342 Creating independent municipal collections could fit within this scheme. Do we really need municipal collections? It’s hard to say. Unfortunately, there is no research on the topic. I would reserve the term municipal collection for art collections set up for a particular city, rather than financed by that city. That sort of art I call the art of the city. It’s unequivocally united with specific spaces of the city and characterized by multimedia (music, literature, photography, urban installations, performance, etc...), sponsored by the city or other donors. I would distinguish such collections from art collections – mostly contemporary – financed from the municipal budget, as well as so-called history museums in certain cities. Municipal collections, in other words, aim at documenting a given city as a collective, multimedia work of art. (…) The category of locality has undergone a wave of criticism in recent years. It carries the threat of fetishizing a certain communal aspect, which undergoes experimentation in the field of art. One of the basic premises of this type of project is to bring about specific change. This is a problem described by Miwon Kwon, among others. Locality in contemporary art is a topic, rather than a characteristic. Miwon Kwon describes the process of splitting art from a place and relating it the performative urban collective. This process is both social and artistic. It leads, rather, to experimentation with ephemeral municipal communities than to experimentation between artists with local communities. interviewed by Ewelina Bartosik
Ewa Rewers, Ph.D – philosopher and cultural theorist, director of the Department of Urban Culture at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Poznań. Author of many books on urban culture and issues related to theories of modernism and postmodernism in language and culture, such as Społeczna świadomość językowoartystyczna (Linguistic-Artistic Social Awareness, publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe uam, Poznań 1991), Język i przestrzeń w poststrukturalistycznej filozofii kultury (Language and Space in the Post-structuralist Philosophy of Culture, publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe uam, Poznań 1996), Postpolis. Wstęp do filozofii ponowoczesnego miasta (Post-polis. Introduction to Postmodernist Urban Philosophy, Universitas, Kraków 2005) and coeditor of Sztuka – kapitał kulturowy polskich miast (Art – Cultural Capital of Polish Cities, publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe uam, Poznań 2010), Miasto w sztuce – sztuka miasta (City of Art – Art of the City, publisher: Universitas, Kraków 2010).