In 2018 and 2019, we carried out two editions of the KORCZAK LABORATORY project. They focused on promoting the thoughts and achievements of Janusz Korczak, directing the attention of their audience not to the death of the great educator, but to his life and views.
Workshops with young people and the resulting performances – installations directed by Wojciech Faruga – were co-created with and addressed to teenagers, based on the principle of peer education.
The first edition (2018) focused on the youth of Janusz Korczak in order to build an alternative to the persona of the ‘Old Doctor’ established in the collective consciousness and present Korczak as a dynamic personality, often torn by contradictions, but always faithful to his beliefs and values.
In the second edition (Korczak Laboratory vol. 2 – Pani Stefa, 2019), we told the story of Stefania Wilczyńska, a figure hugely important to Korczak, yet practically forgotten. Emmanuel Ringelblum, the author of the famous Holocaust archive, wrote of their collaboration: “They worked together all their lives. Even death did not separate them. They went to their deaths together. Everything connected with the person of Korczak – the boarding school, the promotion of love for children – everything is a joint achievement of both of them”.
The projects’ partner was the Museum of Warsaw’s Praga, and they were co-financed by the National Centre of Culture.
