“Getting closer…” is a process, a transformation, that we would like to invite everyone to participate in. Getting to know “Others”, our own reactions towards them, emotions, dislike and sympathy, we get to know ourselves. This is the most beautiful human gesture of getting closer and showing respect, it is a trip to the worlds surrounded with walls and forgotten in the everyday reality, but existing so close to us…
Darek Jakubowski, ‘Aldona’s Portrait’
„Getting closer…” is an interdisciplinary educational project in the field of contemporary art and social sciences. It is thematically focused around the problem of “otherness”, “difference” and consequently tolerance, respect and sensibility towards those who are different from the majority of society.
„It is our duty to make audible those voices which are excluded from the mainstream -regardless of their physical or psychical disability, poverty, sexuality which is discriminated against, judged as the wrong sexuality or any other otherness which is not commonly accepted. Let’s listen to their tales and try to find ourselves in these narrations. If we open our eyes and ears then we will find it. This getting closer is a long-lasting process of looking for a person (or a relative) in the Other, of joining the culture of free people, freedom of the Others who are not afraid, who believe that there is more than only one – our – moral code, and that those other codes are equally true. The getting closer and finding ourselves in the Other and the Other in ourselves is impossible, unless we return to the Others all the values of which they were deprived by the dominant discourse.”
[Bartek Lis, fragment of the inaugurating lecture to the project “Getting closer…”] Project by the ART TRANSPARENT Foundation Coordination and subject-matter supervision: Agata Makowska