Agnieszka Rayss - This Is Where the End of Cities Begins

This Is Where the End of Cities Begins / Tu się zaczyna koniec miast

I am looking for the skeleton of the city; I am wandering around spaces quite close to inhabited areas – if measured by physical distances. But this was a parallel reality; forgotten, visited by special request only. Each day it looks different, depending on the weather, the time of the day and season.

I get off at the final stop, Google maps in hand. It’s getting dark. You can still vaguely see the city, here and there you can catch a glimpse of the Palace of  Culture and some skyscrapers, but this area is a place of a different kind. A small cosmos, bound by train tracks, old fences, power plant blocks. The train tracks run through the thicket. There is a stream behind a barrier of shrubs; abandoned plastic bags and bottles reflect the light and glisten like Christmas tree baubles.

Evening strolls around the menial outskirts turned from a search for the industrial Warsaw into a venture into the hyperreality, strangely close to outer space, only with gravity. In daytime, the lunar craters could turn out to be heaps of gravel, and the spaceship – a prosaic part of a sewage treatment plant, or a water intake. Fortunately, everyday life has no access to this parallel reality, where dampness and dusk distort the shapes. You can stay on another planet.