Religious Materialities, Aesthetics, and Protests in Urban Poland: Religious Icons and the Re-Emergence of Civil Society

Abstract

In this paper, we reflect on the creativity and social change nexus in urban Poland by focusing on the recent religion-linked materialities in Kraków. Such materialities, or religious icons, are directly involved with transformations and the emergence of a new type of Polish civil society and activism. Therefore, we elaborate on the notion of religious icons involved in the recent re-emergence of the protest culture in Poland. We reframe them in terms of powerful socio-religious mediators that open the way to re-imagining and claiming new (re)configurations between social and religious fields in Poland. We acknowledge the role played by affective, creative, and semantic modalities of aesthetics vis-à-vis social change and suggest rethinking the link between creativity and religion, which we consider emblematic of current epistemologies of post-secular urbanities in Poland. We claim that the religion-creativity nexus should be included in the analytical framework examining contemporary developments of Polish civil society in general and social movements in particular.