WHAT IS THE USE OF THE RUINS OF MODERNISM? FROM WOLA TO HOTEL PALENQUE - AND BACK AGAIN (Cóz nam po ruinach modernizmu? Z Woli do Hotelu Palenque i z powrotem)

'While thinking about the space of Warsaw and the heritage of socialist realism - including the non-extant 10th-Anniversary Stadium and the soon to be demolished fountains in the Edward Szymanski Park in the Wola district - I simply cannot evade a particularly evocative phantom. I have in mind a vision of Hotel Palenque on the Yucatán Peninsula. A place that became famous (probably only virtually: has anyone actually seen Hotel Palenque?) thanks to Robert Smithson'. The presented text is an attempt at looking at modernistic architecture via the context of its disintegration - the processes of destruction and entropy. This motif seems to play an essential part in contemporary art: it emerges both in the works of the classics (Smithson, Gordon Mata-Clark) and the young artists (Cyprien Gaillard). The point of departure for these reflections is the local example of a 'socialist realistic-modernistic' park in Warsaw, once extremely 'modern' and today - decaying and sentenced to modernisation (tantamount to recomplete redesigning).