Gdansk: 15-30.11, opening: 15.11, 19:00,IS Wyspa, ul. Doki 1/145 B

Warsaw: 24.11, 19:00, CSW, ul. Jazdów 2
Conception and text: Max Cegielski, Photo: Michał Szlaga, Video: Kuba Czerwiński 
globalprosperity.blox.pl

Today, Gdańsk Shipyard exists in collective awareness primarily as a venue where strikes took place and history was created, and not a place of hard and humdrum quotidian labour. Overwhelmed by symbols, sacred dates, names and political conflicts, we have forgotten that industrial action was not the only activity shipbuilders were involved in. The shipyard was their home, the venue where many of them came in their youth to receive training, the enterprise where they spent most of their lives. Their work gave them a sense of pride. Even now they feel attached to the local landscape: cranes, seagulls and vessels that they built with their own hands. Now ships are produced by qualified workers in China and Korea, who haven’t got the faintest idea of Occupational Safety and Health regulations, fixed working hours or the Solidarity. After some years, even cheaper, uneducated peasants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India cut the fleet into pieces.

Pondering where the Shipyard ends, where the ships produced here disappear and where the postulates of Solidarity have never been heard, we set out to Alang in India – home of one of the largest ship scrap yards worldwide. It is a place of ongoing struggle for basic occupational rights and workers’ dignity. At least five container ships built for India in Gdańsk in 1980 were scrapped here. They were launched when Poland was in the course of shaping its new mythology during the strikes of the era of Solidarity. Christening vessels with names of poets-saints, India, independent since 1947, transferred historic figures into the industrial epoch, thus merging modernity with ancient times.

In Alang we expected to see a burial ground, but instead we found a place where matter is born anew. Indeed, here the life of ships comes to an end, but other entities emerge in their place. Energy does not disappear, on the contrary, it is used again. Nothing is wasted, hundreds of thousands of people make a living on this industry. On the beach alone, twenty thousand workers toil during peak periods. Danger looms everywhere, a cut bow can fall off too soon, gases explode in engine rooms, objects fall down, asbestos contaminates the place – on average, one person dies here each day. Following this most difficult phase, ships are fragmented into smaller and larger parts, transported into the mainland, processed and sold. Here as well nobody has ever heard of safety regulations, but one of the workers asked: Am I supposed to die of hunger or of asbestos poisoning?






Presentation of the exhibition in Gdańsk embraces: exhibition of selected photographic works, slideshow and screenings of documentation from Alang and found footage video at the Wyspa Institute of Art; as well as presentation of selected photographs on the premises of Gdańsk Shipyard.

Presentation at the CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw embraces: lecture by Max Cegielski and comments by Adam Mazur, slideshow, screenings of video materials from Alang, conversations with shipbuilders from Gdańsk and found footage materials, debate.

Max Cegielski, initiator of the project, curator of the exhibition – journalist, writer, radio and TV presenter, cultural animator, traveller. Autor of books – reportages about India and other countries of the “Third World” (among others, Drunken on God, 2007; The Eye of the World. From Constantinople to Istanbul, 2009), and TV programmes.

Michał Szlaga – press photographer. Since 2000 he has kept record of transformations occurring on the premises of Gdańsk Shipyard. www.szlaga.com

Jakub Czerwiński, camera operator, cinematographer in, among others, documentaries A Screening at the Tatry Cinema (Silver Hobby-Horse for the Best Documentary at the Cracow Film Festival), Through Glass (Silver Tadpole for cinematography at the Camerimage Festival, special mention in the Young Cinema Competition at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia).