Piotr Borkowski, director of the Culture and Art Center (OKIS) in Wrocław, talks to Barbara Deręgowska about cultural life in Lower Silesia.


Piotr Borkowski, 48, graduated from the Wrocław Academy of Agriculture in 1984. In 1988-1990, he completed a postgraduate course at the Journalism and Editing Department of the University of Warsaw. In 2002, he completed a Postgraduate Program in Marketing and Management at the Academy of Economics in Wrocław.
In 1984-1986, he worked as a teacher in an elementary school in Wrocław. In 1985, he started to work for the Odra monthly, first as a proofreader, then as technical editor and managing editor. He is now deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine. In 2001-2002, he was deputy director of the Culture and Art Center (OKIS) in Wrocław. In 2002, he won a competition to become director of the center and has held that position ever since.


You have spent the last five years heading an institution that aims to shape cultural tastes in Lower Silesia. How do you do that?
The Culture and Art Center in Wrocław is supervised by the government of Lower Silesia. For 30 years the center has been conducting cultural activities aimed at the general public. We indeed shape people's tastes and enrich the imagination of residents in Wrocław and Lower Silesia as a whole. How do we do that? We provide them with unforgettable experiences in the form of classical and popular music concerts, art exhibitions, literary events, theater shows and many other cultural events. We organize several big international festivals every year.

For example, we hold the immensely popular WROSTJA festival of one-actor theaters that features shows by outstanding actors from around the world. The Wrocław Promotion of Good Books event attracts dozens of Polish publishers representing a sizable group of contemporary writers and poets.

In the spring, we hold the May With Ancient Music festival, and in the summer, we co-organize the International Moniuszko Festival in Kudowa-Zdrój. In the fall, we follow up with the International Festival of Viennese Music. We also hold the annual Lower Silesian Art Festival that showcases dozens of exhibitions of painting, sculpture, ceramics and photographs by both Polish and foreign artists. We organize around 200 cultural events a year.

We are the owners of the Domek Romański Lower Silesia Photography Center in whose historical interiors we hold photo exhibitions of the world's greatest artists. The site also hosts photo workshops and presentations of work by photographic school graduates. The OKIS also publishes the prestigious cultural magazine Odra that has been around for 45 years.

You do not limit your activities to Wrocław and Lower Silesia province. Are you also active abroad?
We keep expanding our activities as this is a great way to promote the city and province. We work with cultural institutions from other Visegrad Group countries, that is the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. By the end of the year, we will hold an exhibition entitled On the Danube, Vltava and Vistula to show work by outstanding medal makers from the four countries.

For years, we have coordinated projects as part of a cultural cooperation agreement between the Lower Silesia province and the French region of Alsace, in fields such as visual and audiovisual arts and cultural heritage. The project includes visits by artists, student scholarships, youth exchanges, concerts and exhibitions. We also have joint publications.

We hold inter-regional presentations of Lower Silesia's cultural heritage in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia and Ukraine. The OKIS buildings on the Market Square are home to the Lower Silesian Cultural Information Center, which provides information on cultural events in the region. Every month more than 5,000 people visit it, including many foreigners. The center puts on painting and photography exhibitions and offers art magazines. It also offers tickets to all the concerts, exhibitions and shows held in the city and the province as a whole.

The OKIS's activities focus on improving the quality of cultural life in Lower Silesia. We make every effort to be a modern culture promotion center.