The book reflects on the 1990s in Poland as a time of transformation, treating the historical aspect of this period as a space open to specula tion about the Pole’s present and future. Indeed, I consider the 1990s a cultural experiment, full of potential for modernization and eman cipation, which after all, has not been fully implemented in culture. Therefore, the phenomena, mechanisms, languages, and cultural and social practices I describe in the book are collectively called by me the cultural performances of brève durée (Fr. short-term; in contrast to longue durée, the long-lasting historical processes). The relationships I forge between the past fragments of the Polish political transforma tion concentrate on deliberations of inconsistency, breaks, contradic tions, retractions, and disappearances of emancipatory potentiality. I track several mutually illuminating performances of brève durée that reveal and map places of unfinished emancipatory processes of the Polish transformation. Performances of brève durée are brief, momentary, ephemeral strategies of cultural programs that happen or play out in the sociocultural space to soon disappear, leaving behind only traces of aesthetics, rules, cultural obligations, changes, and re sistances against dominant discourses and social practices. Moreover, they leave behind possibilities for the future, in turn revealing the secluded, insular nature of Polish modernity. Supplemented by later narratives and determined by present ones, they gain the status of a past that never came to be, thus something that could emerge in the present or become a demand for the future. I describe the Polish 1990s as archives of modernizing, freedom, and affirmation potentialities, which proposed the possible scenario of changes that were happening in the social life of the time. I un derstand archives of potentiality as the mapping of hybrid cultural performances created at the intersection of art, science, and social practices, which remained unrealized, fragile, and fleeting, leaving be hind only traces with which one may recreate projects of an unfinished and potential Polishness, one that is equal, democratic, emancipated, just, empathetic, secular, modernized, open to diversity and otherness, green, and connected to global processes.The Polish political transformation - particularly in the 1990s - emerges in this context as a unique laboratory of unfinished emancipa tions in the country’s political and social history. Art played a crucial role in this emancipatory process; it probed, diagnosed, antagonized, and produced practices, narratives, and images for a society under transformation and for a nascent democracy. Art modernized, pro voked critical reflection, transcended local sociocultural conditioning, and broadened imagination. Furthermore, the laboratory of Polish transformation formed interactive relations between social and artistic actions. Today, they can be probed and arranged in constellations made of cultural phenomena, their contexts, and social transforma tion processes. In turn, this constellational layout allows us to observe something which had never been arranged or presented in this way before.
