All views expressed in the blog texts are the personal thoughts of the authors and not necessarily represent the position of the Foundation.
“Is this what you want to leave after your lives?” – reflections on the subject “what drives some people to act devastating”, that I wrote 14th of March, but they needed some time to be published.
Many times, while cleaning up the Pearl, or the Pearl’s cemetery, which has been closed, not in use, for years, or while removing old, left rubbish, or while removing the daubs on walls or tombstones (as it was even freshly did last year), I’m struck by the short question “why”. Why does someone who has entered a place that isn’t theirs, even if it’s abandoned, feel such a strong urge to destroy? To leave behind this kind of “contribution” to reality? Is scrawling with a spray or scratching into plaster “I love Kasia, Bartek, Janek…” really that romantic…? Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I personally prefer the form of a letter, a much more personalised and intimate way to express different deep feelings. 
Or maybe writing “Wojtek is a d*ck” or “Kinga is a w*ore” while no one can see it, shows more courage than looking straight in Wojtek or Kinga eyes and facing the consequences…?
But let’s get to the point. When I was in high school, as full of wild energy teenager, I used to “urbex” through empty buildings. These were mostly old factories, with high, spacious halls that reminded me a bit of Moria, completely unsecured, with holes in the ceilings, glass carpets from broken windows lying on the floor. For me, it was a very powerful experience of transience at the time. Seeing the slow death of places that had once lived on the functioning of dozens, or even hundreds, of people. Places that provided work, food, and daily life for these very people… And then? For various reasons, they lost their function, as well as their life… All that remained was the wind wandering through the labyrinthine corridors, the darkness slumbering in the windowless cellars. That peculiar silence… of longing? Loss…? Over time, many of them were razed to the ground.
Another example I’d like to mention is one of the vast, disused Jewish cemeteries, where I often spent hours sitting. It was a space more like a park than a cemetery, where many beautifully decorated tombstones stood barely supported or tossed onto a large mound, and the rustling leaves of the many self-seeded and also mature trees played a peaceful melody amid the hustle and bustle of the big city.
And you know? In all these cases, it never even crossed my mind to scribble anything, to carve my initials. What’s more! Even if I came with some eatables, I always took my trash and threw it to the nearest dumpster. After all, it was lighter, making it easier to carry outside than to inside.
No one taught me this, no one forcefully drilled this kind of behaviour, these kinds of rules into me. It just came naturally from me. That’s why I still don’t understand, even though I try to rationally explain, what drives people who mark their existence in this dirty, destructive way throughout life…
P.S. By the way, during writing this text it came to my mind, that my first “urbex experience” took place in my early years of elementary school, when I was exploring the interior of a ruined manor house, more specifically, the manor gardener’s cottage, hidden among a thicket of nettles and a forest of dense bushes. For many years, it was a terrifying ruin. Some time ago, I saw that the park had been cleared and restored to the urban fabric, and that the famous, beautiful manor house now exists as a very pleasant café. Once a building that had lost its caretakers, lost its former function, was a den near the town center, better avoided, and its existence was almost erased from the map, like the palace of the town heiress itself, with which it cooperated…
~ Thinloth