ABOUT US

The Spokój Foundation was founded in 2022 in Dąbrowa near Stężyca, in Kashubia. It was started by a group of friends who weren't satisfied with just complaining that too little happens outside the big cities. We started doing our own thing.

We're a foundation and we operate as a not-for-profit organization. We're not a company selling pretty wristbands, little fences and sponsored awe. We make cultural events because we want art to be normally accessible: close to people, places and everyday life.

We combine music with art education and work with the local community. We're interested in the moment when someone from the city meets someone from over the fence, when an artist chats with a kid after a workshop, and the stage isn't an ivory tower but a piece of floor, ground or planks.

Access to culture shouldn't depend on your postal code, your industry connections, or whether you know the right words. You can come from far away. You can live here all year round. You can be just starting out. We make a place you can walk into without dressing up as someone smarter.

In the paperwork it sounds like this:

The aim of the Foundation is to create a space for creators of artistic communities and their audiences, by broadening social awareness and sensitivity in the area of cultural events, art education and the promotion of art among people living in both rural and urban areas.

In our own words: we want culture to be closer to people. To look at, to touch, to test with your hands. To ask the question that seems dumb and then turns out to be the most important one. To step into the process without shame and without the face of someone who already knows everything.

We organize artistic events that bring different communities together: festivals and concerts, workshops, shows, open-air sessions. We show contemporary and multimedia art, including the kind that usually doesn't stand in the middle of the market square with a big budget and a banner bigger than a cottage.

We give space to work to musicians, painters, graphic artists, performance artists, filmmakers, photographers and dancers. We have people with experience and people who are only just checking whether their idea has legs, a cable, a point and a place in the real world.

We support emerging artists by pairing them with more experienced creators on shared projects. This isn't about arranging people in display cases. It's more of a conversation, a rehearsal, tinkering with something late into the night and that moment when someone shows their work in public for the first time and the ground doesn't actually swallow them.

We run educational activities for adults, children and young people: open studios, workshops, seminars. Participation matters to us. Watching from a distance can be good, but your own hands make a better mess. And out of a mess something alive often comes.

We promote the culture of Kashubia, niche art, non-commercial art and a sustainable lifestyle, including a zero-waste approach to organizing events. Without sanctimony. Simply less junk, more sense.

Spokój Festival is the Foundation's main project. It's an intimate music and culture festival that gathers artists and participants every year in Dąbrowa near Stężyca. Four stages, workshops, open-air cinema, a skatepark. All around, the Kashubian forests, which don't need a description in a brochure because they do the job anyway.

The festival grew out of a need to bring people together through music, image, movement and conversation. We want to make an event close to nature, close to the local community and close to a culture that still breathes, scratches, laughs under its breath and doesn't pretend to be a premium product.

We make Spokój by people, for people. Partly out of stubbornness, partly out of tenderness for the place, partly because once something like this works, it's hard to later pretend it can't be done.