Rafał Piotr Betlejewski (born 30 October 1969 in Gdańsk) is a Polish performer, paratheatre artist, and copywriter.
He is the founder of the Transparent Theater and the creator of social campaigns, including "Burn shame" and "I miss you, Jew." He is interested in the phenomenons of identity, social roles, as well as language and social communication.
Professional activities
Rafał Betlejewski is the founder of the advertising agencies Cytryna Advertising Agency and Colleagues Strategy & Creation. Some of his work there included advertising campaigns for Mlekpol, a dairy cooperative and the largest milk company in Poland, as well as for mobile phone network Era. He is also the president of the board of the Advertising People Association.
Until 2017, he ran the programs DeFacto and Betlejewski.Provocations on TTV. In the past, he also hosted broadcasts on Polish Radio RDC, including among others, Betlejewski on Saturdays and Science Frikszyn – about science with people on Tuesdays. He left the station in 2015 in protest of the dismissal of editor-in-chief Ewa Wanat.
In 2015, together with Ewa Wanat and Tomasz Stawiszyński, he founded Public Medium radio as part of a project of the same name, along with a team of professional and civic journalists, experts, and social activists.
Social actions
Beautiful Agony – Anna Politkovskaya: On 20 February 2014, Betlejewski posted a video less than two minutes in length on his YouTube channel in which he masturbates and orgasms in the staircase where Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and human rights activist, was murdered. The video description indicates that it is one of the 14 videos that he made during his artistic residency in Moscow at the invitation of the National Center for Contemporary Art and the Polish Institute. (2016): A controversial television experiment created as part of the program Betlejewski. Provocations, recorded in Radom and broadcast on TTV. The program features desperate residents of Radom looking for work. They were recorded with hidden cameras in staged scenes during fictitious job interviews. During the interviews, hired actors offered unaware program participants a well-paid job if they agreed to act unlawfully or provide services that went far beyond expected responsibilities for a job. The experiment was met with criticism from some journalists, who considered Rafał Beltejewski's actions to be unethical. "Hunger" (2012) "Burn shame." In this campaign, organized from 2001 to 2004, Betlejewski addressed his message to employees who were not satisfied with work in large corporations: "You got corrupted, come to burn shame." Happenings also took place during this campaign, consisting of the burning of artifacts of corporate life, such as company pens, floppy disks, employee opinions, etc. I miss you, Jew!: Although the idea was created in 2004, the slogan itself was not created until a year later. There are several projects contained within the main project. One such project consisted of photographing Poles in public spaces once associated with Polish Jews, alongside an empty chair and a kippah placed on it. Another project consisted of writing the slogan "I miss you, Jew" on walls. This was done not just by himself, and Betlejewski encouraged others to write the slogan on their own as well. Subsequently, these slogans, both legal and illegal, began to appear throughout Poland, with photos of them being posted on a common website online. On the same website, Betlejewski created a space for preserving the memories of Jews in Poland as well as for expressing memories related to those memories. He defined the purposes of his activities as "[wanting] to retrieve the word Jew, take it away from the anti-Semites who are the only ones in this country who use the word freely. I am striving to build a platform for expressing positive emotions towards the people referred to as Jews."