Disarmament of culture is a project whose aim was to initiate a debate on the need to reformulate the ways of thinking about history and memory. Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jarosław Kozakiewicz proposed to develop the idea of the Institute for the Disarmament of Culture and the Abolition of Wars Józef Rotblat – a place representing a symbolic challenge to the culture of war sustained in collective memory.
The project included both an architectural vision and a multidimensional analysis of the tradition of art involvement in the glorification of war. The starting point was the study of the iconography of war monuments, monuments reflecting the ideologies according to which history is seen only in terms of struggles, victories and defeats. The artists proposed to look at the “weapons” of contemporary culture in its various forms – from art to pop culture offering military and war games for children.
The idea of the Center was to be the Eastern European equivalent of the project to transform the Arc de Triomphe in Paris into the World Institute for the Abolition of Wars (2010), presented by Krzysztof Wodiczko in the form of an architectural structure surrounding the Parisian monument. The artists placed the Warsaw project on the Saxon axis – in the vicinity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as a key place for shaping the collective memory of Poles.
The project of Wodiczko and Kozakiewicz was a non-war monument, its structure evoking the idea of openness and pluralism. Instead of enclosing memory in a symbolic form, the artists proposed an architectural vision of a place for working through the past, a space for discussion on cultural and historical narratives – both rooted and present.
