Maciej “Metys” Hojak (1972) is a co-organiser of the Poznan Anarchist Library and an activist of the Anarchist Federation. In the 1980s he disseminated the “Agency News Review”. Since the 1990s he has been publishing anarchistic books and magazines in Bractwo Trojka.
Hojak comes from a workers’ housing estate Rataje in Poznan. His parents, turner and cleaner by professions, came from a peasant environment, and in his memories Hojak often came back to his childhood years in the countryside. Such biography (of a new working class, created as a result of intensive industrialisation and urbanisation) was quite typical for the anarchistic environment in Poznan. “Metys” went to a basic vocational school with a typographical profile. He studied to be a typesetter – a vocation which combined physical work with preparing books and magazines to be published. Moreover, in the 1980s the typesetters were highly esteemed, due to their connections to secret, underground printing houses of “Solidarity”. Thus, choosing this type of school was a result of his workers’ background, literary and intellectual ambitions, and dissent attitude. Since 1986 Hojak worked as a distributor of the
second-circuit magazine “Agency News Review” – which was a perfect opportunity to meet oppositional activists and get himself acquainted with underground publications. The systemic transformation coming together with technological development resulted in making Hojak’s freshly learned vocation useless, as digital typesetting and offset commercial printing houses quickly stepped into power.
In the early 1990s “Metys” was mainly interested in the underground art activities: artzines, mail art, badges. He was connected to the Independent Group of Artists “Imperatyw” and their literary magazine “Woskowka”, as well as the Social Reading Room of State and Émigré Publications. At the same time he edited the artzine “Szelest” (
“Rustle”), a neo-Dadaist, manually produced, and created collectively (without stating the author). The zine was an opportunity for fun and experiment: the titles, and sometimes even whole texts, were pasted with the letters cut out of the newspapers; the photocopied issues were manually coloured with Bambino crayons (typical children’s wax crayons). Editing the zine soon developed into publishing poetry volumes and reprints of classical anarchistic brochures.
In 1994 the publishing house Oficyna Wydawnicza Bractwa Trojka was founded and Hojak has been still co-running it. Nowadays, Trojka is definitely the biggest publisher of anarchistic works in Poland. The same year the Rozbrat squat was established – Metys is a member of its collective. In 1997 Hojak was one of the founders of the Poznan Anarchist Library, which was located in Rozbrat. He used own social activism and literary passion in order to run occupational therapy workshops. He has been still working in the library, as one of its founders. He also engages in various initiatives of Poznan’s libertarian environment.
