Cosmic Grass: From synthpop environmentalist children’s revue to an experimental music video about the fossil fuel industry

In 1986, in the declining socialist system and amid growing concerns about the natural environment, children from the cultural center in Knurów, Upper Silesia, presented a show called Cosmic Grass (Kosmiczne Trawy). The event was a futuristic music revue with mesmerizing, cold synth sounds and psychedelic costumes. Soon after, the kids started a tour with the show around Poland, even before the highest officials. Notably, the Cosmic Grass narrative concerned environmental degradation and destruction of ecosystems caused by humans, whereas the cultural center in Knurów was affiliated with the local hard coal mine. Since the nineteenth century, the Upper Silesia region has been famous for its coal deposits and mining industry, as well as mining traditions in working class folklore, customs, and everyday life. In socialist Poland, the Silesian mining industry was economically and ideologically critical for the country’s prosperity and stability. The assignment of the environmentalist show in a region so renowned for and dependent on fossil fuels at least seems to reveal an unintended inconsistency between economic and cultural policy.

In 2022, Karolina Pawelczyk, an artist born in Knurów, created a 15-minute video based on the Cosmic Grass show. In her work, Pawelczyk reconstructed the plot of the revue, adding a few quotes from the Polish president praising the fossil fuel industry in Upper Silesia and calling coal the strategic resource of the country. Some parts of the new show were performed by adults, stylized as neo-hippies, in the degraded landscapes of Turów, where the brown coal mine is still working. Turów does not belong to Silesia (the town is located near the borders with the Czech Republic and Germany); however, in recent years, it was one of the main sites of the struggle between environmentalist NGOs and the conservative government. Moreover, Turów became a cause of disagreement between the Polish and Czech governments due to its disastrous impact on groundwater. The reconstruction of Cosmic Grass suggests that environmental problems caused by fossil fuel excavation today are like those more than thirty years ago. The show also questions the role of the artists, today and in the past.

The article aims to problematize how different positions of the artist and relationships with a community can have an impact on a local scale. The 1986 Cosmic Grass reached high ruling party members and the broad public, whereas the 2022 remake engaged local citizens and allowed them to speak for themselves when they visited the video exhibition in Warsaw. Neither the first nor the second provided a significant change in policymaking, but when confronted with one another they might reveal their limits under specific political and economic circumstances.

The artistic stands toward environmental degradation of each version of Cosmic Grass were based on different positions in the process of production of art. Comparative analysis of the two versions reveals both approaches’ technical and political predicaments and limits. Thus, revising the 1980s’ sonic dimension of environmentalism enables effective contemporary action. Musical practices in Upper Silesia, along with consideration of the semi-peripheral industrial region and environmental activism in socialist and post-socialist Poland, create a context for the analysis. An additional framework is the concept of the long 1980s as a period that defined the world’s contemporary social, political, and cultural landscape, and the ways the political resistance and social struggles are being maintained. Fragments of political ecology and eco-musicology also apply.

In his 1934 essay “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin addresses the author’s position toward political struggle. The decision to dedicate one’s work to the proletariat’s interest and thus to conform to the correct political tendency, is right, but not enough, Benjamin contends.¹ Instead of discussing the relationship between form and content, Benjamin asks about technique: How does the art piece stand in relation to production?² By technique, Benajmin means not only aesthetical technique but also the technical production of the artwork, as well as relations of production that determine social conditions. By juxtaposing Soviet and German writers, Benjamin exposes the difference between making use of the means of production and ignoring one’s position in the production process, in effect patronizing the working class.³

Progressive authors should transform and liberate the forms of production. Such technical innovations should make the productive apparatus useful to the proletariat. Without this kind of functional transformation, “the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes and propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question.”⁴ To make the fight against such appropriations possible, artists must start by examining their positions and then take on the task of “promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production,” and organizing “intellectual workers in the production process.”⁵

Considering the climate crisis, the role of the means of production must be perceived in connection to other species. Such a broader horizon requires what Donna J. Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”: the commitment “to be truly present, not as vanishing pivot between awful or edenic past and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”⁶ Examples of thinking and acting through multispecies kinships and collaborations, far from pure hope or despair, are provided by the SF: the acronym by which Haraway simultaneously means “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact.”⁷ SF as a practice of worldling and storytelling brings back the question of technique:

The analysis of the technical means of production thus should include the matters that matter. In musical activities, matters were always one of the most obscure and problematic questions. “Regardless of its explicit themes or implicit inspirations, music is made and consumed by people, and it reflects the conditions of that making and consumption,” contends J. Martin Daughtry.⁹ Due to what he calls centripetality, music “can intensify a listener’s embodied sense of their fictive separation from all that is not them,”¹⁰ thus furthering human/nature dualism ideology and turning one’s attention away from the process of slow environmental violence. Instruments that produce music are themselves produced of nonhuman bodies. The music industry has disastrous effects on habitats throughout the Earth; consequently, “the instrumentalization of the nonhuman world and the sensation of humans as soulful and exceptional creatures reinforce one another.”¹¹ Music listeners rarely think about the lives sacrificed to produce instruments nor the social and economic circumstances of that production. Meanwhile, “the connection between music, materiality, and violence in all of its multiplex forms is revealed as a throughline running from the beginning of the age of humans to the present,” Daughtry claims.¹²

The paradox Daughtry points out is linked to music’s power to create imagined communities or a whole different social world. Josh Kun calls this kind of world an audiotopia: “a space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit, be safe in, learn from.”¹³ The same characteristic disconnects people from their local surroundings and provides them with ideas, identities, and emotions, that empower them to make a change in the real world—for better or worse. Furthermore, the songs people share at moments of political action or social upheaval cannot be distilled from and examined without the broader soundscape. Andrea F. Bohlman argues that it is “the irreducibility of the sonic” that makes those engaged in protest acknowledge a particular piece of music as a crucial factor in the history of their struggle.¹⁴ Songs that people sing are just a part of much bigger and more complicated orchestrations. Noriko Manabe makes a similar remark when pointing to romanticization in the popular consciousness of the figure of “the lone musician speaking truth to power” that does not relate to the circumstances under which Japanese musicians eschew taking openly political stands.¹⁵ In socialist Eastern Europe, where institutions, infrastructure, and organizations of official culture frequently served as sites of underground creativity, the romanticized figure of the rebel musician often proved misleading as well.

In this paper, Benjamin’s claims are applied to the analysis of the differences between the artists’ positions in producing Cosmic Grass in 1986 and its reconstruction in 2022, and consequently, the employment of the means of production in both cases. Decisive would be the distinction between a top-down project that could provide the community only with symbolic empowerment and a more horizontal collaboration between artists and local citizens, endowing the latter with opportunities to publicize their cause; or the distinction between an audiotopia cementing community and the sounds and voices heard on the record. Haraway’s reflections on the matters that matter and Daughtry’s insight into the environmental costs of music production, as well as thoughts by Kun, Bohlman, and Manabe, would help in the further analysis of Cosmic Grass entanglement in the coal mining industry, the ruling party’s ideology, and the fate of local communities, both human and more than human. The story of Cosmic Grass is made of coal and plastic, labor and exploitation, and as such it is analyzed in its broad socio-economic contexts.

The story of the Cosmic Grass revue originated in the Silesian city of Knurów, more precisely from the Cultural Centre affiliated with the local coal mine (Zakładowy Dom Kultury KWK “Knurów”). The show was performed by local children and financed by the mine, but its idea came from a higher source.

The narrator of Cosmic Grass is a young girl named Karolina. She does not like fairy tales so she creates her own stories. In one of such story, she changes herself into a silver fish and floats down the Wild Strawberries River. She is delighted by the river’s scenery, but suddenly something nasty happens: a group of juvenile vandals treads the grass and destroys the wildlife simply for fun. Karolina hears the grass and trees crying desperately for love and help. The rescue eventually comes from outer space: the mighty cosmic grasses come to bring justice to Earth. They threaten an abduction of all the vandals to Ganymede (Ganimeda), the remote planet where nothing thrives or sings, stones fall from the sky instead of raindrops, water in rivers is dark, the sun does not shine, and stone-made monsters wander around. But it develops that capturing the young troublemakers not necessary: under the cosmic grasses’ threat, the wrongdoers undergo a metamorphosis into ecologically friendly folks. In a moment, everything returns to normal: the sun goes up, flowers blossom, and all other plants flourish. After the successful intervention, the cosmic grasses leave Earth. Where do they go? “Anywhere, who knows?”—as they sing in the last song of the show.¹⁶

All the main members of the crew were professionals. Music for the revue was written by Krzysztof Kobyliński, composer and pianist from Gliwice, Upper Silesia, who in his music combines jazz, neoclassic, ethnic, and electronic music. In the early stages of his career, in 1982-1983, he performed with the Gliwice jazz-rock band Formuła Rockowa Street (Rock Form Street). Then he played keyboard in the popular new romantic group Kapitan Nemo. In 1986, the band issued the long-play album Kapitan Nemo with many futuristic sound and text motives; it was the same year that the Cosmic Grass revue was produced. The scenography was designed by Edward Lutczyn, a graphic designer and cartoonist, the author of drawings in lifestyle magazines, pictures in books for children, and the design of music albums. Henryk Konwiński, the opera and ballet director, who then worked in Silesian Opera, together with Edward Szpotański, the manager of the ballet team in Silesian Operetta (now City Theatre in Gliwice), oversaw the choreography. Even the children, chosen for the revue—and the newly created group 7 or The Sevens (Siódemki) in the culture center—had to attend a special workshop whose aim was to assess their vocal and dancing abilities.

Because of the highly qualified team engaged by the culture center in Knurów, the revue had to be a smash. It was produced in just one year from the idea in 1985 to the first performance in June 1986. Synth-pop music composed by Kobyliński was mesmerizing and cold, more suited for current pop culture than productions for kids. Only rare foolish sounds tooting and bubbling between songs reminded listeners that this was a show performed by and dedicated to children. In Polish music of the decade, such synth-pop sounds would evoke imaginaries of machines and industry rather than wild rivers and meadows.

Colorful and almost psychedelic costumes resembled characters from Labyrinth, a 1986 movie with David Bowie as mischievous Goblin King Jareth. There was even a silver spaceship landing on the stage with rumble and smoke. The publicity of Cosmic Grass soon spread outside Knurów and the children’s group started giving shows at contests and festivals throughout the country, where they won praises and awards. One of the performances took place in the House of Music and Dance (Dom Muzyki i Tańca) in Zabrze, Upper Silesia, as a part of the country’s central celebration of Barbórka, a traditional miners’ festival. According to the performers, the spectacle was applauded by the highest officials, such as Communist Party and government leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski and government spokesman government Jerzy Urban.¹⁷

In 1988, after two years of The Sevens’ touring, the state-owned label Pronit issued Cosmic Grass on a long play album with a cover designed by Paweł Wenerski, a professional graphic designer. The songs on the album were interlaced with additional narrative written by Ewa Chotomska (daughter of writer Wanda Chotomska), a popular writer and scriptwriter who specialized in books and TV productions for children, Tik-Tak, Fasola, and Domowe Przedszkole among others. In 1983 she co-established the famous children’s band Fasolki. It was Chotomska who created Karolina, a girl-turn-into-silver fish, for the role of the narrator. Chotomska was another distinguished artist who contributed to the production.

Gathering such outstanding staff for the revue’s production—managerial team, musicians, graphic designers, and other professionals—was expensive. Even more money was required for the special effects and scenography of the production. Issuing the LP two years later was another costly undertaking. For some reason, the coal mine in Knurów covered the costs. Thereby the environmentalist show was founded by the mining industry.

After 1989 and the transition to a liberal democracy and capitalist economy, shows like Cosmic Grass were largely deprecated as part of the official culture of the former regime that the new democratic national broadcasters and promoters pushed aside. By 2022 Cosmic Grass was almost completely forgotten; however, the problems with ecological disasters, polluted waters, and carbon emissions remained.

In 2022, Karolina Pawelczyk created a 15-minute, speculative two-channel music video based on Cosmic Grass. The artist was born and grew up in Knurów, so she understood its citizens’ social and environmental problems. Pawelczyk is also interested in cosmic science and her previous artworks—untitled (PW-Launcher 1) from 2015 and TV Loser from 2019—both focused on human exploration of space as motivated by delusion, greed for dominance or source of false hopes. Pawelczyk has also used her technical expertise to facilitate Open Weather workshops for children with the help of the geography teacher from Opolno-Zdrój.¹⁸ In her other pieces, Pawelczyk combined research in media and politics, with technical knowledge and an inclination to socio-philosophical speculation. No doubt she came face to face with the legacy of Cosmic Grass.

The popular phenomena of retromania, the 1980s nostalgia, and hauntology¹⁹ made the “rediscovery” of Cosmic Grass especially attractive to a young audience. In her version, Pawelczyk used songs performed by The Sevens group and other music fragments from the original Cosmic Grass. However, she built a new story on the meaning of the revue. Specifically, the old tunes sung by children were dialectically juxtaposed with new and disturbing sounds produced in collaboration with musician Agata Kneć. Hence the content of the recreated show was filled with anxiety and irony, in stark contrast to the 1986 revue.

The narrator of Pawelczyk’s video is also Karolina, as in 1986 and as the artist herself (voice actor: Katarzyna Gorczyca). But this Karolina is not a daydreaming girl turned into a silver fish: observing contemporary ecological catastrophe from the future, she nostalgically recalls the good old days, when the mine prospered well and the river was untamed. She cannot sleep at night, she is scared and feverish, and finally, she loses control. Throughout the entire video, Karolina dialogues with the water, the second narrator of the story, equally uneasy. Presenting water, not only trees and grasses, as a subject, an independent being that has its own voice and thoughts, Pawelczyk raised uncanniness and changed the optic: if water could speak, it would not say anything optimistic. Water wishes for closing the mine before all wildlife around the site is lost. The narrators of Cosmic Grass anxiously repeat quotes from President Andrzej Duda’s rants about “black gold” and “strategic resources” at the 2018 COP24 conference in Katowice, Silesia.

Further modifications were made in the visual dimension. Video footage of the original spectacle is lost, and only a few photos remain. Pawelczyk had to use different objects to make her video. She resigned from making any new properties, unecological and unnecessary, but introduced her photographs of the lignite mine’s which looks almost like Ganymede, lifeless and dreary. Parts of the video were filmed (dop: Jędrzej Filus, edit: Agnieszka Białek-Zaborowska) near the site of the Turów mine and power plant during the plein-air in neighboring Opolno-Zdrój in 2021, in which Pawelczyk participated. She incorporated in the video fragments of post-art practices carried out in the town by other artists and improvised, site-specific performances. Costumes were made earlier for the community parade, which strolled through the village with the slogan “Opolno is the Future.” However, one can find little hope that these activities will bring a bright future for the town. Adult performers employed in the roles, originally played by children, seem ironic. Stylized as neo-hippies joyfully playing in the degraded landscape, the performers can be seen as idealists whose agency is extremely limited vis-à-vis the fossil fuel companies.

The making of the video was not the last chapter of the story. Pawelczyk’s Cosmic Grass was shown in Warsaw (Komuna Warszawa Theater, Zachęta National Gallery, and Krytyka Polityczna Cultural Center) and in Katowice (Rondo Art Gallery), bringing the attention of the art world to the fate of places like Opolno-Zdrój. When in 2022, Cosmic Grass was accepted into the exhibition The Discomfort of Evening in—National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (one of the biggest presentations of young art in Poland)²⁰—the artists who participated in Opolno-Zdrój plein-air, Pawelczyk among them, invited locals from the town, thus amplifying their voices. This way, art production served as a means, rather than a goal, for including peripheral grassroots voices in the public debate.

Music composed by Kobyliński for Cosmic Grass was exceptional, neither characteristic of Upper Silesia traditions, nor of the environmental protest. The region was famous for its inclination towards blues, progressive rock, and heavy metal, not synth. Since 1981, the Rawa Blues Festival has been organized in Katowice;²¹ five years later, the Metalmania festival was launched in the same city, in the futuristic Spodek arena whose shape resembles a UFO. According to Marta Marciniak, “the punk subculture has been developing in Silesia for a long time and has produced one of the strongest regional scenes in all of Poland,” especially in the Silesian cities of Rydułtowy, Racibórz, Gliwice, Rybnik, and Jastrzębie-Zdrój.²² Rydułtowy, for example, became known for street punk. Another city, Gliwice, with its student club Gwarek, has grown to the informal status of a regional punk center. During the 1980s, an original, heterogeneous post-punk scene emerged there, known as the Gliwice Alternative Scene (Gliwicka Scena Alternatywna). “Perhaps the industrial and then post-industrial landscape with so much inward-looking, yet community-friendly German and German-inspired urban architecture, played a part,” Marciniak pondered about the strong punk community emerging in Upper Silesia.²³

The proliferation of music groups and events in the region was paralleled by creating new images of the region’s identity. On the one hand, there was a conservative vision depicted by the Poziom 600 heavy metal band. Although the group’s name stems from working in a mine 600 meters underground, on the stage of the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole in 1983, the musicians played their hit ‘Czarny rynek’ dressed in kontushes, a type of overcoat used by Polish nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: perhaps fantasies about splendid life of the nobility were more tempting to emulate than the working conditions of Silesian miners. On the other hand, female vocalist and composer Gayga (Krystyna Stolarska) intertwined pop-rock with futuristic images and rebellious statements. In her music video “Chodzę, stoję, siedzę, leżę” from the middle of the decade (noticeably inspired by the B-52’s ‘Private Idaho’), she was striding through Spodek, which looked almost like a spaceship. Eerie cyborg characters, half man, and half robot, moved around the cockpits. Gayga sang angrily: “I live just like you,” but everything looked different than in usual life. Cosmic Grass shared a similar interest in spacecraft and aliens, but the turn to synthpop conflicted with the rock idiom popular in the region. If Poziom 600 exemplified escapism from the hard conditions of miners’ lives and Gayga expressed anxious feelings about being different than others, Cosmic Grass narrated a story about an alternative, strange future.

While staying far from such musical veins specific for Upper Silesia, the Cosmic Grass sound was even further removed from the sonic scope of environmental activism. Common belief says that the political activities of the democratic opposition in Poland in the 1980s were separated from musical activities, hence music was on the margins of oppositional culture that focused on the (printed) word, especially literature. Many foreground opposition figures perceived music as apolitical and unnecessary for the political battle. Even when music was political, it was perceived not as music at all, but as theatre (in the case of political cabaret) or literature (in the case of sung poetry, a popular genre among the intelligentsia in Eastern Europe). Considering “Kultura Niezależna” (Independent Culture), one of the foremost cultural journals of so-called “drugi obieg” (second circuit), an oppositional alternative network of papers, books, leaflets, and cassettes, Bohlman stated: “Across the periodical’s run, music and sound are rarely the quilting points of independent culture.”²⁴ Despite that, through the audio and visual recordings from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, the scene of the protests in August 1980, and the histories of producing recordings that mediated the protests from the beginning, Bohlman reached “musical stakes that engage the cacophony of crowds, amateur artistic creativity, moments of ritual and repose, the orchestrations of communication media, and thunderous nationalist celebration at the scene of dissent.”²⁵ Music was present in “Kultura Niezależna,” not as a subject of discussion but to bring attention to something else. “For example, an intriguing concert description clarifies the kinship between the Independent Culture Committee and Witold Lutosławski,” Bohlman points out.²⁶

The ruling Party in the 1980s, while formally overseeing music production, circulation, and performances, also was not directly interested in music’s political efficacy. The Party cared even less for pop music, which was labelled as entertainment. The socialist state neglected pop culture to such an extent that in 1987, during a discussion in the Department of Culture of the Polish United Workers’ Party’s Central Committee, there appeared postulates to privatize the entertainment business and leave it to the public’s demands.²⁷ Karolina Bittner called pop music “an orphan in the administrative-party structure.”²⁸

Environmentalist protest scenes in the 1980s had specific sonic components. Environmental activism across Europe gained momentum in the decade. Lisa Godson contends:

The connection between environmental protection and human rights stemmed from the increasing fears of nuclear war, particularly in Eastern Europe. Whereas in the 1970s, there occurred some relaxation between the Eastern and Western blocs, after the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War in December 1979 tensions grew high, and the nuclear arms race was resumed. A new wave of anti-nuclear activism surged, connecting environmental rights with the peace movement, “with protest against the nuclear energy industry more specifically focused on ecological threat.”³⁰ In October 1982, nearly 3 million people came out in cities across Europe, from Stockholm to Rome, to protest the arms race and missile deployments, which was one of the biggest peace mobilizations in history. Since 1982, the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign stretched from Western Europe to activist groups and individuals in the Eastern Bloc.³¹ But it was the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 that catalyzed the mass movements against environmental endangerment caused by industry and governments.

In Poland in the wake of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the construction of the nuclear power plant in Żarnowiec village near the Baltic Sea became a sensitive question. Activists from various social and ideological backgrounds—youth, environmental, democratic, anarchist, and even religious—started protests against the construction plans even before the explosion in Chernobyl; for example, the anarchist Alternative Society Movement (Ruch Społeczeństwa Alternatywnego) in Gdańsk (in the same region as Żarnowiec) warned against nuclear energy as early as 1985.³² Although the plant, which would have been the first nuclear power station in Poland, was officially planned in 1971, construction did not start before 1982. The rising opposition against the plans was carried on mainly by activists connected with the Freedom and Peace (Wolność i Pokój) movement that was originally focused on civil rights and the problem of compulsory enlistment for the army. Protests escalated after 1986 and eventually led to the local referendum in 1990. Soon after, on November 9, 1990, during the hard moment of the politico-economic transition toward capitalism and liberal democracy, the nuclear development program was canceled by the parliament, mainly for financial reasons but also for lack of consensus among the experts, regardless of their political affiliation inclinations.³³

The first independent, environmentalist non-governmental organization operating publicly in Poland and perhaps even the whole socialist Central and Eastern Europe, the Polish Ecological Club (Polski Klub Ekologiczny), was established in 1980.³⁴ While the Polish Ecological Club was an expert group, in the second half of the decade, new radical attitudes and forms of action flourished in the country and were adopted by the youth movements, especially punks and anarchists.

The Freedom and Peace movement not only put on its agenda environmental protection but also soon became popular among young people for its spectacular actions, like sittings and demonstrations. Besides Żarnowiec, Freedom and Peace was also successful in the case of the smelter in Siechnice near Wrocław, which produced catastrophic pollution: after the protests, in 1988 the government decided to shut the plant.³⁵ Another huge protest in Poland took place in Czorsztyn, Pieniny and the Gorce mountains, in 1990-1991, where environmentalists and anarchists occupied the site of reservoir construction on the Dunajec River. However, the action under the name “Tama Tamie” (the dam against the dam) was not successful, and the dam was completed in 1995.

Other important environmental organizations were the Green Federation (Federacja Zielonych), established in 1988, and the Workshop for All Beings (Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot), officially founded in 1990 but functioning since the middle of the 1980s, at first under the name Workshop for Live Architecture and rooted in the philosophy of Deep Ecology; both organizations were connected with alternative youth, and environmentalist activism became perceived by many youngsters as part of a broader resistance to state power.³⁶

The street happenings, leaflets, and posters by the Orange Alternative happening movement in Wrocław joyfully and unpredictably highlighted nuclear threats and natural disasters, declaring full endorsement for the nuclear power plant construction in Żarnowiec.³⁷ Punk and post-punk bands painted in their songs grim pictures of radioactive contamination (‘Radioaktywny blok’ by Brygada Kryzys, 1982), environmental disaster (‘To będzie koniec’ by Kontrola W., 1982), the atomic arms race (‘Atomowa śmierć’ by Dezerter, 1984), polluted air (‘Zatrute powietrze’ by Dezerter, 1988), and contaminated environments (‘Sopocka plaża’ by Dzieci Kapitana Klossa, 1986; ‘O, jaki dziwny, dziwny, dziwny…’ by Tilt, 1990). Soon, many songs verbally and sonically referred to the beauty of wild nature or the misery of its devastation by humans. An array of folk, punk, post-punk, reggae, and other musicians declared their concern about the state of matters,³⁸ and the environmentalist actions acquired various musical experiences, including gigs, happenings, collective singing, shouting, and laughing.

Nonetheless, since the 1960s, environmentalism has been a part of the Polish official authoritative discourse and legislation (water resources law from 1962 and air quality law from 1966) despite the principle of economic development. The League for Nature Protection (Liga Ochrony Przyrody) was the officially approved civic organization functioning since 1945. Together with the Nature Protection Guard, established in 1957, they were mass organizations with more than one million participants.³⁹ When in 1970 acid rain caused huge deforestation in the Jizera Mountains, the Polish government launched a program of planting more than 12 million new trees. Though the first environmental protection law was written just after the war, in 1949, growing consciousness of the degradation of the natural environment and the necessity of its protection among Party authorities in the 1970s (beginning with the establishment of the Polish Committee of Human Environmental Protection under the vice-PM, in 1970) led to inscribing environmental protection into the Polish constitution in 1976.⁴⁰ Consequently, in 1980 a new environmental protection law was enacted, and in 1983 the Ministry of Environment Protection was established, the first in the socialist countries. On April 10, 1986, 16 days before the Chernobyl disaster, the nuclear law was enacted.

During the 80s, the ecological question was regularly put on the agenda by state authorities, and environmentalism was even promoted in the media, “as it was perceived as apolitical and unthreatening to the established political order” in Poland as well as other countries in the region.⁴¹ In the same vein, the former anarchist militant and organic intellectual Janusz Waluszko maintained that environmentalism was almost apolitical, and due to this characteristic, it could appear on both sides of the political barricade.⁴² Good examples are popular official youth magazines like “Świat Młodych” (World of Youth) and especially “Na Przełaj” (Cross-Country), which in the second half of the 1980s served as the mouthpiece of the environmental movement. The mass youth peace and environmentalist movement I Prefer to Be (Wolę Być) was animated by the authors and editors of “Na Przełaj.” From a broader perspective, the race to take care of nature was a vital part of the Cold War, the same way as the arms race.

Groups such as Freedom and Peace, Green Federation, Workshop for All Beings, as well as Orange Alternative, and hardcore-punk bands, were roughly leftist. They all emphasized self-organization, self-government, collectivism, and social justice—the values that according to David Ost differentiated the left from the right in socialist Poland. The right was keener on individual freedoms and sovereign state authority and was afraid of anarchy.⁴³ As a part of that authoritative discourse, the officially accepted and propagated version of environmentalism, Cosmic Grass’s records and performances must be perceived more on the (individualistic and authoritarian) right than the (collectivist and participatory) left. They were neither present at the scenes of environmentalist protest nor included sounds of dissent in their sonic fabric. On the contrary, Cosmic Grass had the full support of the resorts of the cultural production.

Cosmic Grass was not the first environmentalist cultural undertaking under the state’s wing. As early as 1971, in Opolno-Zdrój (“Zdrój” is a remnant of a health resort that was there in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century), a plein-air Ziemia Zgorzelecka took place under the slogan “Art and science in the process of human’s natural environment protection.”⁴⁴ It was the first in Poland—and one of the first in the world—art event that pertained to environmental protection (though concerns about natural landscape degradation and exploitation of natural resources have been present in Polish art since the 1960s).⁴⁵ The purpose of the plein-air, curated by Jerzy Ludwiński, Antoni Dzieduszycki, and Jan Chwałczyk, was to bring artists, scientists, and local residents together and jointly draw public attention to the devastating problems caused by industrial development and overproduction. Ludwiński, the main theoretician on the curatorial team, conjectured that the “dematerialization” of art could bring the moral answer for technological gigantomania.⁴⁶

Paradoxically, the Turów mine and power plant combine (established in 1957) accepted the role of hosting the event. The proximity of the unique natural landscape and the open-cast mine was regarded as interesting by the organizers.⁴⁷ Artists participating in the plein-air made several conceptual works documenting and problematizing disastrous changes in natural landscapes as well as the overproduction in the art field.

Pawelczyk chose the landscape of Turów for the music video for Cosmic Grass not by coincidence. The artist took part in the second plein-air in Opolno-Zdrój, organized by the Office of Postartistic Services together with the representatives of the Opolno-Zdrój community (administrator Anna Wilczyńska and Na Trójstyku Association), as well as Wrocław Contemporary Museum and Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, 50 years after the first one. Today Opolno-Zdrój is highly affected by the mine’s operation: degraded and left behind with a population of around one thousand. The idea of the 2021 plein-air was less to commemorate Ziemia Zgorzelecka and more to organize art residencies providing connections between artists and the local community. Instead of re-enacting the 1971 plein-air, the curators and participating artists together with citizens asked about the future of Opolno-Zdrój in 2071. How would it look if it survived in the shadow of the mine?⁴⁸ From the discussion on the needs and risks of the town, subsequent actions arose that despite their relatively small scale empowered the residents: workshops for children, cleaning the bus stop, dyeing fabrics with natural materials, and similar post-art works.⁴⁹

The second plein-air in Opolno-Zdrój occurred during a long controversy about the Turów lignite mine between the Polish and Czech governments. In March 2020, the Polish government extended the license for the mine, whose board planned further expansion until the coal deposits were completely depleted. The harmful impact of the mine on the environment, like the drying of the land, has been already expressed by local communities.⁵⁰ In 2007, a WFF report on the most polluting power plants ranked Turów in eighth place in Europe and first in Poland based on relative emissions (the similar power station in Bełchatów, the biggest emitter in Europe in absolute emissions, was in eleventh place in relative emissions).⁵¹ The dispute became inflamed in February 2021, when the Czech Republic sued Poland at the European Court of Justice. The Czech government complained that the brown coal mine drained groundwater. Furthermore, extension of the mine’s license by the Polish government moved forward without a proper assessment of its effect on the environment.

The court ordered the immediate closure of the mine. The Polish government defied that decision claiming that the shutting of Turów would put the country’s energy system at risk, deprive millions of households of electric power, and bring the loss of thousands of jobs.⁵² The Turów power plant generated about 7% of Polish electricity.⁵³ The Polish government has begun negotiations with its Czech partners, but the mine was still operating. In the wake of the Polish refusal to stop the work of the mine, the court ordered Poland to pay the European Commission a penalty of half a million euros per day, which the Polish government refused to pay. In February 2022 the EU cut funds designated for Poland due to an unpaid fine. The Polish and Czech governments eventually agreed on the steps Poland would take to protect the groundwater level and clean air, but the financial cost turned out to be much higher than at the starting point.⁵⁴ Moreover, the social and environmental costs for the local wildlife, agriculture, and communities on both sides of the border are constantly rising. Local rivers are drying up, and running water in surrounding villages is no longer accessible.⁵⁵

The case of Turów connects the environmental effects of the fossil fuel industry with socialist and contemporary Poland. Another story is about Upper Silesia. Due to its mining industry, Upper Silesia became one of the most contaminated regions in Poland as early as the 1980s. Today many mines and related plants in the region are closed, but some are still operating, and the contamination of the natural environment is a substantial problem. So, it was astonishing for many that the Polish government set the 2018 COP24 conference in Katowice, the region’s capital. By choosing the city, the government placed itself in the role of guardian of the Silesian miners’ community and employment. Two mining companies were the official sponsors of the event. Coal was displayed on Polish stalls and used as a decoration in the conference center, located in the old coal mine. “Silesian soul in the lump of coal” reads the slogan promoting carbon products during the summit.⁵⁶

The Polish government did everything to show the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. “How does one tell a region of 5 million people—in over 70 cities across the region—to just move on, your world is that of the past?” asked rhetorically Michał Kurtyka, a state secretary in the Ministry of Energy and COP24’s president.⁵⁷ President Duda went even further, saying, “According to experts, we have coal deposits that will last 200 years.” One would think that such a statement should be nothing else but gallows humor, but Duda clarified it, “It would be hard to expect us to give up on it totally.”⁵⁸ From his point of view, using coal as a basis of energy security did not contradict climate protection, and the coal mining industry should remain the foundation of the Polish economy. He called coal a “black gold” and a “strategic resource.” Duda’s remarks were read with bewilderment by both Polish and international media outlets as damaging to the Polish presidency of COP24.⁵⁹ Pawelczyk laced these remarks into the reconstructed Cosmic Grass, bringing politics back to the show.

The COP24 conference did not bring about any spectacular achievements. The main success was perhaps putting the 2015 Paris Agreement into practice—not much in the imminent perspective of the worldwide natural catastrophe: droughts, floods, die-off of coral reefs, heat, conflagrations, and food shortages. The major problem cited was rising carbon emissions, including coal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that cutting emissions targets should be much tougher. The result of the conference was met with relief that despite the contradictory interests of many countries,the talks were still ongoing.⁶⁰ In Poland, energy plants, public transport, and power stations are mostly dependent on carbon; 80% of electricity in Poland is generated from coal.⁶¹ The problem of dependency on coal is quite urgent but not new.

The Knurów mine still functions despite a few attempts to shut it down in the last two decades. Nonetheless, according to Instytut Spraw Publicznych report, the majority of the miners in Poland realize the necessity of decarbonization and perceive it as a potentially positive economic impulse for their region.⁶² Miners are convinced that for climate reasons the so-called green transformation should be introduced and the Polish economy should become less dependent on coal, though the politicization of the climate policy raised their doubts about how the transformation process would proceed.⁶³

In both cases, Knurów and Turów, one can see a remote but not surprising effect of the political and economic changes that happened during the long 1980s. The category of the long 1980s indicates a time of dire anti-Communist (and anti-leftist in general) changes across the globe from the second half of the 1970s to the middle of the 1990s. According to Rosi Braidotti, the 80s, due to the merger of neoconservatism on the level of ideology and neoliberalism on the level of economics, “paved the way for the violent world we inhabit today.”⁶⁴

The results of the anti-Communist backlash, neoconservatism and the neoliberal transformation were, among others, environmental problems, pollution, hastened and often risky industrial investments, and the nuclear arms race between East and West. Revisiting Cosmic Grass and its context can help with the search for effective environmental action under the specific conditions of post-socialist capitalism in Eastern Europe.

In Poland in the 80ss, concerns about the natural environment were widespread. Knurów citizens probably knew best the disastrous effects the mining industry had on their health, living conditions, and the natural landscape. It seems understandable that they dreamed about a better world with clear rivers, thriving meadows, and breathable air. The children’s revue was a well-established and popular genre during the post-war period. Also, futuristic imaginations about space travel and adventures were vastly popular, particularly in the youth culture (one can find a lot of science fiction stories and facts about outer space in youth magazines such as “Świat Młodych”). From this point of view, a spectacle like Cosmic Grass was not much more than Zeitgeist compressed into one show. Nonetheless, the fact that such a revue was produced by the mine and approved by the Party is puzzling. There is no archival evidence for the Party’s conscious attempt to greenwash its industrial politics with the show. However, that does not answer the question of why the show was accepted for production at all.

Furthermore, the Cosmic Grass recording was officially issued on a vinyl album—another example of industrial activity that is damaging to the natural environment. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), of which phonograph records are made, is manufactured from ethylene; this fact intrinsically connects record pressing with the petrochemical and plastics industries. Music is therefore not a neutral expression of human creativity but “an agent of petroculture.”⁶⁵ According to Kyle Devine, “The purpose of highlighting the roles of science, engineering, and big business in the history of plastic recording formats is […] to underline the extent to which such forms of labor and industrial-scientific structures were inseparable from the everyday act of buying a recording and listening to it.”⁶⁶

In 1980s Poland, this connection seemed to be quite visible. Due to economic recession, workers’ strikes, problems with supply chains (there even was a shortage of cardboard for record covers, and some had to be shipped from Czechoslovakia), and low-quality PVC compound, pressing LPs became particularly difficult. Many popular bands had to wait for months for their album release.

What is more, Pronit’s factory, located in the town of Pionki, central Poland, was formally and factually part of the military industry. It produced gunpowder, explosives, and other munitions for the army, not just vinyl records. Pronit pressed discs published by other entities and served as a label for music albums, which was the case of Cosmic Grass. It had different priorities in a country where the deficiency of plastics was almost permanent, and throughout the 1980s, music journalists, managers, and producers complained in music magazines that there was no other pressing plant. In this context, issuing the Cosmic Grass LP seems not only to become part of the environmental slow violence but also to depend on the military industry and to deepen the socio-economic problems of state socialism.

So once again, how is it possible that the story about environmental degradation and destruction of ecosystems caused by humans might have been financed by the local hard coal mine and officially praised even by General Jaruzelski?

First, the mining industry was in socialist Poland an essential sponsor of cultural enterprises (at the end of the 1980s, the cultural center in Knurów even had micro-ports in its purview). Mines were well-off enough to produce even a big show. Since the middle 1960s, industrial plants in Poland played the role of patrons of the arts, fulfilling the state’s cultural policy aims of cultural dissemination and reinforcing the relationship between artists and the working class.⁶⁷ Industrial patronage of the arts legitimized authorities and provided convenient opportunities for artists.

Second, as we saw, environmentalism was a part of the authoritative discourse in the 80s, so the narrative of Cosmic Grass had nothing in question from the point of view of the government. Therefore, while several punk, post-punk, and other bands on the alternative music scene raised in their songs the questions of the destruction of natural environments, and even musically supported the protests in sites like Żarnowiec, to produce an environmentalist revue was completely along with the Party’s line. The Sevens’ show was created top-down, with main roles played by prominent members of the cultural establishment. With performers playing on the stage separated from the audience inside public venues, it was by no means participatory, according to the definition by Thomas Turino.⁶⁸

The message could be sincere, but the main issue lies in the circumstances of cultural production. Applying Manabe’s parameters of person, space, and time, one may say that the Cosmic Grass show was created by professional, “major-label” musicians (it is better to put it in the inverted commas because in socialist Poland, the involvement in official cultural production was more important than issuing records under this or that label) in the public spaces fully controlled by structures of power (culture center in Knurów, House of Music and Dance in Zabrze, record album issued by Pronit), and during the transitional period when the ruling Party gradually had been losing control both over the country and social legitimization, ideological basis notwithstanding.⁶⁹

For artists like Kobyliński, participating in the Cosmic Grass production could be quite a safe and even profitable way of expressing their genuine concerns over ecological questions. Knurów citizens might be proud of it. For kids performing on the stage of the cultural center, their families, and the town’s community, Cosmic Grass offered a kind of audiotopia,”⁷⁰ but the same audiotopia can be taken as evidence of the revue’s centripetality, separating listeners from the real world outside the venue.⁷¹ The top-down production of the show could not empower the community living around the mine; the performers were not even informed that some spoken narrative was added to the LP version of the revue by producers.⁷² The means of production of the revue were all in the hands of authorities; locals could use it and take advantage of the cultural institution and its resources, but they did not have the opportunity to modify it and make it more emancipatory. The last word was that of the professional crew (director, composer, scriptwriter, managers, and designers) that produced the show.

Moreover, the Cosmic Grass narrative was about disobedient adolescents who trod on delicate plants and threw litter about. The perils to nature came from such misbehaving individuals, not from the fossil fuels industry, or the authorities. Similarly, the intervention by the fantastic grass coming from outer space removed any realism from the plot: with the idyllic happy end, nobody needed to be concerned about the actual devastation of the wildlife. Finally, the show was performed by children, and the main narrator was a child-turned-into-fish so it was easy not to take it seriously. The contradictions of the environmental and economic policy under socialism were thus resolved by moralism, depoliticization, and infantilization. It could raise awareness of the necessity of environmental protection without aiming at industrial extraction and pollution.

The relationship between the production of artworks enmeshed in cultural industries and fossil fuel industries became a subject of the reconstruction of Cosmic Grass in 2022. Manabe noticed that the rendition of some preexisting works, and combining them with references to contemporary problems, is a common tactic applied by musicians depending on their position, the space in which music is played, and the political conditions of the moment.⁷³ According to Benjamin, the aim of progressive artists should be the liberation of the forms of production, so that the technical apparatus serves the working class, not the ruling class.⁷⁴ In the case of Cosmic Grass, the reworking was linked with the problematization of the artist’s position towards the local communities and the broader public. Pawelczyk intentionally chose the narrative music video form to gain popular attention. By including in her video scenes shot in Opolno-Zdrój plein-air, Pawelczyk asked about the possibility of the artist’s cooperation with the people affected by the fossil fuel industry, not only making pieces for exhibitions in art galleries. The performers of Cosmic Grass seem dreamy and fragile, indicating deficiencies of (post)artistic practices against the authorities.

Daughtry contends that due to a lack of time in the face of ongoing catastrophe, “there can be no musical strategy for combatting climate change,” and any deployment of music would make a change only locally.⁷⁵ This perspective is not far from Pawelczyk’s point of view as expressed in Cosmic Grass. She offered no hope but also no embitterment that the fate had been sealed already. In Haraway’s terms, it is about staying with the trouble and speculating about what could happen if there were no grasses from Ganymede. The commitment to the vulnerable and already affected landscapes, people, and other living beings (in Opolno-Zdrój and elsewhere) and not just representing them in sonic or visual form but endowing them with tools for the struggle for their cause brings Cosmic Grass close to what Haraway called science art worldings: a kind of sympoietic undertaking that “cultivates robust response-ability for powerful and threatened places and beings.”⁷⁶ Despite the very local scale, ephemeral connections between actors, and other limitations of such a project, Cosmic Grass involved different entities in joint actions.

This way Pawelczyk repoliticized Cosmic Grass. Along with bringing back the politics of the revue, she cast aside a moralistic tone: in her artwork, there is nothing about the good or bad habits of individuals but a lot about the wasteful neoliberal economy, esoteric discourse that distracts people’s attention from common causes toward individualistic wellbeing, and role of the artists in the field of environmentalist activism. In 1986, the means of production were fixed in the hands of authorities, so the revue was produced according to the principles of authoritative discourse. The autonomous position of Pawelczyk as an artist enabled her to problematize the relationship between means of art production and efficiency. She deliberately made a lo-fi video almost without a budget: hand-made outfits, improvised scenes, lack of requisites—something beginners can do as well. On an upcoming plein-air in Opolno-Zdrój, the Cosmic Grass video is to be shown to the local public. The collaboration among artists and locals entailed the empowerment of the community, which was not possible in the case of the top-down produced show in 1986.

The Cosmic Grass children’s revue incorporated in its narrative and success story the ideological and economic contradictions of late socialism. Inconsistencies of the financing and narrative of the 1986 show stemmed from the wasteful exploitation of natural resources and undemocratic political veins characteristic of the long 1980s. The revue was against nature degradation, but blamed the phenomena on misbehaving individuals, not even mentioning the fossil fuel industry.

The message of Cosmic Grass was more the escapist fantasy about some external powers that eventually would save the world if only individuals abided by the rules. It was not about confronting humans’ industrial and civilizational destruction of wildlife on Earth; quite the opposite, fantasizing about getting away from the trouble thanks to supernatural intervention. Even if one put mines and factories in the place of individual subjects and made the story more accurate, nothing would change in what Benjamin called technique.

The 2022 reconstruction and actualization of Cosmic Grass, in contrast, brought attention back to the apparatus of production and politicized it. Pawelczyk used what remained from the original revue, mainly songs, to juxtapose all its naivety and oddity with political statements and actual images of the scale of devastation of the coal mine in today’s Poland. Cosmic grasses haunted Earth again, with the pain and joy of disturbing relationships between music, arts, politics, and fossil fuel extraction. Moreover, giving a voice to water, Pawelczyk deepened the unreality of the invincible grasses from outer space and grim visions of the Ganymede planet. As a speculative fabulation, the reconstructed Cosmic Grass video does not solve politico-economic contradictions but suggests new ways of thinking about living and dying on the Earth.

The project connected artists, local communities, and the broad public in an act of socialization via the means of production. Cosmic Grass in 1986 might create an audiotopia for Knurów citizens and broaden their sensitivity to ecological threats. Cosmic Grass in 2022 recalled the limits of such a position and shaped frames for the engagement of local people. Rather, it asks questions than provide answers, but by doing so, it points out that examining local experiences and circumstances is the best way to learn the most effective means of taking action.