Strange Museums: A Journey Through Poland

The dictum goes: Go to the bars of a place to understand its living. Go to the museums to understand its dead. When Fiona McGregor, writer and performance artist, travelled to Poland in 2006 as a festival participant, it was her first visit to Eastern Europe. She had a remarkable vantage point to observe new formations in old Europe: economic, political, and personal. Fiona gets caught up watching and participating in a culture in change, where people are struggling to live well enough under capitalism and where old ideas are expressed in the extraordinary cluster of public museums she found. This is a travelogue of Poland from street level.