Rainbow in Flames

The Rainbow, an arch made of artificial flowers, is a public sculpture created by Julita Wójcik and is the outcome of a participatory art project carried out in Wigry, North-East Poland in 2010.¹ In 2011 the sculpture, this time as commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute,² was collectively rebuilt in Sopot and in Wilamowice near Oświęcim³ and was then transported to Brussels where it stood in front of the European Parliament as a monument to Poland’s first EU Presidency.⁴ The Rainbow returned to Poland before the Euro 2012 football championship and was located in Warsaw at the Square of the Saviour, in the Marszałkowska Housing Estate.⁵ Between 2012 and 2015 the sculpture was administrated by the Warsaw City Council⁶ until August 2015 when the Rainbow was dismantled and removed from the Square of the Saviour.⁷ The sculpture then joined the collection at the Warsaw’s Centre for Contemporary Art, its new patron. There have not been any further announcements as to where the sculpture will be displayed in the future.⁸

The Rainbow, which Julita Wójcik called “simply beautiful”,⁹ was described by the author as devoid of any social or political meaning and thus “free”; everyone can ascribe their own meanings to it. The artwork was introduced as potentially “open” and thus capable of producing an unlimited number of readings. This was claimed despite the fact that the rainbow is an international symbol of the LGBT community. It is worth mentioning that, according to Artur Żmijewski, in communist Poland the so-called socially applied arts had long been disgraced because of their having been used as a hegemonic tool by the totalitarian regime.¹⁰ On the other hand, in the mid-1990s and 2000s, Polish artists witnessed incidents of exhibition closures and artworks being physically attacked by politicians and members of the public. This convinced artists that the boundaries between political and artistic performances are blurred.¹¹ The Rainbow was also destroyed and renovated a number of times,¹² the visible result of struggles between various groups of ‘defenders’ and ‘attackers’¹³ who would associate the sculpture either with LGBT issues, or with the hegemonic European project which they criticized for a tendency to unify necessary cultural and religious differences.¹⁴ Initially described as a “gift,”¹⁵ “free” from any social or political meaning, the sculpture was therefore appropriated by various groups among its audience of ‘receivers’. According to Roger Sansi, participation in relational art practices can be described as a mode of “gift-exchange.”¹⁶

In her famous book Gender of the Gift, Marilyn Strathern elaborated on the classical, Maussian notion of the gift as an extension of the person.¹⁷ She used ‘Melanesia’ as an example, not as a particular geographic location as opposed to other locations, but as “a setting for a sustained thought experiment.”¹⁸ Her aim was to criticize the Durkheimian notion of society treated as an average for a given space and time. One of the main questions she raised was whether the individual as such is still an adequate category: would it not be more adequate to say that the relationship between person and society is continuant?¹⁹ In the ‘Melanesian’ case, there is no such thing as the distinction of internal and external set of relations. With respect to the gift-exchange, the author claimed that gift transactions transform persons, who are exchanged in the same way as things. According to Sansi, Strathern “stresses the continuity of people and things, as entities involved in relations – without presupposing any hierarchy between them.”²⁰ According to Strathern, Melanesian persons are complete and composed of elements such as masculine and feminine; they hide certain parts of the self to reveal others, depending on the relation of exchange that they enter into.²¹ The person cannot enter into any relationship without defining and transforming herself and the person is defined by the relationships she enters into and carries. A ritual decomposition of person is also appropriate and possible, as when a person dies in a social sense and the relationships get recomposed and invested in other people, as “…relations are what animates the person.”²²

Alfred Gell, who was strongly influenced by the work of Strathern, claimed that “the anthropological theory of art is the theory of art that considers art objects as persons.”²³ Gell argued that art objects are the ‘indexes’ that mark both the result and the instrument of somebody’s agency. In other words he claimed that artworks, in the form of material objects, are the visible traces of actions intentionally performed by ‘primary agents’. The ‘primary agents’ are not only the artist who made the artwork, or the patron who commissioned it, but also the public for which it was originally created. Drawing on an argument previously made by Strathern, Gell claimed that, as the results of somebody’s intentions, artworks are dispersed – in time and space – elements of the “distributed personhood” of the primary agents (such as the artist, the patron, the public etc.). For Gell, a good metaphor for an artwork is a ‘trap’ because, “The trap is ... both a model of its creator, the hunter, and a model of its victim, the prey animal. But more than this, the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds this two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space.”²⁴ According to Sansi, from this perspective “artworks don’t just index the agency of the artist, but of all the agents that have been entrapped by the artwork.”²⁵ According to Gell, art objects also have an agency – as ‘secondary agents’ they can transform social relations by causing “an effect” in their vicinity. As recounted by Sansi, who elaborated on what was stated by Gell himself, this allows one to think that “the trap, as an index, is a device of generating relations, or in other words of generating agents, not just tracing them back…”²⁶ In this article, drawing on my ethnographic data and selected interpretations, I would argue that the Rainbow, surrounded by its material and immaterial infrastructures, operates as a powerful device. It is a Gellian ‘trap’, understood following Sansi as a ‘gift’ that interpellates²⁷ emergent political subjects who respond to it as receivers.²⁸

Fieldwork

According to Gell, the anthropology of art is a theoretical study of “social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency.”²⁹ I decided to approach the phenomenon of the Warsaw Rainbow by following multiple interactions, initiatives and interventions mediated by the art object and performed in its vicinity. My fieldwork at the Square of the Saviour lasted six months. I participated in a number of advertised public events such as the first performance of the LGBT choir ’Voces Gaudiae’ (October 11, 2014), a march called “Together Against Nationalism” organized by the Anti-Fascist Warsaw (November 9, 2014), or the happening “I Defend Rainbow like Independence” organized by the Twój Ruch political party (November 11, 2014). During my research project I also observed one, small religious demonstration of the radically conservative opponents of the Rainbow which was called “Protest in Defense of Catholic Faith and Tradition,” and was organized daily between June and November 2014. However, it is important to underline that I also took part in many spontaneous gatherings that took place in the vicinity of the Rainbow or in the surrounding locations, such as the demonstration against the staging of the play Golgota Picnic in June 2014.³⁰ In additionI conducted a number of interviews with different subjects who, in my opinion, were directly involved in the production of the phenomenon of the sculpture. Among others, I interviewed the producer of Rainbow from the Institute of Adam Mickiewicz; I also spoke with Agnieszka Tarasiuk, the curator of an artistic project called Flower Power in Wigry, where the sculpture was initially created. I interviewed a volunteer who took part in the process of making of the sculpture in 2010. I looked at the visual representations of the Rainbow and interviewed the photographer Marcin Wziontek, who was responsible for creating an iconic image of the burning sculpture during the Independence Day March in 2013 - which I will describe later in this article. I also interviewed one of the leaders of the National Movement who organized a widely discussed protest against bringing the sculpture back to the Square of the Saviour after its renovation in May 2014. I also used cell phone photography as a method of documenting the changing vicinity of the sculpture.³¹ Luckily, when finishing writing up this article, I also had the chance to speak with the artist, Julita Wójcik, herself.³²

From “Relational Aesthetics” to “Relational Antagonism”

In a number of interviews, Julita Wójcik called her sculpture an “open work”, using a term coined by Umberto Eco.³³ She compared her position as an artist to that of a gardener, doctor and cleaner, claiming that all she ever wanted was to be socially useful and to make her audience feel needed too - instead of making them feel insulted or scared³⁴. By creating the Rainbow in a collaborative manner,³⁵ Julita Wójcik seemed to be participating in what has recently been called “relational aesthetics.”³⁶ The author of the term, the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, claimed that contemporary art practices that fit into the category of “relational aesthetics” are democratic because they aim to treat the audience like a subject, with all the attendant consequences. Relational artworks are inclusive and they establish possibilities for dialogue. They aim to transform social relations by offering an “everyday micro utopia” – a unique sense of togetherness lost in late capitalist alienation. The artists mentioned by Bourriaud, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, use their privileged positions to create spaces that are available and “free” for their users to inhabit. And whether it is an art gallery transformed into the artist’s own apartment - a place where everybody could occasionally dwell - or a canteen where Tiravanija cooked pad thai to feed the audience, the idea was to offer a sense of togetherness – not on a large scale, as promised by past utopias, but on a micro scale.

However, as Claire Bishop interestingly pointed out, the question was: Who were the persons that Tiravanija fed or invited to their gallery ‘apartment’, and why?³⁷ For her, the fact that a group of gallery goers ate pad thai, chatted and did a bit of networking, did not mean that the art practice became truly democratic, since it did not address existing socioeconomic boundaries. Thus she argued for “relational antagonism” instead of “relational aesthetics”: for her, democratic is what usually puts the idea of “harmonious” co-existence into question. It is the sense of “otherness” and the uncomfortable position of the one who cannot be totally herself when confronted with the “Other” that lies at the core of democracy.³⁸ As stressed by Bishop, “the threat that the other represents transforms my own sense of self into something questionable,”³⁹ and that is why the “relation arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution.”⁴⁰ She understands the public sphere in a similar way to Rosalyn Deutsche, who drew from the argument of Laclau and Mouffe, not as a sphere of dialogue leading to consensus but as a sphere of antagonisms.⁴¹ According to Laclau and Mouffe as recounted by Bishop, “a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate – in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased”.⁴²

In 2010, in Wigry, in north-east Poland, Julita Wójcik created a “rainbow made of artificial, cemetery flowers” to “support the walls of post-Camaldolese monastery.” The Roman Catholic Church was at the time in the process of reaquiring the property, which had previously been rebuilt by the state and was serving as a public, cultural institution – the House of Creative Labour (Dom Pracy Twórczej) where the ‘artist-in-residence’ program was housed.“Flower Power” had been intended as the last artistic project organized in the House of Creative Labour.

The artist’s choice of materials made reference to provincial commemorative practices⁴³: in Poland, artificial flowers are commonly used for decorating graves for All Saints’, the Day of the Dead and local indulgences.⁴⁴ Fresh flowers appear more frequently during summer festivals such as Corpus Christi processions and harvest celebrations - dożynki. During the harvest, (usually) women collectively make impressive garlands weaved from the ears of corn, flowers, fruits and vegetables. And they are not only for display, but are also the subject of agonistic competitions between villages.⁴⁵ In the case of the Rainbow sculpture, these local traditions intersected with others spheres of life the artistic project called “Flower Power” was initiated by curator Agnieszka Tarasiuk who aimed also to invoke the usage of flowers in contemporary art practices such as land art, environmentalism and other practices.⁴⁶ The project openly addressed matters concerning sexuality, including queer or simply non-heteronormative sexualities (for example in Maurycy Gomulicki's Fangor Flower or Jeronimo Hagerman's Aromática Cama Comunal). The broader context of emancipatory social movements was also present.

In order to make the Rainbow, Julita Wójcik organized a handicraft workshop. The workshop was open to all to attend, and although the artist said that some of the collaborators were her acquaintances – who also invited their friends in turn – many others joined in on the spur of the moment. The majority of the volunteers were women,⁴⁷ both local and those coming from big cities like Warsaw. According to Julita Wójcik, one of the key figures in the process was Dominika Wróblewska, an LGBT activist and feminist who also invited further participants. The volunteers’ main task was to equip each factory-produced flower with a stalk made of wire. Later on, crafted items were collectively placed on the arch of the sculpture. As recounted by the artist, she found the non-alienating, manual labour process created a micro utopia of cooperation set up across differences such as age, gender, and sexual orientation of the collaborators.⁴⁸ Julita Wójcik continued organizing similar workshops between 2011 and 2014, whenever the sculpture needed to be rebuilt or renovated. She thus transformed the activity of crafting flowers into that of crafting social relations.⁴⁹ What was fashioned was not only the material object itself but also the ephemeral community of the Rainbow ‘co-producers.’

However, the story of the sculpture came to prove that the term relational antagonism proposed by Claire Bishop seems more accurate to describe what is at stake when contemporary art practices take social relations as their matter. It remains crucial to underline that the Rainbow was created in the shadow of the conflict between the church and the state, a conflict which was said to concern “property rights”. The final results of reclaiming the property in Wigry had mostly symbolic results – the post-Camaldolese monastery was soon reopened as a pilgrimage centre dedicated to the memory of John Paul II.⁵⁰ The sculpture was created in the context of conflict and that is why it was not “open-ended” – the context enforced divisions which became more apparent later. As recounted by Bishop, divisions are limitations and “it is from the exclusions engendered by this demarcation that antagonism occurs.”⁵¹

Disobedient Object

As mentioned above, the Rainbow in Warsaw was destroyed several times. During the 2013 Independence Day March organized in Warsaw by a radical right-wing organization called the National Movement,⁵² the public destruction of the Rainbow was given a powerful visual representation. The iconic image of a young man triumphantly raising a Polish flag in front of the burning sculpture was by photojournalist Marcin Wziontek. The photograph soon went viral and attracted the attention of international media such as The Guardian, which posted it as a “picture of the day.”⁵³ In Poland the photograph was published on the cover of the newspaper “Polska Niepodległa (Independent Poland) and granted the title “patriotic image of the year” by the Association of Catholic Journalists.⁵⁴ According to Wziontek, the young man whom he portrayed was at the same time photographed by his own friend, so the picture only “captured the moment”. I also remember people gathering near the burning sculpture, many taking photographs, acting as if they were documenting a get-together with friends. For me, the relaxed atmosphere under the burning sculpture was striking because the act of burning the Rainbow itself, preceded by public incitements to hostility motivated by homophobia,⁵⁵ had a surprisingly similar structure to pogroms.⁵⁶ One radically conservative Catholic TV station was even fined for inciting hostility while providing live coverage because, according to the National Broadcasting Council, the correspondents openly expressed their approval for the act of public vandalism.⁵⁷

In 2013, the empty, blackened frame of the burnt Rainbow soon became material evidence of the failure of Poland to integrate with the European project.⁵⁸ However, it also brought out some recognizable themes from Polish history – such as the shame of being the one who performs violent acts. Andrzej Leder, in his book A Dreamt Through Revolution. Exercises in Historical Logic, claimed that in Poland, between the years 1939 and 1956, a social revolution took place that enabled both the emergence and the expansion of today’s urban middle class.⁵⁹ However, according to Leder, the memory of the “dreamt of” revolution has been suppressed because of the dramatic violence that it brought in its wake. In my opinion, this would explain why so many counter-initiatives were taken up in response to the burning of the Rainbow, as if participation in these counter-initiatives could change their uncomfortable position of being “passive witnesses”, a role known from the public discourse on the role of Poles in the tragedy of the Holocaust.⁶⁰ The sculpture was soon restored as a result of the great effort of Warsaw citizens, who put enormous pressure on the local government by organizing a number of grass-roots initiatives and happenings in defense of the sculpture, such as “Let’s stick a flower in the Rainbow!”⁶¹or “Unshakeable! Let’s kiss under the Rainbow.”⁶² The numerous campaigns usually initiated via Facebook, included diplomats⁶³, activists⁶⁴, and celebrities⁶⁵. One group of prominent public figures organized a public collection of money for the purpose of renovating the sculpture.⁶⁶ Somebody hacked the Facebook page of the National Radical Camp⁶⁷ – which was banned for promoting hatred right after the Independence Day March of 2013 – and it was brought back online with an image of the Warsaw Rainbow and plenty of new political slogans⁶⁸ such as: “Nationalism is not patriotism, because hatred is not love. NRC – we change for the better,”, “I am Polish and I have Polish obligations: tolerance, solidarity, opposition to violence. NRC – we change for the better,”, “„Girl plus girl is a normal family,”, “„Public communications, communal houses, first communion. We used to cry: down with communism, but now we are not so sure,”, “„Only under the Rainbow, only under this sign, can Poland be Poland and a Pole be a Pole!”⁶⁹ Julita Wójcik also publicly condemned homophobia and organized a handicraft workshop⁷⁰ that was hosted by the Zachęta National Art Gallery.⁷¹

At that time, the burnt and blackened frame of the Rainbow gift-sculpture had apparently transformed itself into a “disobedient object.”⁷² The construction was soon decorated with flowers, leaflets, flags of the Campaign Against Homophobia, drawings, and paper notes carrying personal messages. The term disobedient object was coined by Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon for artifacts that “ordinary people always used to exert counterpower.”⁷³ Disobedient objects “can be monuments, full of symbolic, historical accumulation, or small, quotidian and domestic. As much as they are often playful and humorous, they can also be simultaneously traumatic, traversed by antagonisms and conflict.”⁷⁴ Disobedient objects “aren’t unified by style or type,”⁷⁵ although it is very rare that they are “fine,” since “quality” is what belongs to privileged social conditions. Disobedient objects, entangled with humans, are temporary constructions that are not made to last. They are objects that are made to support social change, and that is why they are filled with hopes and promises. However, most often they fail.

The Rainbow as Spectacle

It is important to underline that after the sculpture was burnt in 2013, the Mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, announced that the Rainbow, which was initially described as a temporary project,⁷⁶ would be rebuilt as many times as necessary, as a “symbol of tolerance.”⁷⁷ Just before Independence Day March 2013, the sculpture was actually restored by the local government, because it was also burnt in 2012.⁷⁸ By saying that the Rainbow would be rebuilt as many times as necessary, the Mayor declared that the gift-sculpture would become an agonistic gift, a potlatch. One of the main issues raised by the opponents of the sculpture was that the artwork’s maintenance was costly.⁷⁹ For them, the “gift” was never “free” – it was paid for with the public’s money. According to Sansi, who drew from the argument of Bataille, a potlatch is an “expense without return,” and as such “it turns the expense into public spectacle.”⁸⁰ The author claimed that potlatch, just like theft, can become “an event of transgression that questions the reproduction of the existing social order”⁸¹ by denying the logic of the market economy. However, if the potlatch is performed only for fame and recognition of the “giver,” it easily turns into “spectacle.”

At the moment my research was conducted, in 2014, the Rainbow had already been restored by the local government and was fully renovated. However, this time no one could physically approach the sculpture because the whole area was highly secured and the artwork was under the special protection of city guards. The sculpture, originally made as a fragile construction – an arch made of artificial flowers – was now diligently maintained, unlike other “disobedient objects” which are made to support social change. When appropriated by the City Council, the sculpture became an “inalienable possession”⁸² – a precious objectification of the city’s policy aiming to associate Warsaw with “tolerance.”

To be precise, the flow of people in the vicinity of the sculpture was limited from the very beginning because the artwork was located on a roundabout. An exception to this rule was made in November 2013, soon after the sculpture was burnt, when visitors were allowed to enter the traffic circle. Demonstrators were also allowed to enter the roundabout during the march “Together Against Nationalism” in November 2014, during the women’s rights march “Manifa” in March 2015, and also during Gay Pride march in June 2015. However, aside from those days, the majority of visitors who came to see or to photograph the sculpture were forced to keep an obligatory distance. So for the ordinary, unaffiliated passers-by, it was possible to view the sculpture only from afar, either from the opposite pavement or traveling by tram, car, or bicycle which already gave the impression of seeing it as if it were a moving image.⁸³

In the summer of 2014, I still observed efforts made by passers-by who struggled to trick the officers and enter the zone inhabited by the sculpture. The intruders were usually stopped by city guards and chastised for crossing the street in the wrong place or fined.⁸⁴ When observing the interactions my first intuition was that the roundabout preserved a sort of an ’aura’ produced by past participatory events. Because the Rainbow was made in a collaborative manner and because, for most of the time, Julita Wójcik remained fairly absent as an author – the sculpture was appropriated by various groups of its receivers, some of whom definitely knew how to play hide-and-seek with the authorities. For example, one of the volunteers who took part in the process of making of the sculpture in Wigry told me in an interview that after the sculpture was burnt in 2013 in Warsaw, she felt that she needed to take a stance. She therefore took part in the happenings organized in defense of the Rainbow that also condemned the homophobia of its critics, for example, by initiating a non-heteronormative exchange of kisses in the vicinity of the sculpture - “Let’s kiss under the Rainbow!”. Interestingly, after that event, the Rainbow was temporarily appropriated by a group of conservative politicians from the political party Solidarna Polska, who decorated its frame with national red and white flowers, and organized a Christmas Eve party there.⁸⁵ The politicians claimed that they wish the Rainbow to be rebuilt, but only in national colours. The interviewee did not like the idea of the Rainbow being appropriated by right-wing politicians. One night, she spontaneously decided to tear some of their flowers from the monument and brought them home as trophies.

However, between June and November 2014, it was quite apparent that the Rainbow was surrounded, not so much by the “aura” attributed to collaboratively made artworks as by the invisible, protective mist emitted by CCTV cameras installed by the Centre for Security and Crisis Management of the Capital City of Warsaw,⁸⁶ which also provided a sprinkler system and illuminated the sculpture with street lamps.⁸⁷ Thus the actions performed in the vicinity of the Rainbow, which I regularly observed, were not only mediated by the sculpture. They were also substantially designed and furnished by the material and immaterial infrastructures operating in the “site” that the Rainbow inhabited, such as the city monitoring, hotspots, street lamps, electricity, and the specific, panoptic form of the built environment itself.

It was the built environment that provided conditions for creating multiple, visual representations of the sculpture in first place, which, in turn, transformed the disobedient object into a “panoptic device.”⁸⁸ A number of Facebook pages were dedicated to both the Square of the Saviour and the Rainbow, and so an immaterial infrastructure was set up for the circulation of images.⁸⁹ The page called “Zbawix” [a play on words that connects two terms – “savior” and “fun”] was full of posts and digital images documenting the daily life of the Square, as well as “crazy nights out” and photo evidence of an action performed by one of the arsonists who attempted to destroy the sculpture during the period when my research was being conducted.⁹⁰ The owner of a coffee place located at the Square of the Saviour, Galeria Funky Studio, installed a surveillance camera on the façade of his building, so that the sculpture could be streamed live on the Internet.⁹¹ The Square of the Saviour was given its own public hotspot to enable a connection via a network called Square of the Hipster. It is important to add that the majority of public events that took place in the vicinity of the sculpture were announced via social media.

Thus I would argue that, in this case, it is not only the sculpture itself, but also the infrastructures that should be perceived as mediators; not only do they organize and regulate the flow of humans, goods, and information in the vicinity of the sculpture, they also transmit and confirm the existing power relations.⁹² Close, ethnographic investigation of the social space produced in the vicinity of the Rainbow may potentially serve to call into question theprivileged role of human agency in producing the phenomenon of the sculpture as even the gestures performed in the vicinity of the art object may no longer belong to the subjects, but to those who represent them.⁹³ The Rainbow was permanently monitored by CCTV cameras – both commercial ones and those provided by the local government; the sculpture was also frequently televised and photographed on private cell phones. It is therefore possible to claim that the Square itself became a site of the transmission of what Debord called the ongoing “spectacle.” According to Debord, the “spectacle” is “not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images”.⁹⁴ Furthermore, a complex system of monitoring and control usually serves the purpose of creating “disciplined subjects.”⁹⁵ Hence, I would argue that here, more agency was attributed to the complex, multi-layered infrastructures that put the panoptic device in operation than to human subjects. From this point of view, the dynamic interactions between the intruders who struggled to enter the site inhabited by the sculpture and the officers who struggled to fine them, those interactions were “unimportant competitions,” since, according to Debord, “the spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue,” “the spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals.”⁹⁶

A Gift that Interpellates

Soon after the Rainbow was re-installed at the Square of the Savior, in May 2014, one small, radically conservative group, led by a priest, protested “in defense of Catholic faith and tradition”. One of their main demands was to remove the Rainbow, which they considered “a blasphemy,”⁹⁷ from “the vicinity of the church of the Holiest Savior”. As they put it in their official open letter addressed to the Mayor of Warsaw: “standing at the Square of the Holiest Savior, we pray for the Authorities of the Capital City to send a crew of workers with a crane so that the installation [the Rainbow] could be taken away as immediately as it was installed.”⁹⁸ Contrary to the official, historical reports,⁹⁹ the priest who wrote the letter claimed that, in the past, the Square of the Savior had had a monument to Jesus Christ which was destroyed by the Nazis. The demonstrators wanted to return the Square back to the previous “owner”, so the conflict was presented as if it was concerning “property rights”, as in Wigry. However, the protest was organized against the so-called “gender ideology,”¹⁰⁰ that is, among other issues, against Poland’s ratification of the Council of Europe’s “Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.” This message was communicated via banners that the demonstrators held which compared “gender ideology” to totalitarian regimes such as communism and fascism. Some of the biased slogans were roughly translated into English: “Correctly-thinking Pole, remember!!!! Gender – the ideology of spineless Westerners is not for our hardy Poles. Instead of helping to change our laws, homo-couples should be helped to change [themselves].”¹⁰¹ This was because the convention included content pertaining to LGBT persons, as it prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. Thus, the imaginary results of actions taken by the protestors would be to return the Rainbow back to its actual patron - to the Council of Europe.

The protest had its own dynamics organized by the rhythm of prayers (the recitation of the Holy Rosary, The Chaplet of Divine Mercy, The Angel of the Lord) and informal discussions. The majority of the demonstrators were elderly women. It was rather unlikely that they would talk to random passers-by – they usually stood close to each other, almost in a circle which, to me, suggested that their activity was directed to the inside rather than the outside of the group. The demonstrators would ignore those passers-by who wanted to argue with them, laughed at them, took photographs of them or, in some cases, were willing to have a conversation with them. The protest was addressed almost exclusively to a group of people of the same religious affiliation, who could prove it by joining the activity of praying in public. The gatherings were organized five days a week, usually at the same time and in the same part of the Square. Each of them lasted approximately three hours, despite the changing weather conditions, season of the year or signs that the demonstrators were getting tired with propping up the massive placards. The regularly practiced religious protest seemed effective in how it produced social relations: almost the same number of demonstrators would meet every day and they were not always the same people. Many times I saw new people spontaneously joining in, usually to recite some part of the Rosary. The public gathering soon became a recognizable meeting point for them. The demonstrators would not only pray – they also chatted and occasionally exchanged leaflets distributed by the priest, such as the copy of the already quoted open letter addressed to the Mayor of Warsaw.

When they were standing opposite the Rainbow, I noticed that some of the protestors faced the sculpture when reciting the Rosary, as if the Rainbow had, in fact, been appropriated by them. When after one of their gatherings, I randomly asked one of the elderly ladies about the artwork, she honestly confessed that before she had not been in the sculpture. She did not realize when the Rainbow appeared and why. It was only after the “free gift” was introduced as a “gay symbol” and associated with “gender ideology” that it became visible to her. From this point of view, the repetitive actions mediated by the Rainbow and performed in its vicinity seemed effective in how they produced the ephemeral political community of religious believers, praying in protest against the presence of the sculpture.

It is important to underline that after my fieldwork was completed, Poland ratified the Council of Europe’s “Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence” (signedby the Polish President in April 2015.) Nevertheless, Polish law does not define crimes motivated by homophobia and transphobia. The protest “in defense of Catholic faith and tradition” was continued in 2015.¹⁰² This time, the demonstrators held placards that criticized President Bronisław Komorowski who ratified the Convention, and openly expressed their approval of the newly elected conservative President, Andrzej Duda.¹⁰³

Conclusion

The story of the Rainbow shows how Julita Wójcik opened up a space for creating multiple authorship. Thanks to her decision the Rainbow actually became a truly “democratic artwork.” Its “democratic qualities” did not correspond to the liberal concept of the public sphere, understood as a consensual agreement between rational individuals. In this article, I presented some of the examples of how the Rainbow, as a “gift-sculpture,” interpellated the emergent political subjectivities of those who responded to it as receivers. Instead of harmony, the sculpture produced conflicts between the antagonized, ephemeral communities of its “co-producers.” The conflicts that the sculpture effectively mediated falsified the idea that different groups or persons can peacefully coexist in one society without the threat of being excluded. I was hesitant to call the conflicts that I observed “class conflicts,” because that would require more advanced fieldwork. However, I would like to stress that one of the main differences between the various groups of the Rainbow’s “receivers” was generation (elderly vs. young women). According to Bishop, by probing the boundaries of what is and what is not possible, it is conflicts and not consensus that can actually bring about social change.¹⁰⁴ I imagine that the newly emergent political subjects - be they radically conservative, leftist, neoliberal or queer - will remain active in the public sphere. However, their activity will presumably exceed the limits of a public discourse organized around the Rainbow itself.¹⁰⁵ By reporting on the social life of the Rainbow, I followed the argument made by Roger Sansi who claimed that: “Any project of ‘participation’, like the gift, contains the seeds of the opposite: market competition and exclusion. (…) Perhaps from the perspective of anthropology, more than if they are morally unquestionable or politically effective, what is remarkable is their very process.”¹⁰⁶