The process initiated by artist Olga Budzan in June 2025, together with a group of women of different ages, demonstrates that the memory of a place can be preserved not only through the written or spoken word, but also through the making of a tapestry. This multifaceted form, open to transformation, proved to be a particularly fitting medium for capturing the character of Barbara – a site with a rich, complex and still vivid history. Work on the large-scale handmade piece Barbara 1965–2025 created a space for preserving stories and memories of the building, the city and their continuous transformations over the years.
Memory was not understood here as a fixed set of facts. On the contrary, it took the form of an open, expansive narrative about people, co-created by a community. These elements intertwine with individual stories, allowing the creative process to generate not only a textile object, but also an intergenerational bond among women.
A crucial foundation of the project was active participation and regular meetings during which new fragments of the patchwork were created. The workshops took place both at Barbara and at the Ethnographic Museum, where Olga Budzan works. These two spaces – different in function, atmosphere and rhythm – became equally important to the project’s development. Barbara offered a living connection to the memory of the place, while the museum introduced a dialogue with craft traditions, the history of making, and the role of material and technique.
One of Budzan’s key artistic decisions was the use of second-hand materials. Scraps, old clothes, household fabrics and randomly preserved textile remnants enriched the work with an additional historical layer, while also reflecting the artist’s everyday practice as an ethnographer. She visited second-hand textile shops and carefully selected structures, textures and colours that corresponded to the decades during which Barbara was in operation. Each fragment carried its own biography, and incorporating them into a single composition allowed the project to be understood as an act of care – a recycling of memory that granted a second life not only to fabrics, but also to stories. This choice rooted the textile in everyday domestic practices: in items stored at the bottom of drawers, marked by wear, infused with scent and family memory.
During her residency, Budzan drew on research conducted by Adam Pacholak and Iwona Kałuża, yet she did not treat their work as data to be illustrated. Archival descriptions, analyses and photographs instead functioned as an echo – a background to be freely interpreted and filtered through the experiences of contemporary participants. As a result, the textile ceased to be a reconstruction and became a multi-voiced, intuitive interpretation, emotionally grounded in the material practice of those who created it.
To understand what this textile grows out of, it is worth pausing on the context of the place itself. The Barbara building, named with a feminine first name, celebrated its sixtieth anniversary as an architectural structure in 2025 and its tenth anniversary as the home of the Wrocław Institute of Culture. The textile, which gradually acquired the features of a persona, naturally anchored itself in Plac Młodzieżowy – a space shaped from its beginnings by social tensions, performative gestures, grassroots initiatives and spontaneous bursts of urban energy.
The collaborative work became an attempt to capture the rhythm of this place, which has undergone numerous metamorphoses: from post-war ruins, through socialist realist ambitions and the modernist thaw, to the architecture of the Tarnawski duo, still remembered in Wrocław as the first post-war expression of modernity in the Old Town. The women involved in the project drew out details from this layered history: café window displays, black-and-white columns, the neon crab flickering above the entrance, recipes from the Swedish-style restaurant, and stories about the shoe shop once located inside. These small narratives formed a social map of the place, one that proved just as essential as the official historical record.
From a curatorial perspective, the process highlighted not only the importance of collective women’s labour, but also the ways in which social memory often takes shape through small, caring encounters. Grandmothers’ stories about ice cream from the Italian machine, anecdotes about cockroaches running along the columns, tales of stolen soup or the legendary “sultan cream” were translated into the language of fibre, introducing an informal, non-institutional narrative into the textile. In this way, Barbara 1965–2025 became not a reconstruction, but a dialogue – a conversation with the place and about the place, conducted through community.
The textile records both organised and spontaneous meetings, conversations born of shared labour, and reflections that emerged later at home while sewing individual fragments. It also stands as evidence of how collective work by women can transform urban history into an intimate experience, while simultaneously giving it a communal dimension.
The culmination of the entire process was the ceremonial unveiling of the textile in Barbara’s reading room on 29 October 2025. The event brought together participants, their families, city residents and those interested in textile art. It was the first moment when the artwork could be seen in its entirety. The atmosphere felt less like a formal exhibition opening and more like a community gathering – full of emotion, laughter and the instinctive pointing out of fragments in which personal stories had been woven.
Artist: Olga Budzan
Community of women: Joanna Bożek, Agnieszka Jagodzińska, Magda Brumirska-Zielińska, Hania Sobolewska, Aleksandra Abramik, Małgorzata Karpicka, Hanna Golis, Anna Glanowska-Cieśla, Maria Zając, Marta Wiercińska, Małgorzata Składzień-Sikorska, Aga Tomaszewska, Olga Vaskanian, Joanna Falkowska, Maryna Hrysiuk, Magdalena Olewicz, Stanisława Łomnicka, Bożena Kędzior, Małgorzata Stasiewicz, Róża Gontarz.
Curatorial text by Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka