Conceptual Future Tense: The CPK and Its Environs

Imagine watercourses as communication routes. The marshy town of Baranów, situated between the Pisia Tuczna and Pisia Gągolina rivers, becomes the Central Communication Port of Western Mazovia. Plastics from Mszczonów, aurochs hides from Jaktorów, and salicylates from Grodzisk are reloaded here onto larger rafts and floated down the Bzura River to the Vistula. Inhabitants travel between settlements via a network of canals dug during the time of the Olender settlement. Yet, this vision cannot be realized: the springs are drying up, and drought is a permanent state. The canals do not serve communication but rather drain water from the once-wet lands to the dead zone in the Baltic Sea. The Central Communication Port will rise on concrete, not water.

In the 1970s, the Polish state attempted to build a monumental series of dams on the Vistula River. This drastic regulation was supposed to bring great benefits to agriculture, energy, transport, and, of course, the ruling party and the working people of the cities and villages. The first element of the cascade was a weir and power plant in Włocławek, commissioned in 1970. The location was significant. At that time, the chimney of the Jan Marchlewski cellulose plant, known as “America,” still stood in Włocławek, adorned with the largest red banner in Europe. Now, it flew over an artificial lake covering seventy square kilometers. Authorities built several more dams, but after the political transformation of 1989, they abandoned the Vistula Cascade project and demolished the pulp mill chimney along with its faded banner. The main victims of the project’s negative consequences were the fish and other aquatic life. Blocking the river’s flow disrupted their life cycles. Thanks to the Włocławek dam, we saw the local disappearance of salmon, vimba, trout, and eel, which once traveled far upriver to the south of the country. Toxic waste, heavy metals, and masses of organic debris now lie at the bottom of the reservoir. Every era has its investment ruins.

Imagine that authorities have never dismantled any railway line ever built on Polish soil. The network would look something like this. It is easy to envision a country where rail is a vital means of transport. Railways are the past, but also the future. And the present. In 1977, Polish railways carried 1.2 billion passengers. Today, they carry perhaps a quarter of that number a year. We can’t explain this dramatic decline solely by the increased availability of private cars. The collapse was systemic. The closures were greedy and thoughtless.

The concept of the Central Communication Port (CPK) officially saw the light of day in October 2017, when the Council of Ministers adopted a resolution establishing the CPK. According to the Law and Justice government’s plan, it was to be a completely new, centrally located transport hub for Poland. However, in the 1990s, the visionary architect Jacek Damięcki conceived the first ideas for a large airport connected to an extensive railway network. Damięcki presented a project for a transport hub connecting two cities (the Warsaw-Łódź “binary city”). Since the CPK’s establishment, a great deal has happened, and yet very little. The concepts and scope of the investment keep changing; some want to build an airport empire, while others wish to abandon the plans altogether. Meanwhile, new houses continue to emerge in the municipalities of Teresin, Baranów, and Wiskitki, and the “Stop CPK” banners are slowly fading. What will authorities ultimately build in this area and its so-called impact zone? Archaeological research into the future points to as many as forty possible scenarios.

A boundary post, usually concrete or stone, sometimes plastic, marks the junction between plots of land. It precisely indicates where one province meets another, and where a state demarcates itself from its neighbor. A network of neighboring municipalities, intersected by railways, highways, and local roads, defines the CPK area. The CPK project will overlay this landscape with another grid of borders that converge at customs control.

The field marks an empty space, ready for development. Cartographers and politicians project their fantasies onto it, eager to sit at a table and draw across the supposedly vacant terrain just as if they were drawing borders between the colonies of great empires. Such a clean slate invites the demarcation of runways or anything else, depending on imagination, economic conditions, and the prospect of profit.

Siła i Światło (Power and Light), a joint-stock company registered in 1918 shortly after Poland regained independence, operated in the energy sector, initially acquiring shares in power plants managed by companies from the former partitioning powers of Germany and Austria. Among its acquisitions was the Pruszków power plant, which later supplied electricity to its own investment project: the Electric Commuter Railway from Warsaw to Grodzisk Mazowiecki. In the 1930s, authorities decided to extend the line from Grodzisk Mazowiecki to Mszczonów. They purchased land and engineering work began, including the construction of embankments, culverts, and bridges. The ruins in the village of Przeszkoda and the most spectacular bridge over the Pisia Gągolina River in Radziejowice-Parcela have survived to this day. The outbreak of the Second World War halted the construction, which never resumed.

During one of our field trips, Karol Trammer showed us the unfinished bridge of the Electric Commuter Railway in Radziejowice-Parcela. The structure’s irresistible, animalistic character immediately struck us. While working on this installation, we explored what links an investment in ruins with a species in ruins – the last aurochs. The wood used to build Ruin comes from the vicinity of the Jaktorowska Forest.

Most domestic cattle breeds trace their ancestry to a wild species: the forest aurochs. Aubrac bulls descend relatively directly from aurochs domesticated in Spain. These large herbivores disappeared from that region as early as the 10th century.

Unknown, from the Chronicles of the Sochaczew County, [in:] Władysław Szafer, From the Naturalist's Portfolio, 1st ed., vol. II, Warsaw 1967

Jaktorów commemorates the death of the world’s last aurochs in 1627. However, little memory of it remains in the land, which no longer resembles the ancient Jaktorów Forest. In the modernized countryside, it is difficult to even see cows, the distant relatives of the aurochs. The people whose daily lives continue under the threat of the CPK project also fear being forgotten.

The last aurochs remembers well the efforts of the people of her time to protect her: the reserves, the hunting moratoriums, belated reflections on a disappearing world. They had no chance of success. The path to extinction for her species began ten thousand years ago with domestication and the gradual loss of habitat. It is part of humanity’s path. Thus far, the path to its own destruction as well.

Humans attempt to repair the damage they have done to nature. One questionable strategy is the de-extinction of species. The Heck brothers, two zoologists with Nazi affiliations, initiated the first experiments in this field in the 1920s. To them, the aurochs embodied a primal, Old Germanic force. Through back-crossing, they created “Heck cattle,” intending to reintroduce them into a planned hunting reserve in the Białowieża Forest.

The embryo, made of sedge peat that remembers the Mazovian aurochs, is in a state of hibernation. For centuries, humans drained peat bogs and wetlands to expand agricultural land. Today, society returns the land once taken from the aurochs and from nature to public debate through the European Biodiversity Strategy.

This cast-iron bread pan was purchased near Baranów from a baker, the son of a foundry worker. Paired with colorful ribbons, it tells the story of the sacred space within the CPK area. The ribbons form a rainbow, a symbol of both God’s covenant with humanity and the pride and diversity of the LGBTQ+ community.

A map stands next to a church in Kaski village. The sun’s rays consumed the outlines of places, leaving an empty board on which an airport, or anything else, may appear.