What international artistic event is organized in Bolesławiec? A girl we ask shrugs her shoulders. – "I don't know, maybe the Ceramics Festival?" Yes, she has heard about the ceramic-and-sculpture symposium; after all, it takes place every year, but she cannot say for how many years. A moment later, from the next person, we learn that this year's symposium is apparently the fourth.
"The ceramic-and-sculpture symposium promotes our city wonderfully," the residents of Bolesławiec say. And they themselves do not know what that is supposed to mean. It is difficult to find someone who can explain what the city actually gains from it. "The symposium promotes it," repeated like a mantra, is enough. Because apart from the symposium, there are also other events in the city. Big events where people can have fun and consume sausages and beer. People know about such events and attend them. The symposium is for promotion; there is no need to know anything more about it.
Paper and Clay
It is a pity that this ignorance is often accompanied by the conviction that the symposium will shape itself out of clay, and for free at that. What is there to spend money on? Clay is not expensive, after all; studios are free, accommodation is cheap, and there is no Holiday Inn in Bolesławiec. So the already modest symposium budget can be cut even further. And the commissioner, Krystyna Gay-Kutschenreiter, can spend another year wondering where to obtain funding.
Few people realize that the symposium is not only clay and studios made available free of charge. It also includes exhibitions, for example. And a catalogue presenting the artists' works, which, nota bene, consumes the most money: it has to be printed on good paper because it travels out into the world. And halls where sculptures made during the symposium are exhibited, most often in large museums and galleries. And the symposium staff... All of this together costs around PLN 70,000.
Two Zlotys
Where can so much money be obtained? The city will contribute some, because the symposium is, after all, its showcase. The Association of Artists from Wrocław will contribute some, since if artists want a symposium, they should sponsor it themselves as well. Perhaps the European Union will add something. Despite this, funding is difficult to obtain. Therefore, although the symposium could develop to an increasingly higher level, it cannot gain the necessary momentum.
It brings a tear to the eye—it has already been forty years. And every year costs so much. How much beer and how many sausages could be bought for that, how many concerts and fairs could be paid for! Instead, the entire benefit of the symposium visible to the layperson is a few shells at enormous expense, and the catalogue. But are this amount of money really so enormous? After calculating, it turns out that the cost of the symposium is less than two zlotys per resident of Bolesławiec.
If There Were an Airport
This year's symposium will be attended by 23 artists, including 9 people from, among other places, Taiwan, Ukraine, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Canada. There were more applications, but the Bolesławiec symposium is unable to accept more participants. The obstacle is often the artists' requirements, for whom a private studio and a room with a bathroom are an obvious standard.
Participants in the symposium often ask where the airport is in Bolesławiec. Never mind that there is none; what matters is how foreign artists assess the city, viewing it through the prism of the symposium. The fact is, the symposium promotes the city and is organized at an international level. It is known in the United States, Argentina and Germany. It attracts respected artists. It does not attract the residents of Bolesławiec.
It is a pity that we cannot appreciate the symposium, which, organized for several decades, has become one of the brighter points on our city's cultural map. We still know little or even nothing about it and treat it as a pompous, unnecessary event on which enormous sums are spent. Supposedly it promotes the city, but we still begrudge the sausages...
Katarzyna Pieniądz