{"id":31032,"date":"2021-08-11T11:00:03","date_gmt":"2021-08-11T09:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/?p=31032"},"modified":"2021-08-10T13:04:38","modified_gmt":"2021-08-10T11:04:38","slug":"wykombinovac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wykombinovac\/","title":{"rendered":"Wykombinova\u0107"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[353,795],"project_type":[743],"class_list":["post-31032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-online-publications","project-untranslatable","project_type-themes"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"<em>Wykombinowa\u0107<\/em> is one of the key terms of Polish identity. It allows us to go through tough times and still manage life. It means coming up with something (a solution, an idea) in a smart, informal, improvised way, not following the rules. It suggests the situation may have seemed hopeless, but someone persevered and managed to find a solution. You can wykombinowa\u0107 some money, a lunch, something, anything; but you can also wykombinova\u0107 how to help, or which way to go.\r\n\r\nThe root verb is <em>kombinowa\u0107<\/em> \u2013meaning not \u00bbto combine,\u00ab but rather to contrive, as well as to be up to no good, to cheat, to flout the rules. This can sometimes be pejorative, but is often about bypassing the system to think out of the box. If you succeed \u2013 you may wykombinowa\u0107 (come up with) something, outsmarting the encountered reality.\r\n\r\nWykombinowa\u0107is less about linguistics and more about Polish cultural heritage. It is born out of Polish history and the way we have managed to cope with apparently insurmountable obstacles. It\u2019s a survival strategy that became a powerful intellectual and effective weapon we use every day. Take life under the so-called \u00bbsocialist\u00ab regime. How do you find food for your family if the store shelves are literally empty? You have to wykombinova\u0107 something. Go to another store, wait in a queue with the hope of something popping up, bribe someone. My relatives would sometimes go from Warsaw to the village their family was from to buy an entire pig. All they needed to do, then, was to wykombinova\u0107 how to transport it back home in their tiny Fiat 126p, packed with family members. This spirit of peculiar entrepreneurship didn\u2019t fade after 1989. If anything, it gained new flavors \u2013 from illegal businesses to an ever-surprising spirit of independence.\r\n\r\nOne possible translation to English would be \u00bbto figure out.\u00ab But for heaven\u2019s sake, to figure out has this moving out of a figure, like solving a riddle \u2013 from a Polish perspective figuring out sounds somewhat na\u00efve, as if life were a mathematical equation. Like you need to be the good student who finds the correct answer. Wykombinowa\u0107, on the other hand, doesn\u2019t aim for perfection or an objective truth. Rather, it accepts the limited horizon we function within. There may or may not be a final truth. What we need is to come up with strategies of survival and new, creative ways of functioning in this world. Improvise, rethink, persevere, prove them wrong, find a solution, make it work. Somehow.\r\n\r\nIt does feel like magic. Or alchemy. It\u2019s a post-socialist alchemy \u2013 you combine things, thoughts, bits and pieces of ideas, you stare into the almost-nothing you have inherited from reality, and somehow you arrive at something which works. It shouldn\u2019t have: there was really not enough in the pot, and yet, magically, the solution is here. The strange ingredients you used, the surprising combinations, only make sense once the result appears in hindsight. It was impossible to plan. To be clear \u2013 there is nothing esoteric about it. Your knowledge and preparation helped, but you needed to be present here and now, to pierce, to puncture the opaque horizon of possibilities.\r\n\r\nOne big question is \u2013 if someone wykombinova\u0107s something, \u00bbfigured something out,\u00ab can you emulate it? Possibly. Sometimes wykombinova\u0107 brings about a recipe. Quite often, however, it is so connected to the perseverance of an individual or group that it remains unique. The pragmatic alchemist\u2019s achievement is not easy to repeat. What is clear, however, is that it sets the tone. If someone has done it, it is possible. It\u2019s a contagious attitude.\r\n\r\nWykombinowa\u0107 is not some insane sacrifice. It\u2019s not connected to a painful effort. You do it because you\u2019re up to it. If the problem is serious, you need to focus more and it will take more time. But you don\u2019t whine; you don\u2019t cry. Actually \u2013 you don\u2019t suffer. No more <em>per aspera ad astra<\/em> (Latin for \u00bbthrough the hardships to the stars.\u00ab) You replace the cult of suffering with a playful search for solutions. (As a Pole, I can tell you this is a crucial quality for me.)\r\n\r\nOne last thing: the future.\r\n\r\nWykombinowa\u0107 goes against all the grand narratives. It laughs in the face of governments and corporations. It doesn\u2019t mind the stupidity of the future and the seeming lack of perspectives. It looks for solutions, without pathos and great agendas. It may not solve the climate crisis. And a few other issues. But it helps us have hope on a human level. Combining, recombining, outcombining, drilling our way through, every time."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"<p class=\"p1 is-size-6\"><strong>Wojtek Ziemilski<\/strong> is a theater director and visual artist. His performances have been shown in more than twenty countries at events such as the Ruhrtriennale or the Prague Quadriennial, and have won awards including the main prizes of both the Zu\u0308rcher Theater Spektakel and the Fast Forward Festival in Dresden. Ziemilski expands and extends the idea of documentary performance, often inquiring into spectatorship and the possibility of action. He teaches contemporary approaches to performance with a particular focus on devising techniques, connections between contemporary dance and theater, and the use of media in performance. He is a lecturer at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw and at Warsaw University, and has given lectures and workshops across the world.<\/p>"}],"intro_preview_headline":"Wojtek Ziemilski","intro_preview_txt":"","intro_preview_img":31033,"post_id_old":"","post_author":null,"post_subtitle":"Wojtek Ziemilski","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":true,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":null,"post_copyright":"ccl_default","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":"","related_posts_post":[5616]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31032\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/5616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=31032"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=31032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}