Sibyl 2018
Our museum has once again received the prestigious Sibyl award, given annually in the Museum Event of the Year competition. This is the most important form of recognition for museum professionals for interesting museum projects. The honorable mention was given to the “We Built This City” exhibition prepared by the Museum in 2018 on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Stalowa Wola.
On May 27, 2019, the Palace on the Island, Warsaw’s Royal Lazienki Park, hosted a gala ceremony for the winners of the 39th Sibyl 2018 Competition for the Museum Event of the Year. The event is organized by the National Institute of Museology and Collections Protection, and its goal is to identify the most outstanding achievements in the sphere of museum activities submitted by museums from all over Poland. The competition jury was composed of prominent representatives of the world of science and culture, appointed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. This year’s competition was held under new organizational regulations with a reduced number of competition categories, but without omitting any of the museum activities. In 6 categories, the jurors selected the best three projects each. Among the distinguished projects submitted in the TIME EXHIBITIONS category was the anniversary exhibition entitled “We Built This City. “We Built This City,” prepared by the Stalowa Wola Museum. The museum competed for the Sybil statuette in this category with the exhibition “Marcello Bacciarelli. The most beautiful portraits” prepared by the Royal Castle in Warsaw – Museum and the award-winning exhibition ‘Leon Tarasewicz’ prepared by the museologists of the Museum of Architecture in Wroclaw.
The exhibition “We built this city” illustrated eight decades of Stalowa Wola not through dates, key events, well-known people who vividly wrote themselves in history, but through residents who told the history of one of the youngest Polish cities.
–80 years from the perspective of a city is not much, but from the perspective of a human being it is a ragged life, so this human scale was superimposed on eight decades of development of Stalowa Wola,” says Lucyna Mizera, director of the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola.
The title of the exhibition referred directly to the fact of building the city on raw roots and emphasizing the role of the entire community in this work, and the exhibition was accompanied by the motto of writer John Green: People make places, and place makes people.
Through the prism of the memories of Stalowa Wola residents the narrative of the exhibition was carried on, allowing us to listen to what they had to say about the city they built, in which they live, whose streets they traverse every day, whose image they have in their memory, and whose climate they create. The exhibition made reference to the current trend in museology of biographies of places/objects and interpretations of heritage.
The exhibition included photographs, documents, souvenirs, utilitarian objects, things related to specific people or places, fragments of films and other objects, which appropriately illustrated the narrative and acted as witnesses to the history of the city and its inhabitants. The exhibition was also a visualized form of spoken archive, which included interviews with residents of Stalowa Wola, recorded with the participation of the Department of Museology of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Rzeszow and students of museology and sociology at the University of Rzeszow. The originator of the exhibition was Lucyna Mizera, director of the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola, the curator was Katarzyna Zarzycka, with the cooperation of Wojciech Chudzik, while the coordinator was Elżbieta Skromak. The visual arrangement of the exhibition was developed by designers from Koza Nostra Studio.
