Orange Alternative - The Dwarves

The Dwarves

The first known actions of the Orange Alternative consisted of painting dwarf graffiti on spots created by the police's covering up anti-regime slogans on walls of the Polish cities. The first graffiti was painted by Major Waldemar Fydrych and Wiesław Cupała on the night from the 30 to 31 August 1982 on one of the residences in the Wrocław district of Biscupin and Sępolno.

Altogether more than one thousand of such graffiti were painted in the major Polish cities such as Wrocław, Kraków, Warsaw, Łódź, and Gdańsk. Dwarves appearing in numbers all over Poland aroused the interest of both Polish pedestrians and the militia, whose intervention led to short term arrests of the graffiti artists.

During one of these incidents, Major, a detainee at a police station in Łódź, proclaimed, in reference to the Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, yet another artistic manifesto and referred to his graffiti art as "dialectic painting" stating: "The Thesis is the Anti-Regime Slogan. The Anti-thesis is the Spot and the Synthesis is the Dwarf. Quantity evolves into Quality. The more Dwarves there are, the better it is."