The Thousand Year Plan – Agnieszka Polska

The Thousand Year Plan – Agnieszka Polska

Art Collection Telekom
Hallen #4, Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin
09.09. – 17.09.2023

Curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher

‘The Thousand-Year Plan’ is a 2-channel, immersive film and sound installation. The film, which combines animated and live-action video, talks about the electrification of Polish countryside in the years following WWII.
On the one hand, it is a history of modernization and emancipation, and on the other – a poetic expression of anxieties resulting from the protagonists’ entanglement in a moment of technological breakthrough, in which “electrical current measures the new time.”

Set in the 1950s, Agnieszka Polska’s film introduces four characters from the peasantry on two opposite screens: a couple of engineers working on the electrification of rural areas and two anti-communist partisans hiding in the surrounding forests. The dialogue reveals a kaleidoscope of emotions: hope for a better tomorrow, faith in progress, but also fear and a sense of loneliness. Although they all imagine the new world differently, they are united by an awareness of living through a turning point in history. Nature, time, and technology –emphasized via digital animations in the symbolic layer of the piece — are the film’s other, equally important heroes.