This text was published in Book Arts Newsletter No.156 by Impact Press at The Centre for Fine Press Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, in November 2023.


So, here it is.

SIENKIEWICZ STREET IN KIELCE TWENTY YEARS AFTER or in search of the other side.

In April 2022 I took part in BABE. It was so nice to come to Bristol, to the UK, after almost ten years long absence. Some people still remembered me and my books. Passing by my stand a lady pointed at the Street partially spread on the table and said to her friend: This is a very nice book – and added almost at once – no, no, I’m not going to buy it, I already have a copy, bought it years ago, but if you made a new street…

The “Sienkiewicza Street in Kielce” was made in 2002 and published a year later by the BWA Art Gallery in Kielce. Exactly twenty years ago. Then traveled all around the world, got some awards, as well as many fans. This off-set printed edition of 500 was sold out. I republished it by myself as an open edition and keep printing new copies on demand, on ink-jet machines.

Any anniversary provokes special events and celebrations. We were thinking about some kind of celebration, yes, of course. And I found the best “special event” would be a new Street. And I made it.

Is it really a new Street? Am I new myself? Is the world new after two decades? I am different, no doubt. But not new. So is the world. So is the street. And so is the book.

If different then what’s the difference?

It’s much too difficult to write what is the difference between the world today and the world twenty years ago. It’s a little bit less difficult in the case of the city and the street, and it’s not easy enough in the case of myself, so let’s concentrate on the book.

The First Street is entirely hand drawn and hand written. The Second Street is not. I said to myself: no, I won’t be able to spend the whole summer sitting in the heat and drawing house by house as I did twenty years ago. Maybe it would be great both the experience and the effect, but I simply felt not strong enough and the way I draw now has changed and would not be suitable. Hence the second book is “photopainted”. The images look like watercolours but they are not – they have only been “aquarelized”. A lot of details has been lost, that’s right, but this time they are not so important.

The first visit was absolutely accidental – that’s why the text flows spontaneously, chaotically, like water when you pour it on the ground. The second visit is not accidental, or it is at least much less accidental. The traveler is coming back to look for what he did not find twenty years ago, what he was not even looking for, and definitely what he didn’t lose. However walking along the street he suspected, at least for a short while, that maybe the buildings on both sides were but props and there was nothing behind the front walls. This next walk is not chaotic and spontaneous, it’s more like marching, each line of the text being one step forward. Although you read a single line normally, mostly, meaning from the left to the right, the text flows from the bottom to the top. As if walkwise. Just imagine this text printed on the pavement: if it were arranged by our convention, from the top to the bottom, to be able to read it you would have to start walking form the end of the street and walk backward – if you start reading from the beginning of the street, it means from the railway station up, you will read the text backward, starting from its end. So, to have the beginning of the text and the beginning of the street in the same place, the book must be open down, neither to the left nor to the right nor up, and the text goes from the left to the right and from the bottom to the top. But be careful! There are exceptions to this rule. It is also very important that the text in the Second Street has not been looped. The traveler is not coming back to the station as he did in the First Street. No loop this time. Something else instead…

And there are no mixed languages. Not that much playing with words. Everything looks more serious, but isn’t this seriousness a joke? Who knows… This means there are separate language versions. Polish and English so far. And most probably there will be no others, but who knows?

No puns, language puzzles and word crossings this time – but there are street crossings instead. The real ones! Hence the Second Street is much more complicated than the first one. Needs more attention and care. The reading itinerary is full of turns and twists. Also due to the yards.

Yes, there are many yards. Definitely. Yards are the other side of the street. Of the facades.

This is the story about searching the other side, isn’t it?

You may say: well, he is twenty years older, he must be really old, so he’s approaching the ultimate border, that’s why he wants to learn what’s on the other side of it. Yes, you may say so, but that’s not the point. Not now. The mind is the point. Now. Now and then and always. The mind.

We are always inside our heads. We are the prisoners of our minds. Maybe the most fundamental question, the only worth answering, is the following one: what is on the other side of the mind? Or: what’s the other side of the mind?

You may also say the motif of coming back after many years is quite popular in literature and film. And you are right. I may say that if a book is sort of crime and the author is sort of murderer, then coming back to the crime scene seems not only attractive but quite natural. In fact making the Second Street was not a big surprise for me since a vague idea of next volume had been roaming in the gloomy labyrinth of my head. Yet you must be aware this is not a sequel. These are just two walks along one street performed within a gap of twenty years.

There is one more difference: no edition this time. I have already mentioned the complexness of the book. Printing is easy but assembling the sheets is not. It is a crime of freedom and recklessness of imagination, and I must be punished. But where one door shuts, another opens. Now I can play with the sizes. So I have the basic (normal) size printed on A3 sheets, and small (pocket) size printed on A4 sheets. This is possible due to the fact this time I used true type fonts which are not distorted when diminished or enlarged. I tried to make the pocket version of the First Street – some parts are OK, the others are not; the small hand written letters are almost illegible when diminished.

And I made a giant copy, too. For the purpose of the special exhibition which was opened on October 13, 2023.

Each exhibition of my books is itself a book, certainly much bigger, where books, drawings and texts, all presented items, are letters, words, phrases… So is this one. The Second Street giant copy twenty metres long is spread on the floor. One can easily walk on it. But it is also as if the spine of the bigger book, the exhibition-book. Everybody who enters the venue, enters also a book, an open book: luckily the corridor is right in the centre and the halls on both of its sides are like left and right pages.

This exhibition is a very special one, because it is a double exhibition. The new venue of the BWA has two levels: the ground floor and the cellar. My books are in the lower gallery, while my brother’s collages, drawings and paintings are in the upper gallery. It’s very important. Not only due to the fact my brother used for his collages scraps of papers, offcuts from the covers of my books. We had been living together for almost two decades in one flat in the tenement house at the Sienkiewicz Street, and our parents – for almost six decades. Now, after so many years we are back together again, of course not in the same room and the same house, but very very close to the street – the new BWA venue is sited even less than a stone throw from the street. You can easily find it in the book.

In the end you may ask: what next?

Sienkiewicz Street forty years after? Why not? It’s gonna be easy. Just two pages: on the first page the traveler gets of the train, on the second page he dies of heart attack, and then thirty blank pages. Provided that the author will not die earlier. If so, then we will have an aerial view of the street, a soul’s eye view… The problem is I don’t have a soul, I have a mind. I hope you don’t mind it.