Pluszaki (Plushies) International Festival of Contemporary Music Warsaw Autumn

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A child’s room makes up a unique sensory s p a c e – t i m e close to most of us: a space–time existing here and now for contemporary children and as a memory, as it were, for adults. A child’s room has its own climate, character, acoustics, audiosphere, and specificity, which naturally envelops the main protagonist of the place: the person living in it. A very characteristic visual element of many children’s rooms are the plushies: plush toys in which various emotions, sensations, expressions, and sensory perception channels are condensed. The visual aspect of a plush toy is as distinctive and important as its tactile, sensory and often also olfactory aspects. A plushie is designed in a way that would make a child (and often an adult as well) become seized by a sudden and overwhelming need to touch it or by an emotion that can be compared to falling in love – love at first sight. However, the distinctive toy carries many emotions and sensations, not only pleasant ones: tenderness, love, joy, a sense of security, but also anger, jealousy or sadness, expressed intensely and in a very disciplined, condensed form. A plushie and the essence of emotions accumulated around it can be a good metaphor of what an artistic miniature addressed to a small child should be. Such miniatures—musical “plushies”— would make up this concert. 

Anna Kierkosz