Join FestivALT and MEK Director Antoni Bartosz for a candid conversation about the museum’s collection of objects related to Jews and the museum’s responsibility to represent Poland’s multiethnic history in general. What should be expected of an institution that uses the slogan “My museum, a museum about me”? On this day you can visit the Museum for free - just say “FestivALT” at the counter.
Cultural anthropologist Erica Lehrer will lead a tour of the permanent exhibition of the Ethnographic Museum, focusing on the artefacts (as well as the absences) related to Jews and Jewish culture. What do these objects say about non-Jewish Polish conceptions of Jews and Jewishness? How should “folk” culture about and by Jews be displayed in this kind of museum?
Join the FestivALT co-directors and creators of Lucky Jew for a discussion about the project, its problems and merits, and the conversation that has grown around it.
The debate about the origins of hummus is a long and controversial one: nearly every country and ethnic group in the Middle East has made a claim to be its primary inventors, and buying or selling the food can quickly become a political statement. This debate has not left Kraków unscathed: while in much of the city, hummus is primarily sold as a product of the Arab world, in Kazimierz, it’s typically treated as a Jewish Israeli foodstuff. For this inaugural event of FestivALT Nights, join Bart and Kasia, owners of Hummus Amamamusi and makers of self-described “Polish hummus,” for an evening that will change everything you think you know about a little legume called the chickpea.
Confronting challenges of identity, memory, translation, and place, Michelle Levy and Patrycja Dołowy will perform their experience in conversation, between passionate search and profound discovery. Having followed Paulina’s story across Poland and Ukraine, the two women will summon archives, personal travel footage, maps, oral histories, foliage, pieces of the earth, speculation, and reflections, as tangible means to share what is truly ungraspable.
Zofia Noworól, a choreographer and yogi, and her partner Mateusz Ostrowski, a process-oriented psychotherapist, present a different experience of Jewish Kraków.
namesake is an experimental film by Eliza Levinson that explores the legacy of diaspora, migration, and "postmemory”—how memory is embodied and transmitted over generations.
Composer/guitarist Alex Roth relocated from London to Kraków last year, reversing a migratory path traced by his great-great-grandfather in 1890. Weaving improvisations around his own field recordings, this multi-part promenade performance explores tensions between documented and experienced memory, unfolding across four sites of special significance to Kraków’s Jewish community.
Legendary Polish Jewish burlesque performer and activist Betty Q has transported Madame Q, the Warsaw club and studio she co-owns, to Kraków for an evening of fun, conversation, and burlesque.
