Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read Online Free PDF Page B

every single day, I’m not strictly one of them, I’m a fake: a middle class overeducated Polish girl, who is there seduced by the cultural lure of the West, rather than led by material necessity. The gigantic rent-a-car companies sponsor billboards telling us “Welcome to London”, but we couldn’t be further from our Western dream here: we are, of course, in Luton, the biggest transit space for Eastern Europe’s migrants, travellers, small-time businessmen, British working class youths in flip flops going to Ibiza and, as the posters everywhere are suspecting/informing us, we might be human traffickers and all sorts of frauds, crooks and cheats, who, as the posters suggest, speak with thick Eastern European accents. As British Airways is well beyond my league, I travelled, travel and will be travelling with my compatriots on those crying-children-ridden cattle cars, until there’s any job they can possibly take.
    One look at my birth date – 1983 – will tell you the whole story of my getting around the world. Born when borders were still a serious business indeed, I didn’t really experience the incapability of travelling, especially as my parents were small entrepreneurs typical for the early 90s era of “transition”.
    The trip back can be quite different. If any academic/culture-workerfriends from London are travelling in the opposite direction, it’ll be only for one reason: they are international conference guests, part of the growing industry of “studies on Eastern Europe”, festivals of architecture, design, Jewish culture, post-communism, Walter Benjamin or Alina Szapocznikow, warehouses where tolerance, mutual understanding and curiosity for the changes between us are supposed to be built. The fact that the vast and fascinating world of EU financing encompasses not only our agriculture, but our culture, is what enables this world of wonderful, newly established friendship. I travelled first to the UK, because a certain cultural worker lured me by romantic visions of concrete buildings and council estates. Being seduced by a vision in which the Krzysztof Kieslowski’s
Dekalog
estate in which I spent my childhood could be romantic, instead of a horror of boredom, a Warsaw girl, I embarked on my first, self-financed trip to the Smoke, to interview him for a progressive art magazine by a city-theory-inspired NGO. Then the aforementioned romantic culture worker went the way back to Warsaw, as a guest of a major artistic institution to speak there on a politics of urban renewal. Then I went back to the better world to pursue my knowledge on political aspects of the ruination of the city where I lived. Since then, there were many travels back and forth between the City that was being stripped down of its old, post-war regime buildings and the City which already got rid of a pretty large amount of buildings of this regime. Together, we also travelled on Wizzair lines to other culture workers Eastern European destinations: Kiev, Ukraine; Zagreb, Croatia, Belgrade, Serbia, Budapest,Hungary, Bratislava, Slovakia.

    1.3 Jacek Kuroń makes a little speech on the opening of the first ever McDonalds restaurant in Poland
    The periphery, as we were repeatedly told by post-modern thinkers, is more interesting than the center. Neoliberal reality would agree with this only if you were to look for its dark places. The dark spaces of status quo are placed irregularly: it is both Pristina and Moscow; both Luton and London, both Łódź, “Polish Manchester”, now in the turmoil of becoming a ‘creative city’, while most of its population is vegetating. It is yet unknown, what the authorities plan to do with the impoverished population, when their task, which in among other things included an investment from David Lynch, in revitalizing an old power plant, will be completed.
    We live both at the margins of Europe and, as we like to see it, in the spotlight, especially when we either disrupt the international