In the workshop led by Simone Rueß, a collective map was created based on a performative exploration of urban space. The starting point were mental images of selected spaces of Katowice and performative and linguistic interactions with places such as the train station, the shopping center and the pedestrian zone.
The aim was to draw attention to the network of socio-spatial relationships in Katowice. According to Martina Löw's relational spatial concept, space is a constantly changing arrangement of people, other living beings, goods and architectural objects. This space is synthesized through the processes of
perception, imagination and memory.
Furthermore, Simone Rueß' concept for the workshop was based on Kevin Lynch's (1960) idea of the mental image of the city and Grzegorz Kowalski's theory and teaching of the “own/common space”. (Excerpt summary of the workshop at NIAiU, Warsaw)
"Based on the insights I received during the conversations and narrative mappings of residents along my first tour through the city (Nowa Huta), I revisited and approached selected locations in greater detail (Lynch 1960, 15). I stood with my mobile table at six locations for a longer duration of time (approximately two to three hours), scanning the visual field and documenting the multiplicity of moments as layers of strokes and lines on a single sheet of paper (Figure 4). The live drawings were simultaneously filmed from above and later digitally sped up in videos and superimposed. Inverted to white on black, like an X-ray, the time-based images illuminate ‘a view of bodies seen through and beyond their skins’—that is, a view of environmental structures seen through their surfaces (Rueß 2023a, 89). Built on my artistic practice, I used the method of overlaying drawn movements into simultaneity to reveal the so-called movement space in relation to the architecture, environments, and their histories."
excerpt: Simone Rueß (2025). Performance Drawing: Uncovering Multiple Timescapes of Nowa Huta, In: Spacetimes Matter. A Collection of Mapping Methodologies. Baxter, Jamie-Scott / Heinrich, Anna Juliane / Marguin, Séverine / Sommer, Vivien (Eds.), Jovis: Berlin.
References:
Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Rueß, Simone. 2023a. ‘Drawing and (Re)Acting: The Creation of Movement Spaces’. Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 8 (1): pp. 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp_00107_1.18 October – 21 November 2010 at Galeria Studio, Palace of Culture, Warsaw
Nowa Huta is a unique testimony to urban and social 're-figuration' in today's Europe. Originally designed from the top down as an ideological, socialist, and urban planningproject, Nowa Huta has been undergoing an ongoing economic and social transformationsince 1989. The accompanying geographical changes and the progressive changesof Kraków have led to new residents, different everyday activities, and altered patternsof movement. The audiosphere is also undergoing a profound transformation, whichis linked, for example, to the closure of the industrial context. In an interdisciplinarydialog, Simone Rueß and Rafał Mazur bring together analyses of urban structures andsoundscapes in the form of a hybrid mapping. Residents are invited to actively participateand reflect on their neighbourhoods in the context of local and global upheavals. An audio-visual 5-channel installation makes the artistic investigations spatio-temporally experienceable.



Gendera, Marta (2014), Park Tysiąclecia, Millenium Park. Próby, szkice nowej przestrzeni publicznej, Zielona Góra:
Fundacja Salony, pp. 166-173


In 2011, Simone Rueß and Krzysztof Franaszek jointly created the video installation HALA (two projections 16:9, 6‘54“, on loop). It documented the dismantling of the KDT market hall which spanned a vast expanse at the very heart of Warsaw next to the Palace of Culture and Science from 1999 to 2009, which today marks the site of the contemporary art museum MSN. In their record of gradual destruction, the artists discovered that the demolishment involved the erection of temporary structures which were later taken down, as well. Their collaborative project de-re-konstrukt (2019-2021) that followed, as well addresses the arc of creation and destruction, which is part and parcel of the urban lifecycle.
The movement which takes place every day follows
the given spatial and architectural elements and
forms an additional invisible space within and in
relation to the architecture. This movement space
is shaped through an aggregation of moves over a
longer period and usually has soft, round edges, as
corners are generally avoided by people. After observing
and tracking the daily paths between rooms and
objects in the apartment in Płocka Street in Warsaw
Poland, I moulded the body of movements with its
soft round edges in silicone.



Passers-by between the main railway station and Patelnia in Warsaw, Poland.
Sketch of the Movement Space inside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw - the lifts:
In the middle of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, which marks the centre of the capital city, there is a system that shows similarities to the spinal column of the human body. In the midpoint of the palace tower are 12 elevator shafts in which people are transported daily to 43 floors. The work abstracts the space within the architecture of these elevators, a space which the people occupy and define over time through their usage of the moving lifts, getting in and out at the different floors. Dismembered in its seperate vertebrae, the spinal column is lying on the floor, as if an organ has been removed from the body and relieved of its normal function. And so, the observer has the chance to examine the spine with his own eyes.