Stadion – bazar
Stadion Bazar

Summary/Abstract: The Warsaw open-air market in the “abandoned” Tenth Anniversary Sports Stadium is described as a cognitive figure of essential diagnostic value and not as an ethnographic oddity. According to the accepted interpretation, Stadion Bazar (the Stadium Bazaar) is a figure not of a relic, vanishing after the closure of the almost twenty-years old Europe Fair (Jarmark Europa), but of that which is emerging and anticipated in the form of intensifying trans-cultural processes. Stadion Bazar is a Polish localization of the well-known “ethno-landscapes” by Arjun Appadurai, a sui generis laboratory of the forms and styles of Polish postmodernity. An important part is played by a recognition of the “borderland syndrome” (the frontier between the East and the West) and the “revolutionary” role (in relation to the central systems) performed by an informal and, simultaneously, powerful “’parallel economy” conducted in the open-air stalls of the bazaar. The author analyses the cultural consequences of the presence of Stadion Bazar in a capital city, and its influence on the transformations of the semantics of urban space and the dynamics of the styles of Polish pop-culture and consumption models.

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