But, to be fair, what I am going to write about has a little to do with cartoons. Because living in Brighton can feel a bit cartoonish sometimes. And my greatest success in life is getting to live in Brighton.
See photos attached – all taken on rather cloudy or otherwise grim days, but even then the city doesn’t fail to entertain with all its colours!
Here is where my draft apparently saved but didn’t actually save, so I had to re-write the post. Some original emotions may have gotten lost… I apologise for that on behalf of the Jubilee Library guest wifi.
So, see, Brighton is great. It really is. I have no regrets about moving to Brighton, it was in fact one of my favourite things I ever did. I have regrets about going to the uni here, but it’s too little, too late! My grade is out – I got a 69.57 average, which is just 0.43 below distinction, but WHO CARES, RIGHT?! It’s not like 0.43 of a point destroyed my self-esteem, not at all. But no, my self esteem isn’t that fragile, I like to think – I’m not 11 anymore – but it would’ve felt a hell of a lot better to have gotten distinction. But what can a girl do. Not much.
I’m turning 25 in less than four days and I’ve read somewhere that your brain stops developing when you’re 25. So I guess the peak of my intellectual and artistic activity may have passed – probably years ago – but we’ll see as the future comes. And the future comes every day. How nice of it.
Now I’m gonna go back to watching Girlboss, now that I’ve finished season three of Emily in Paris. They’re nice background noises, perfect to add a bit of colour to the dull greyness of my neighbourhood, now that I’m back in my family home for Christmas. Maybe I’ll post some more while I’m home – stay tuned, as always. And remember to leave a comment!
kotersey 