Mobile Academy in Warsaw: "Ghosts, phantoms, spectres and places they inhabit". Two-part interdisciplinary summer academy in Warsaw.

The Mobile Academy is a periodic scholarly institution of no permanent residence. An idea by two German women, Hannah Hurtzig and Carolin Hochleichter, it offers its participants intense, interdisciplinary programme concentrating on one particular subject. The courses are run by artists invited from all parts of the world. Together with participants, they carry out projects, studies, research and presentations. These will be complete with theory classes and field studies devoted to particular subjects. The courses offered cover such areas as acting, directing, performance, choreography, dance, photography and the theory of art. Prof. Maria Janion is Honorary President of Mobile Academy Warsaw. Events in Warsaw shall be held between 25 August and 10 September 2006.

Mobile Academy Warsaw are going to run an international comparison of what is ghastly in architecture, politics, art, theory and our everyday reality. For some time we have been able to observe both in us and in our environment a different degree of, let's say, social ‘ghastification', which might result either from our being haunted by ghastly powers coming from the Utopian no-place, or because one oneself used to be a ghost of a Utopian Communist community. And today, one might be whoever-wherever in the land of facts, something to the effect of not-I, which appears the condition and economic prerequisite of success. "The phantom of market economy has supplanted the ghost of Communism" (Heiner Müller). What, then, do the spectres of the future look like?

Polish Audiovisual Publishers record "Cargo Sofia-Warsaw" project, one of the undertakings carried out within Mobile Academy Warsaw. Audiences travel round Europe in a lorry specially adapted for the purpose, with a professionally constructed auditorium inside. They watch the town, people, their behaviour in different situations, sometimes they interact with them in a way provoked by the director-author of the project, the Swiss Stefan Kaegi. The vehicle is driven by two proferssional Bulgarian drivers. In Warsaw, the lorry will leave four times from the Rozmaitości Theatre to take its passengers on a 90-min. trip round the town.