Many cooks enrich the broth | ‘Eintopf’ – intercultural site-specific art festival in Łódź, Poland

German entrepreneurs played a significant role in the development of the textile industry. The festival took place in the former thermal power station that supplied energy to one of the successful textile factories. The Art Nouveau industrial building with its sophisticated architectural elements bears witness to the former wealth of a German textile manufacturer. During this period, Łódź was referred to as ‘the promised land’ – a name that Polish director Andrzej Wajda gave to his 1975 feature film, which depicts the industrialisation of the city in all its drama.

Today, the site of the old thermal power station is a gentrified area. Łódź, once the centre of the textile industry and known as the ‘Polish Manchester’, is increasingly developing into an art and culture metropolis with important scientific centres.

The Eintopf site-specific art festival became a space for exchange and encounters – both with the city itself and with a group of German artists who have been working in a site-specific manner for over thirty years. Two artist collectives took part: Frakcja from Poland and Endmoräne from Germany. Both work on site-specific installations and actions in self-initiated projects – in both urban and rural areas.

The festival focused on exploring historical multiculturalism and its contemporary manifestations. The aim was to highlight different perspectives and stories from the fabric of the city, weave them together and create new artistic narratives that tie in with Łódź's textile history.

Some works directly addressed the theme of textiles – as a material, symbol or carrier of symbols. Others focused on the past in the form of walk-in glass shards, the confusion of languages in a multicultural context or the building's former function: generating energy. Three humorous installations lent a lightness to the sombre surroundings – such as a Post-it note installation on technical equipment that tongue-in-cheek reminded visitors to ‘remember everything’, or a steam pot made of textile fibres that sat like a dream creature on the huge generator.

Polish and German artists presented their work on the festival evenings. It was particularly exciting to discover similarities despite different working methods. We, the German artists, were impressed by the fabulous hospitality of our Polish colleagues and by the organisation of the festival. The artists were: from the FRAKCJA group Monika Czarska, Alicja Kujawska, Roksana Kularska-Król, Anka Leśniak, Aurelia Mandziuk-Zajączkowska, Beata Marcinkowska and Marta Ostajewska, and from the ENDMORÄNE group Kerstin Baudis, Ka Bomhardt, Angela Lubic, Barbara Müller, Dorothea Neumann, Patricia Pisani and Susanne Pittroff.

At a time when nationalist and separatist movements are on the rise, black-and-white narratives, divisions, populism, authoritarianism, violence, aggression and war are intensifying, and borders are once again being marked by walls, the Polish organisers devoted themselves to what they consider most important: what connects us – closeness, relationships, community. They created an artistic Polish-German meeting in a city marked by a difficult history full of wars and divisions.

Eintopf is and remains a multicultural community art festival: a horizontal and democratic space that facilitates encounters with places and local history and is open to the invisible, the marginalised, those on the fringes of the mainstream. The organisers are planning another festival for 2026, this time with artists from Ukraine.

The Eintopf – Intercultural Site-Specific Festival project was funded from the budget of the city of Łódź.

A bilingual catalogue of the festival (Polish/English) will be published in December 2025.