Positions - Michał Murawski - Laboratories of Friendship, Part 1: New Decolonial Culture Buildings Beyond the Russian Neo-Empire

Laboratories of Friendship, Part 1: New Decolonial Culture Buildings Beyond the Russian Neo-Empire

Michał Murawski

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View of Bogdana Kosmina’s Dakh II in the DCCC garden, landscaped by Denys Meshcheriakov, August 2025. Photo: Olena Misiura.
Positions
March 2026










Notes
1

Recent examples of newly (re-)opened institutions in Ukraine include Lviv’s Jam Factory (2023) and Kyiv’s Pavilion of Culture (2025).

2

Which sometimes, as he put it, seemed to be the result “of the museum curators’ tourism itinerary.” Piotr Piotrowski, “New Museums in East-Central Europe: Between Traumaphobia and Traumaphilia,” in 1968/1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change, ed. Claire Bishop and Marta Dziewańska (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2009), 158.

3

Piotrowski, “New Museums in East-Central Europe,” 160.

4

Piotrowski, “New Museums in East-Central Europe,” 160.

5

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotr Piotrowski, eds, From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015).

6

For kindred explorations of radicality as rootedness, see, for example, Daša Anosova, Daniel Roche, Michał Murawski, and e-flux Architecture, “Editorial,” Reconstruction (e-flux Architecture, September 2023), .

7

An elaboration of “shrapnel theory” in the context of empire, war, and the everyday architecture of shopping malls, is provided in Oliver Banatvala, “Martial Malleability: Shopping Malls and the Everyday Urban Experience of Russia’s War Against Ukraine” (PhD diss., University College London, 2026).

8

With thanks to Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou for helping to formulate this expression; for an attempt to work towards a generative politics of friendship extracted from the toxic debris of neo-Stalinist Friendship, see Michał Murawski, A Form of Friendship: The Museum on the Square, with Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; University of Chicago Press, 2024), especially 41–64. For other recent attempts to formulate ideas of “radical friendship,” see Laura C. Forster and Joel White, Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities (London: Pluto Press, 2025); Alva Gotby, They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (London and New York: Verso, 2023); Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Politics, History, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). See also Slavs and Tatars, Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz: Slavs and Tatars (Book Works, 2013).

9

This section reproduces fragments from, and elaborates on, the text of Michał Murawski, “After the battle, an Amputated Form of Friendship Returns,” in Murawski, A Form of Friendship, 17–83; as well as “Bare Friendship, Future Friendship: Sarah Wilson, Agata Jakubowska and Michał Murawski in Conversation,” in A Form of Friendship, 88–111.

10

See Alina Stamenova et al., “A Center De-Centered,” Reconstruction (e-flux Architecture, December 2024), .







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