It has lost the space of a home, nature and spiritual craftsmanship, that takes care of the enrootment and sacrum. It’s about a space, that knows and respects the laws of geomancy, has its own spiritual architecture, memory, mystery and a tale, written in signs and symbols. Crisis of culture, that the modern man experiences in an increasing extent, can break a revival of the Place. But what does it mean today to give back the birth to the Place? We encounter the examples of re-managing, rebuilding, reminding, reconstructing, or revitalizing of places, that were abandoned, ruined, post-industrial, meant to be forgotten, ecologically poisoned. Krasnogruda, in which our Meeting will take hold, is one of those places. But for the real rebirth we need more - a culture, which will organically revive the Place, offering a true response to our deep longing and counter our homesickness. Perhaps some of you remember about our idea to reborn an old, ruined and abandoned manor house once belonging to the family of our great emigrée poet Czeslaw Milosz. Happily we succeeded, and during last summer, for the centenary of Milosz’s birth we opened an International Center for Dialogue in Krasnogruda. At the same time it was an inauguration of our country, Poland’s, presidency in European Union, and we had here our president Bronislaw Komorowski to have an opening speech. Krasnogruda is situated in one of the most charming corners of this part of Europe, right on the Polish-Lithuanian border. Its rise commands a panoramic view on the unpolluted, post-glacial landscape of hills, lakes and forests that stretch further, over the border, into the neighbouring Russia (Oblast Kaliningrad), Lithuania, Belarus and Poland. It is the location of a manor with a spacious park, the place of great importance for Milosz’s life and writing.
The Meeting „Rebirth of Place” is the way how we want to celebrate our anniversary of „20+2” years of activities of the Borderland Foundation and the Center Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations. This Meeting we intend to be divided into the „7 days of meeting”, from Saturday, April 28th to Friday, May 4th 2012, the events to be held in Sejny and Krasnogruda.
The meeting, just like our other meetings, will be international and interdisciplinary in character and gather people from different walks of life around the world. The participants, often already co-operating with us, will get acquainted with our masters, i.e. the persons who have direct influence on our work or represent the important ideas inspiring us spiritually, artistically or socially. Thus, each day will be crowned by „An Evening with a Master,” combining his/her personal tale with song, music, film etc.
The hosts of some of the days of the meeting will be particular studios of Borderland. Each will prepare a presentation of their work inviting to it their local partners and outside visitors. All of this will be accompanied by theatrical performances, film shows, book presentations, authorial readings, exhibitions and multimedia installations.
We mean the „20+2” meeting to be also a „plus” event in the fact that it will be open towards the future and things to be conceived there. We have restored Czesław Miłosz’s Manor and on June 30th, we opened the International Centre for Dialogue in Krasnogruda. Only now we should be ready to present concrete plans of its activities in the future. Born are new studios of organic work in our „small homeland”, new projects on the Polish-Lithuanian borderland and Eastern Partnership, and we enter a new phase of the realization of the „educational utopia” in the form of the Borderland School and training of modern „bridge builders”; there are also new projects developed in Europe and other borderlands of the world we actively participate in. We shall use the occasion of the meeting not only to talk about these ventures and ideas presenting their authors and the co-operating with us institutions, but also to invite others to partnership and make the „7 days of meeting” a platform of dialogue about the perspectives of our future co-operation.
Krzysztof Czyżewski