"Most people's lives, what are they but trails of debris - each day more debris, more debris... long, long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it all up but death."

Audrey Hepburn (as Violet Venable in “Suddenly, Last Summer”) already knew that any human life can be reduced to a drawn-out pile of random stuff - trash that only Death will clean up. I started Wiersze Na Bruku [Polish for “Pavement Poetry”] from the belief that these leftovers from human lives are a kind of poetry. Moreover, I am convinced that the artist still has something to say after death. The letters we write, the postcards we receive, the magazines we scribble in, the diaries we keep, the photographs we make, the thoughts we didn’t finish - all of this can be poetry, the source of linguistic bliss that goes beyond every-day reality. The artist who creates by prowling the streets, garbage bins and abandoned houses is always on the same trail as Death and cleans up after him, but they are also the keeper of memories of people that have been forgotten. They put those people’s lives back in order and turn them into idiosyncratic fiction.


Wiersze Na Bruku is an art project started by Stephane Rutten, a Belgian living in Poland. It started in 2015, first as an attempt to promote poetry in the public sphere, then expanding into theater, urban exploring, photography and so-called upcycling: a way of turning trash back into something useful. Drawing from random found texts, objects and pictures, I create theater performances, exhibitions and poetry. My work balances between the private (the hidden) and the public (the visible). I bring to the fore what we don’t know - until it becomes unbearably close.