Życie do ustanowienia. O możliwości powrotu Edwarda Stachury
A Life to Be Constructed. On the Possibility of a Return of Edward Stachura

Summary/Abstract: The point of departure of this article is an interpretation of an exhibition of K.M. Bednarski’s Symbols of Life after Death. The author analyses the status of the artist’s famous headstones within the context of relations between the dead and the living, which became the topic of research conducted by V. Despret, an anthropologist of science. M. Barbaruk agrees that thanks to the concept of construction (B. Latour) it is possible to speak about the deceased with whom we maintain assorted complicated relations, just like about works of art. This calls for a suitable “milieu”, or, according to Barbaruk, an interpretation which she describes as Orphic. Barbaruk shows that such is the attitude towards the deceased Edward Stachura assumed by Danuta Pawłowska-Skibińska, who many years after his death decided to return to his old letters and to reply to them. Consequently, Stachura received a chance for a new existence, different from the legendary one. Barbaruk embarked upon a similar interpretation gesture vis-à-vis Stachura by discovering his until now unknown relations with a group of Latin American artists and poets (i.a. G. Iommi, M. Deguy, E. Simons) active in Paris, where from the 1960s they organised phalènes. Barbaruk came across a surprising presence of “stachura” in Amereida, a poem written during a decolonisation expedition to South America (1965). She also drew attention to the role played by Juan Pablo Iommi Amunátegui at the time of Stachura’s stays in Paris (1977, 1978) and to the need to find letters exchanged by Stachura and Edison Simons, a poet from Panama.

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