New seat of the City Culture Institute

The City Culture Institute has a new seat and place on the Gdańsk cultural map: Targ Rakowy 11! Apart from continuing its regular projects for residents of Gdańsk, the institution will offer new formats associated with cinematography, performative arts and educational activities. Moving to a larger, more accessible building in downtown Gdańsk is an opportunity to develop the institution’s core programme and attract new public for CCI events. 

The new location will include a Cultural InfoPoint, where visitors will be able to discover what’s on in Gdańsk, register for alternative walks with Local Guides, buy tickets to CCI film events or multimedia showcases of the mock-up of Gdańsk Śródmieście. Posters, leaflets, and publications concerning Gdańsk will also be on display, collecting the city’s rich cultural offer in one place. The InfoPoint is spacious and open to everyone – you can spend time there, wait for an event or a bus, read a book or work. 

The auditorium, with a capacity of ca. 180 seats, will host regular film screenings, including film discussion groups and children’s screenings, literary meetings, lectures, debates, conferences, seminars, and concerts. We will also use it during festivals organised (European Poet of Freedom, Found in Translation) or co-organised by the CCI (Cinema in Sneakers, Festival of Children’s Literature). 

The ground floor Workshop room will host small meet-the-author events, debates or lectures – for instance, as part of the Open CCI programme, which enables people to implement their creative ideas with CCI’s financial and organisational support.

A bookshop will await Gdańsk residents from the Hucisko side. There, we will find publications about urban culture, art, architecture, history and sociology, poetry volumes, children’s books and literature concerning Gdańsk. The Waterworks building will also include a bistro.

The City Culture Institute supports cultural sector employees, offering a selection of educational formats: workshops, seminars, debates, and conferences. Our new first-floor space will enable us to host the participants of our events. We will also rent it to commercial partners or make it available to cultural institutions or NGOs on a partnership basis. 

The multimedia mock-up of contemporary Gdańsk Śródmieście will attract tourists, school trips and residents to CCI. The mock-up is ca. 50 m2 and includes historical buildings, greenery, viaducts, shipyard cranes, slipways, floating docks, the Sołdek museum ship and the footbridge to Ołowianka. The mock-up room will also include multimedia stands with touchscreens. During the showcases, the mock-up will feature a screening dedicated to the history of Gdańsk and its most interesting historical sites.

The room will also include a model of the Waterworks – the pumping station that ensured proper pressure in the pipes supplying Gdańsk with running water from the mid-16th century to the 1870s. The Waterworks formed part of a group of industrial facilities powered by water from the Radunia Canal. On the ground floor, near the entrance to the auditorium, are fragments of the historical wall unearthed during the construction of the building.

CCI will keep running projects in various neighbourhoods of Gdańsk and locations temporarily arranged to host artistic and cultural events, such as the NARRACJE festival, the Monumental Painting Collection, Local Guides, Gdańsk Miniatures, and herstory walks.