Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Eliza Rose. Moderated by Malgorzata Mazurek.

In July of 1971, experts in diverse fields (artists; scientists; sociologists) convened for a festival hosted by a coal mine in southwest Poland. Though the mine was operational at the time, this could not be guessed from the event’s visual record, from which workers, machinery, and the activity of work are conspicuously absent. This talk uses a diary by the festival’s commissioner to reconstruct its participants’ vexed debates over their rapport with local workers and over their own uneasy proletarian status. The festival is evaluated as proof-of-concept for a campaign in the 1960-70s to build bridges between industry and the arts, in part in order to socially integrate intellectual and working classes. The event’s internal contradictions preview problems that would be this campaign’s undoing, making the event a canary in a coal mine for dysfunction troubling the socialist dream of class unity.