Agnieszka Grzybek talks with Beata Chmiel, leader of the Citizens of Culture.
Agnieszka Grzybek: Who are the Citizens of
Culture (Obywatele Kultury)?
Beata Chmiel: They are volunteers in
a movement aimed at changing the way in which we form our cultural goals, as
well as rules of management and financing of culture in Poland. The movement
arose spontaneously from a civic revolt wanting to protect the constitutional
right to access to culture. Not long after that, we collected 100.000
signatures in favour of increasing governmental funding of culture to 1% of the
yearly budget, which, especially when compared to army funding, is not really a
lot. It should be noted that this movement had specific goals from the very
beginning: for example, we proposed task-oriented financing of cultural
education, creating equal chances for access to institutions and cultural goods, assistance for programmes
promoting readership, developing collections of contemporary art and purchasing
contemporary musical compositions.
Initially signed by a few hundred of the most noted Polish professors,
artists, composers and writers, the petition -addressed to the Prime Minister- gathered over 100,000 signatures. That's the
history of the Citizens of Culture - a movement
calling for the practical implementation of rights established in the Polish
Constitution. This May, just a year and a half after creating our petition, the
Cultural Treaty (Pakt dla Kultury) was signed. This is a special situation,
because it is generally thought that the state ought to contact only formalised institutions, while this pact was
signed by the Prime Minister with a grassroots
movement.
Agnieszka Grzybek: How did you manage to
build such rich social support? According to the prevailing opinion, Polish cultural capital is really small; citizens are focussed
on their personal lives and find no need to engage themselves in anything.
Beata Chmiel: There are a few issues
here. First, virtually everyone signed the petition: people from big and small
cities, people of all ages and professions - nurses, teachers, doctors,
librarians. I think that such strong support originated from the fact that,
during the last twenty years, culture in Poland was highly neglected. The
results are now plain to see - for example, the low cultural capital quotient. Every person that signed our pact, as
well as those people we hadn't reached, understood that culture is an added
value, a means of building competence, it creates opportunities for development,
enables communication, builds cultural capital.
As recent years have shown, building a modern communicative language is
extremely important, also in politics.
Second, we found the perfect moment. It just so happened that our
resistance started at the 2009 Congress of Culture (Kongres Kultury), organised
in Kraków by the Ministry of Culture. And, as Polish tradition has it, people
got together and began to talk. Not about how fabulous it was, but about why,
if culture is supposedly thriving, all outward signs point to the opposite. One
result of these talks was the recognition of a demand for an increase in
cultural funding. Apart from that, various forums and grassroot committees were
established to solve specific problems - for example, a forum on visual arts
took on the task of improving the way managers of art galleries are chosen. In
order to give the public media a clean slate and free them from political
influence, our civil committee on public media prepared new legislation. The
civil forum for book access backed the librarians and libraries in opposition
to a plan of an amendment act to the cultural activities law, which would have
enabled merging libraries with other institutions. Such legislation had already
been enacted in the past, and it resulted in a third of all libraries closing
down. Several thousand library branches, which gave people easy access to
books, just vanished into thin air.
This tension, based on outside circumstances, resulted in solidarity and
cooperation between forums. The presidential campaign in 2010 and the
parliamentary campaign in 2011 were also important factors. During that
presidential campaign, the subject of culture became a part of the electoral discourse for the first time. Every
presidential candidate that mattered felt obliged to give a statement of policy
and signed our petition, thereby making themselves responsible for acting for
change in the way Polish culture is financed and managed.
[continued]
You can download the interview in full by clicking on the PDF button at the top of the page.
Beata Chmiel – cultural manager, assistant director of the National Museum, a
leader of the Citizens of Culture movement (www.obywatelekultury.pl), vice-chair of
the Cultural Treaty task force of the Chancellery of the
Prime Minister of Poland.
Agnieszka Grzybek is a feminist activist, journalist and gender equality expert who has
been involved in the women’s movement in Poland since 1997. She is a graduate
from the Polish Philology Department at Warsaw University and the Post-Graduate
School of Journalism. 2002-2005 she was a member of the Programme-Consultative
Council at the Governmental Plenipotentiary for Equal Status of Women and Men
and the EQUAL Monitoring Committee. She is currently programme coordinator for
Gender and Equality at the office the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Warsaw and a
member of the National Council of the Polish Greens (Zieloni).