Patrycja Wojciechowska 23/02/2025 Patrycja Wojciechowska 23/02/2025

Warsaw Biennale.

Dreams of reorganising the future.

The 1st time I collaborated with the Biennale Warszawa, I presented it as an example of alternative take on activist activity. The reason behind my decision was the Biennale's unapologetic, and very unusual in the art world, stand for political and social change. To me, the BW with its structure built on an ongoing process, where exhibition is more of an anchoring point and an opportunity to revise a certain phase of research than final goal, has certainly a liminal, undefined character.Working in transdisciplinary manner, on cross-section of art and cultural organisation and community of like-minded individuals, the Biennale alludes classification. It continuously changes, while it’s experimenting, testing, trying out and actively building a dynamic network of partnerships and collaborations. It works from the position on boundaries, gaps, through unmeasurable differences. Biennale Warszawa is an organisation committed to change, where values of solidarity, democracy and progress are explored through the method of working that stretches across different fields and practices.

This expansion is in a sense embedded within the very identity of BW. Now, the Biennale has taken a step further and while preparing for its Second Edition and fighting battles of their own facing increasingly difficult political situation in Poland; the team together with Ocalenie Foundation, transformed their headquarters into the Reception Point, where refugees from Ukraine have a place to stay and feel safe. This evolving, changing and undefined nature put together with an uncompromising position of (and on) truth (artistic, social and political) makes Biennale Warszawa an experiment, a rare call to multifaceted collaborative action, a testing ground, and live community.

As the crisis across the Polish border unfolded, it has become obvious that the Biennale Warszawa is the perfect first entry in this project. The organisation’s uncompromising acts of commitment to search for a different face of a cultural institution that it does not attempt to pretend neutrality, feel timely and important. BW takes a stand, working through a network of collaborations,alliances and partnerships creating assemblages, clusters of assemblages and so on. It moves across disciplines, blurring boundaries between fields, working continuously with editions acting as extensions or summaries of the 2-year programme, points of pause, and opportunities to present findings to the public and recess the progress made.

Fluid, difficult to pinpoint, working through continuous transformation, open change and to be changed, Biennale Warszawa resides in the realm of smallest difference. In fact, it refuses to be defined presenting at each turn a different aspect, another face as if it was a series of constantly emerging manifestations. All created in collective effort. WB has the courage to be always in a state of becoming, never settling on being complete.

ONE
The objectives of practice.
Ever since our first collaboration I wanted the opportunity to discuss your approach to the notion of practice. The way I think about it is that there are many practices and many ways of practising things. Practice has a rhythm of production, of daily action, it’s both participation and contribution. One can even say that the experience of being a member of society itself is a form of practice. That our daily routines and rituals are a way of practising life .I really want to focus in this conversation on ways of practice, on how do you see it as a part of a community and larger social body? My inquiry comes from the position of looking at cultural programming as a way of creating a collective, a creative body and way of working.

DISCRETE LIFE OF INFRATHIN: Starting with the original objectives and aims of the Biennale, I wanted to speak of reflections on your achievements so far. The objectives with which you have begun, clearly define the Biennale's Warszawa identity as the entity positioned outside the broadly accepted model of how cultural organisation is expected to be structured and function. Now, in the context of this spring’s events together with the current situation in Poland, you have taken another step further. I would like to discuss your achievements up to date and the future of the Second Edition of the Biennale in the light of these circumstances.

BARTOSZ FRACKOWIAK: We are doing everything to make sure the Second Edition goes ahead, but this context is of course very strong. We are trying at the moment to look at our programme with this in mind and see what could we add, alter, and how to make it more relevant. And so far we are succeeding. The large part of the original programming was conceived as a form of investigation focusing on the notion of authoritarianism. And undeniably it is very easy to see what is happening now in Ukraine as an example of authoritarianism at work.

Let’s Organise Our Future, Biennale Headquarters, 2022

PAWEŁ WODZIŃSKI: Of course there are other challenges. We are working with Ukrainian director Oleksiy Radinsky who remains there and by not being in Kiev, but in a different city, he is unable to complete the work in its originally planned shape. By now, we already know the work will look different, perhaps making it even more poignant. And in a more general way, the whole programme is moving away from our original postulate. At this moment we are trying to preserve something, while looking at some things anew.

You know, I have this impression that from the beginning of the pandemic, nothing has happened,nothing was completed as we had planned. Every event had to be somehow modified. Because of the pandemic. Because of the political situation in the country. Now, because of war. It's the sensation of ongoing instability during these two and half years of work. We opened an exhibition. We closed the exhibition after 5 days. We opened it again. Instead of an exhibition in the gallery, we downloaded documentation online. Instead of programming in space, we digitised the programming. So nothing turned up really as we imagined it and planned.

DLoI: I completely agree with you. I do have to say that at the same time,I have this feeling that despite how difficult it was and how difficult it still is, this ongoing prerogative of continuous change, frequently made at the last moment, often successfully initiates certain type of active and responsive relationship with what happens around: and therefore, is positive in a way. It challenges the established character and identity of things, institutions and practices. You have to continuously change. Or more to the point, you have to allow yourself to be changed by this external force. So, it’s about being receptive and open, about responsiveness. In the case of the WB, with this very fluid approach to identity, it becomes really interesting, because it resulted in the Biennale coming into being even more of its own evolved self than it originally was.

TWO
Social change and political stand.

I want to touch on the concept of cultural organisation taking political and/or social stands. Across your activities you look at different scales in terms of impact and time, with help establishing connections and intersecting relationships of almost exclusively small units. Simultaneous transdisciplinarity and research are your staple characteristics. You work across disciplines, you emphasise research along events and exhibitions/presentations. I think the result is the creation of a community. Perhaps that's where the social change, maybe on a smaller, more of a micro-scale, actually has happened. So working outside of the box ended up in working outside of clear borders, and therefore restrictions.

ANNA GALAS-KOSIL: As I think of your questions, I have a sensation that there is a common thread underlying all topics you propose, which I read as probing the nature of the concept we created. And this regardless if itis as now, under the auspices of a municipal institution, which has its own formatted legal conditionings, or not. We are talking about details of a certain idea, a formula, a model conceived four and a half years ago, tested and subjected to constant transformation. In truth, ideas, networks and relationships, which emerged as consequences of the Biennale's activities, still function and will perpetually evolve. I am talking about various alliances and partnerships,for example East Europe Biennal Alliance, which works in a different mode from that of classical. But I think that we have all reached a point where it became obvious that the type of institution and programming we have tried to build is not convenient for certain accepted and promoted formulas of cultural bodies. I speak here of a very broadly understood bureaucracy and dominant framework encasing modes of communication between institution and governing body.

DLoI: Undeniably what you propose, goes against this strongly defined bymodernism, model of experience of art solidified in a space of White Cube, which is exclusively understood as purposely apolitical. Of course this model has met with extensive criticism over the years and manifested in a whole plethora of activities, which however rarely go truly outside the model and methodology they criticise. And especially one, under the auspices of a governing body.

I personally believe that this declaration of culture and art as apolitical, is in a sense, a strategy of power, an act of seizing agency. Order to remove political content is a taking away position of participation in socio-political debate positioned in the field of art. And again, especially from the position of public organisation.

Establishment of apolitical and neutral field as a rule, takes away the potential of it being an arena of debate and instrument of social change. Political and neutralised model takes away from people, who function in this space regardless whoever it is, curator, artist, critic or viewer, of the emergence of such a situation as social or political commentary. Any form of manifest is deemed inappropriate. Certainly cultural organisations or institutions are seen as they should not express political or social views.

BW: from the very beginning stated that you absolutely disagree with this system. You express an ambition for cultural organisations to function differently. Because society and politics are part of the culture. And it is such a strong decision to go against it and reclaim the arts as a field of political debate, social change and agency. Especially since you have your dependencies, commitments and largely understood framework bound to the governing body. My questions originate somewhere in this moment. They are concerned with the notion of collectives, with the way you collaborate as a team. Further, you also are positioned in the larger collective with all your partners. As Ania said, all alliances, activists, collaborators, Warsavians themselves. In truth each of these groups of relations form a small collective. Which form a larger network of collectives. In some sense it is an expanding network.

And in a way a predominant model of cultural experience, is a manifestation and a tool of control and discipline. You know how you are supposed to enter the gallery, how are you expected to move across the exhibition, how to behave. Everything is clearly defined. The Biennale possesses much larger fluidity when it comes to acceptance of incorporating various methods of working.

PW: I see a great value in our work and from all the projects I have been involved in the last few years, I think the Biennale has been so far the most interesting. If we are to address the subject of depoliticisation of art of which youspoke of, there are many things intertwined of course. As you mentioned, the heritage of modernism has its importance, but there is also the importance of the system under which we have been functioning in Poland for the past 30 years and elsewhere around 40. I mean by this, the kind of ultra-liberal system which depoliticised everything. System capable of depoliticising every area of life and changing it into place of making products, of commodifying all aspects of existence. It is also a significant factor that we have taken into consideration that many actions in the arts and culture are simply commodified or made marketable. And that this process of depoliticisation has also a very commercial aspect.
And I think that this is a state of living in falseness. We simply know that decisions which concern our lives and manner of living are strictly political. So by giving prominence to all depoliticised activities we lie to ourselves and create something of neutral falsity, because the world just doesn’t look like this. White Cube is not free of politics. It only pretends to be, often immobilising or neutralising certain fields to hide the fact that the decision-making process and the environment itself is fully politicised. I don’t think we ever had any illusions on the subject. Consequently as a result we allowed ourselves to perceive art and culture as one of the areas of the political field.

CONVENTION OF WOMEN FARMERS. WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?, Warsaw, 2021

DLoI: This established model objectifies everyone and everything. Whilst entering the White Cube viewer becomes a unit, a single thing, an object which is disciplined, controlled and made to move in a choreographed way. Similarly, artwork itself is a commodity. Air of sanctity surrounding it is given precisely because of that. That it is a product. To be honest, I think objectification and commodification are at the core of this model of experience. What is unique in your decisions, is the open process and transparency of approach to methodology of programming. The program itself is open. It never really ends, it is never really completed. It has only stages, stops, points of revision. Each of these moments of pause give an opportunity to revalorise the experience and achievements to date and these concerning a specific topic. While never fully ending anything. As a matter of fact, each edition of Biennale Warszawa is such a stop of revalorisation. And then again, it carries on.

BF: From the beginning, the concept not only for programming, but also for the institution, the overall institutional model, has had very procesual character and did not claim in any way to pretend neutrality. Instead, it works through speaking up and taking clear stands. It is an attempt to do something in the arts and culture that is real; positioned from the worldview and state your beliefs openly: “I believe in such and such”. To take a stand. All of us are so used to speaking in mode of discourse, following different trends in critique and theory. We are great in perfecting and developing the language, in nuancing, in search for various meta- levels, deconstruction and so on. Whereas it is much more challenging to say for example: ‘We want this and that, Our causative efficiency is aimed to be in this field. We care about such and such. These are our values’. This is far more difficult, because the allure of discourse created by us vanishes in this scenario. This is far away from strictly art, because I believe art should have some of this discursive allure. Some of these travelling concepts, some of that language which accompanies it. There are moments when this language simply isn't there yet. Or it is not used purposefully. Precisely, because it takes us away from politics. So we are in this internal conflict with a critical perspective. From one side we are trying to uncover various things and use critical tools, and from the other, we also care very much to create programs, make propositions, take positions.

I think about these past few months, when we have been intensely working on the exhibition and public programming of the Second Edition of the the Biennale, war broke out and the team together with group of people,practically in few hours, altered our space at Marszałkowska Street in the Reception Point for refugees from Ukraine. On one hand this has nothing to do with the art, on the other hand I have this feeling that this was perhaps one of the most creative processes in which I took part in many years.

And I think of organisation of working systems, as the creation of community, relationships enacted in the framework of affect and sphere of emotion accompanying it, and it doesn’t differ so much from a situation in which we work on something from the field of arts. Simultaneously, I have a feeling that it has a very concrete, although limited in range, impact. The point is, it is our answer to a very real challenge tied up with the presence of refugees. For me, working across fields, these points of binding different dimensions and experiences, are extremely important. I think the institution has a value in this process and in a flexible way it is ready to respond and weave together many dimensions and layers.

Now, we have members of the art community who come, bring us supplies and campaign on our behalf to keep the reception point going. And it is in position at the centre of this practice and type of activity we decided to run.

AG-K: When it comes to the beginning and development of the biennale, I would point out that the the City of Warsaw Municipality and Culture Department at the time, created an Open Call, which was a reaction to what Pawel just described. I mean by this, a certain insufficiency of cultural institutions in the shape in which they functioned at the time and actually function now. It feels important to say that this was a unique gesture, with an announcement of Open Call specifying the requirement of interdisciplinarity. And more importantly, where interdisciplinarity was to be employed in search for the space where certain elements connect. However generally it was outlined in the Open Call, it is important to point out its presence. I don't think it would happen today. It was a special moment which led the municipality and Culture Department to post such an advert and have such an initiative approved.

THREE
Transdisciplinarity. Cross-field ways of working.

Warsaw Biennale itself is an open-ended, processual institution with a very clearly defined trans-disciplinary method of working. From the very beginning you worked through a growing network of partnerships, which the same as your events, actions and projects, moved beyond the field of the arts. It is interesting how this unfolded over time and editions, and on the overall notion of working on long time scale and open-ended projects.

DLoI: Your relations both with viewers, and those invited to participate: organisations, various practitioners, creatives and researchers are horizontal in nature. This is the level and method of equality, whereas a model art and culture institution works vertically, through very hierarchical actions not only behind closed doors, but in reality all over. The entire structure is built around it.

You, on the other hand, function a little bit like mycelium; spreading, sending signals and incorporating environments and habitats into the network. When it comes to methodology of work, this approach to the discipline; through building connections, making contacts and collaboration with people and so on, is very horizontal, very egalitarian.A flat structure that has an underlying goal of creating a collective. This collective acts on a bigger scale than the institution itself and art-cultural experience. As Bartek said at some point, Ukrainian refugees arrived, have been staying in the space and sleeping there, and in some ways this was a creative and cultural move. One is enclosed in another and I have this impression that this is probably the only right direction to take.

PW: This egalitarian building of collectives, this call to collective action. It requires what Ania was describing, trust. And our space helps with it, but also what helps is transdisciplinarity. It helps that we define ourselves as not limited to functions of art. We take a standpoint that there are many disciplines, with art being only one of them. There is also theory, there is also research, social practice and so on. And all are equal. And this strengthens trust placed in us. If people know we work from the position that art is on the same level as social practices or political activism, then they know we will not capitalise our (and theirs collaborative) efforts in the field of art. It means this will not be atypical process of taking over social practice by art and incorporating it in aesthetics, claiming it by the field. We make sure that what we create today together with social actors, practitioners, activists is not capitalised by the art world in some other way. And we achieved that by our way of working. If we act transdisciplinary, it does not happen.

We worked for this trust; making sure it’s established with social organisations and groups, people who are serious about their goals and impact of their work. Gaining it was not a quick process. We had to convince collaborating institutions that we are trustworthy partners, that we will not take advantage of produced knowledge for our own purposes. For example, projects
focusing on migration-related topics have been part of the Biennale from the very beginning. Some, like Bartek’s project ‘Modern Slavery’, were truly challenging both in regards to protagonists and their histories. When working on such projects one has to be very open and at the same time restrained when it comes to working with the material. These are stories of people, often full of violence and pain. When one operates in this activist-political-social space, one learns humility and a different approach to their own activities.

FOUR
Community and partnerships. Multiplicity of collectives. Multiple ways of collaboration.

You work through partnerships and collaborations initiating emergence of community, a community understood in larger terms, of collaborators and participating practitioners, people who are engaged in work with you, activists, partners and practitioners, Warsavians, refugees you are housing. I consider it a methodology of and through practice. I wanted to discuss this network that you have been creating as a call to collective action, where community is a building block.

DLoI: I sometimes think of consideration of art as a form of experimental activity alternative to scientific paradigm. As a result the primary importance of success and necessity of final positive outcome ceases to exist, as the most important is experimentation and search for new ways and new formulas, the process itself. The Biennale reaches moments of culmination, but whilst they are beginnings of other threads of work, they are in fact already another stage. Working in such a manner is a more dynamic way and attitude to the process and completion, regardless whatever it is a project or a formula.

CONVENTION OF WOMEN FARMERS. WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?, Warsaw, 2021

PW: Bartek presented the method of working.I will try to name it. We aim to test ‘an activist paradigm’ (a working term we use) embedded in an institutional framework and applied to transdisciplinary practice. Our work is rooted in daily action, achieving something small every day, something that gives us a chance to move forward, whatever it is, discursive or practical. In a single act for someone, on behalf of someone, against something; in the creation of models, creation of something concrete.

This strategy originated in looking at Poland as a pretty particular country. Poland is more a collection of individuals than a collective. Throughout many years we have learned to function partly because of the necessity of self-sufficiency, alone and it manifests in the form ofcomplete atomisation and fragmentation of the social environment. Some critics speak of social Darwinism, where everyone fights for themselves and everyone is focused on their own values. It's not so visible in thecurrent situation with a massive wave of altruistic help and support for Ukrainians. However, until this moment I was convinced that Polish society was predominantly set on individual goals and objectives, that this collective aspect, this focus on social action barely ever manifested, emerging only for short moments only to disappear again.

So our activist workings or to say it differently, our action aimed at building of common relations, results from the need to find alternative ways of communication with people, in search for ways to build alliances, with assumption that there aren’t that many of these people and environments around we cannot limit ourselves to only the arts.

At the end of the day activists, researchers, academia or social groups or part of the public speaks of the same values. So your commitment to build alliances emerged from attempts to project different proposals for reality, where elements of collaboration, of relation are far more important than successful realisation of one's own individual interests and this approach moves onto our practice. We function in this slightly commercialised, focused on individual success as a goal, surroundings. In response, we try to find alternatives to this state of things, contest this model and build completely different relationships and in conjunction with this, a different model of working.

AG-K: I would also like to add that the Reception Point was made possible to be opened, due to trust and the establishment of certain truth with people who supported us in this moment of emergency. But our space, the way it is, helped too. What we managed to create out of the place where the Biennale is located, put together with the way it is visually accessible from the street, somehow helps. It helps that this is a place of truth, regardless how idealistic or romantic it may sound. It is a space of culture and art, but is also an imperfect space, which gives an opportunity to build the right environment accessible to people from different fields, for example, activists who wouldn't have to feel compelled to follow rules of conduct which dominate traditional art spaces.

When you speak of the power of apolicality, I have a feeling that our actions, strategies and spacial setting provided us with enormous help, making possible entering more democratic and horizontal relations with people who wanted to work together on new emergencies. After these four and a half years we established this community of people and organisations who support us in creation and running of the Reception Point, who brings us supplies and campaign to help us.

DLoI: I wanted to discuss your work through alliances and various types of partnerships and collaborations, regardless of whether it is an individual artist or organisation or activist. They all come and are incorporated in a network created by the Biennale and further on, they become a part of a larger network, one which grows out of its activities. What struck me the most was that you create this network from predominantly small bodies and connections.

I recall Anna Tsing and her use of the category of assemblage, which I believe lies at the foundations of the structure of the Biennale’s Warszawa network and it is an assemblage of small bodies. The Biennale itself is a small organisation with a tight team. And equally all the satellites who work with you in various ways, are small too. And the network simply stretches on.

Coming back to what Pawel said about commodification and commercialisation of things, when everything becomes a capital or it is valued only as long as it presents a potential of capital creation, small entities are not really dominated this much by this drive. They are only people or artists or communities.

BF: I think assemblage is a great metaphor. Assemblages contain different ranges, which contain different statuses and characters. Process which Pawel describes contains trust, building relations with organisations we work with and so on. I see it as a plethora of individual, personal relations and processes in which we are and which make up the whole, and they are all anchoring points for the assemblage. Assemblage which contains different practices and fields in which we are active. And when I think about experiences of these last months; work on the exhibition on technology, extractivism and authoritarianism in the strangest way mixes with the reality of war. For example work of Olek Rawinski which concerns gas lines and pipeline ‘Freedom’, Russian cyber system, which lies somewhere at the roots of infrastructure and now this infrastructure starts to take on a different meaning in the context of war. I think of a book by Swietłana Matwijenko ‘Cyberwar’. The book, from 2019, now re-actualises in this strange way, almost as if a new enactment.

We originally collaborated with the Kyiv Biennal in 2021 around key ideas of alliance and two days after the beginning of the war we spoke about tactic and bulletproof vests and were trying to organise them for territorial defence in Kiev. This is truly very strange and in essence, one of the consecutive stages of the same process. Process which is bound by co- creation, co-thinking, and co-building of different situations. And at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether these situations have a strictly artistic character and fit in the frame prescribed by White Cube, were defined by performative gestures coming from artistic situations, or whatever these are situations emerged from completely different order. In some way, they are part of the same assemblage or the same process in which we function and act. There would not be cooperation on the reception point with the Ocalenie Foundation without previous engagement on action at the Polish-Belarus border. And this form of causality defines our methodology.

Our foundational objective was that we wanted to be an institution which works in
fields of art, activism and theory (& research). We defined these three fields as primary areas of activity. We stated that these three fields are bound to weave in, influence and empower one another. Each project aims to have all three elements in different ratios, but still all three. Fun of working on such programming and institution is that things can bind together and we don’t have to look for distinctive differences or disciplinary definition of borders. We can purposely blur the boundaries and not care whether something is more this or that. And in truth, this is its power.

What you are saying, is taking another step further. It is a form of radicalisation of this initial thought and recognition that in fact things tangle and programming of such an institution is a form of attention turned onto the process; what weaves into such assemblage, what doesn’t, and what to want in this arrangement and what not to want.

I keep thinking about assemblages and how Anna Tsing uses notion in an ecological sense but also as founded in planetary perspective. It connects various localities with a planetary perspective where things have different manifestations and different connections with different ecological, social, political and economic contexts. I truly consider this a characteristic of our institution, where we always stressed the necessity to connect different localities but in planetary perspective, as the process necessary to see connections and see how motifs, objects, topics work, or different challenges. How they work in different geographies, in different places in the world, and to look for possible links even where they are being there purposely obscured or invisible.

Contrary to current projects (in Warsaw) focused on the microscale of more commodified locality and looking at it in isolation, we take decisive stand to see connections and building relations on planetary scale as necessary. Microscale is where the process of fetishisation as a result of something of a cultural product is being built and this all is justified by the idea of groundwork. But in truth, this perspective is significantly narrowed compared to what we propose. I especially think of the geopolitical situation in which we are at the moment, where searching for connections with situations which are happening elsewhere, and investigation into what we could do together, is joint action. It is crucial to look to other places elsewhere, to build knowledge out of connections and search for the links which connect all and allows us to inspire and be inspired, empower and be empowered to think of formulas of non-colonial and non-hierarchical solidarity.

CONVENTION OF WOMEN FARMERS. WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?, Warsaw, 2021

DLoI: I find this micro isolationist take on locality to be, in truth, aveiled narrative of a wall.
You mentioned the truth a few times throughout this conversation. Planetary connections are definitely a process where fact and truth are methods of working. It often becomes clear how many natural habitats, species, migrations, how many capitals, interests and exploitations are entangled in a chain of events and causations. We need to look at global connections. Despite the size of the planet we are all connected.

BF: Yes absolutely. This thinking about localities is very close to our goals and mission. And it has always been a key concept , fundamental and crucial, even more so than transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinarity is a consequence and resultant of this recognition. They are both entangled and it shows how false it is that localities exist in isolation. But in truth, it does not work like this. On Belarusian-Polish border, inthe surrounding woods we meet people from Yemen, Sudan, Cameroon, Iraq, Syria or Cuba. In places, which we can consider primarily part of the nature of Podlasie. They arrive from other places, where they suffered from other wars or persecutions and suddenly they land in Podlasie, in this very subjective perception of something that one could call a local locality. Overnight we have this very tangible, almost sensual experience of other localities’ intrusion and new entanglements emerge from this experience. The Reception Point is in a sense, continuation of this experience as it concerns other people from other border, in different forms of discrimination. It is not an obvious take on art institutions and it is visible that current political processes or decisions move in different direction, meaning narrowing of locality and resignation from trans-local or planetary dimension.

DLoI: I think that when it comes to your approach to art and creative activity, the way of working is similar to looking at culture not as provided experience and formula, but belief that it is what we all as society, co-create. As a collective effort, action in relation.

Ania, you spoke briefly on the Biennale's space. Of mental space, space between all collaborating partners and participants. But also, I think, of physical space, your office-gallery. Your observation on its openness as the quality was so accurate. The space is in the very centre of Warsaw. Fully visible from the street, with an open plan, it is so very horizontal and transparent. It is simultaneously a place of work, exhibition and event space. There is of course an additional layer in its history as it used to be a commercial site, designed as such and perhaps that is why it is so open and accessible. In a certain sense, this transparency combined with your methodology of working, is read a bit differently and I think this is very beautiful, this openness of space moved onto openness of working, on ways of interaction.

AG-K: Originally the institution had no space, just a small office. So finding the headquarters was one of the first challenges of our emerging institution. First events happened in a small building at Mokotowska Street and that’s where the first discursive and research projects began. Later, our current site has become available. I really believe that physical space is extremely important and its impact has weighed on how our activities evolved together with the emergence of trust and truth in the process.

I like to believe we changed a bit the map of cool places and topography of Warsaw by entering the area between Constitution Square and Saviour Square, which used to be this little bit of a dead spot. Shortly after us, more galleries opened nearby. Accepting it as it was, with its horizontal identity, we didn’t really change much in the space. It specially worked for activist purposes as a space that was easily entered, where people could go in and interact on an equal level. I believe that the opening of the Reception Point mirrors the space and its character, that the great strength of this site is that this is the space which easily transforms. It can house an exhibition, event, performance or forum, where academic researchers and farmers who came for Convention of Women Farmers felt equally at home and now it very quickly changed into space for refugees.

DLoI: Along with the transdisciplinary methodology and horizontal exchanges, equality is embedded in your way of working. You employ the notion of forum, a form of interaction constructed around equal level, cross-section between democracy and political debate as a model, put together with exchange of research and open-ended processes as operating systems. I think of this triangle in your methodology where transdisciplinarity, democratic debate and collaboration are in horizontal spatial and mental reality. To me, the value in the forum concerns equality of voice.

PW: Forum is the completion of our concept, idea of equal relations. Even our conferences have the character of a forum. They also emerged on the foundation of discussion. Frankly, barely anything we do is a result of individual gestures. We use collaborative actions, actions of different groups with incorporation of institutions outside of the art world.

AG-K: Often it had a purpose of trying things out, checking if something was possible, as an opportunity to test various solutions.

BF: Testing occurs frequently, for example CWF. It was a meeting of women who have never met each other before, but all of them did similar things across the world. Fact that they manifested in the same space was a challenge and a quality. Marwa Arsanios developed the idea of this joint invitation when she realised that people in different parts of the world use similar language, that these are statements of similar groups or collectives who speak about the same things, but do not see each other and as a result they have a sense of isolation or functioning as singular voice.

Through a planetary approach you start to understand that there is political fellowship between these people. And it lasts as a different form of relation existing on various levels; like the assemblage we spoke of. It doesn’t have to look the same and it can emerge in different variants, taking on different forms. Depending on needs, depending on the attitude and activity of specific individuals or groups.

AG-K: Convention of Women Farmers concerned alternative ways of working to those of the food industry with its long chains of delivery. What we put in one space were small local initiatives which have connections, but without this event, without this forum, it would be much more difficult to notice them as they lack comparable capital. On the other hand without CWF, our next projects, the Permaculture and the whole project regarding the food industry, would not materialise. Now, for the Second Edition of the Biennale, discussion on precision farming and technology in farming would not occur either, if not for this ongoing character of open processuality.

FIVE
Fluidity and the smallest difference.
You created this very fluid, undefiable identity for the Biennale Warszawa. So in a way you are immeasurable, the smallest difference. The Infrathin. And now, with a Reception Point at your headquarters and initiation of East Europe Alliance, you are extending the community around the Biennale and moving outside of the set of activities traditionally associated with art institutions taking it another step further.

Refugee Reception Point, 2022

DLoI: I began this project with very specific thinking of Infrathin, which is one of the most elusive, challenging and fascinating categories in art. Duchamp wrote only a few notes on the subject, but I do like this idea of category in art, category in life, category in state of existence, which refuses to have a definition. The artist himself stated clearly that Infrathin cannot be defined. It can only be explained by examples. And so, I started to think about Infrathin as a category which is bound to the smallest intangible difference, understood as the difference between one and another, which cannot be contained in numbers. It does not fit the scientific paradigm and in some ways, it is rooted in intuition. Infrathin is primarily felt. It is a process of experimentation alternative to the established measurable and verifiable methodology. Its disciplinary identity originates in another place. It is connected to specific fluidity. It’s undefiable.

I think that in general, transdisciplinary methodology certainly has this characteristic. I wanted to ask if you have thought of the Biennale in consideration of this very fluid identity? In a way of working where the smallest, impossible to define difference between one and another, becomes its driving force. Where rejection of category, of categorising in some way defines inscribing organisation in the narrative of the in-between. Consequently, Bienale Warszawa has become liminal.

PW: In response to this, I wanted to discuss the crisis in other disciplines. We are experiencing a crisis of academia and education forsure. It manifests through strategies of marketisation of everything, altering syllabus to fit some imagined or real needs of business on one hand and on the other, some visions of the utility of high education in the form of easily achieved benefits for recruitment opportunities. If you look at classic disciplines,they are all in crisis. We spoke already of art and culture and they both are losing their sharp external boundaries.

We are dealing with the phenomenon of ‘nebulisation’, of fogging or melting of edges of these disciplines, and simultaneously, the process of scattering. Our theoretical activities are good examples here, as for many people who do not fit in the academic world, our activity was a chance to move out of the confines of established regimes of knowledge whilst gaining a chance of performing a different model of knowledge production and distribution.

So it is a bit of a model acting as a response to the crisis of discipline, knowledge regimes collapse and lack of sense of stability. Because of its elasticity and through its ability to fit in different circumstances, our institution is a crisis institution. In understanding that institution, an institutional body is something which acts in timesof permanent crisis or crises; financial, economic, climate, social, political (in Poland), migration.So this not fully describable formula, formula of in-between, favours effectuality, activity in reality full of tensions, conflicts, unexpected twists, actions, violent breaks, or introduction of new elements almost day by day. So in a way this is a response to the reality in which we currently live.

DLoI: Nature of the assemblage is such that it changes. Assemblage is site specific, or perhaps, community specific. Throughout this entire conversation you often recalled the word ‘truth’, a notion which until recently was pretty much uncontested. There was truth or falsehood. Now we live in a world where truth has become a problematic idea of uncertain existence. Majority of people believe that their individual truth is absolute and can contest any truth regardless of its factuality. I speak of situations where emotions and individual convictions are mistaken for it. They are valued more than something that is verifiable. Notion of truth melted away. There is not absolute truth, but there is also not an accountable truth. There are many individual truths which very often contradict and contest one another. It is really difficult in this reality to stand by the truth as it was.

PW: I don’t know if we speak of the truth so frequently. You noticed it. What we undeniably notice, is the topic of individualisation, fragmentation of identity. We also notice these processes and attempt toinclude different perspectives in one action, which may serve as a test of possibilities of escaping this progressing fragmentation. If we think of global issues, for example economic processes of global character, even the most extreme individual cannot do anything about them. If negative, these processes can be stopped only in the framework of collective actions; through societies, through collective voice.

Our activities served as testing of new models of collectivity. We remember from times of PRL (Polish People's Republic) or so called State Socialism that this collectivity was often artificially imposed by an authoritarian state. It was an authoritarian product, where someone arbitrarily speaks for society. Supposedly we spoke of socialisation, but in truth, it was frequently staged. Afterwards, we experienced and are still experiencing individualistic approach. So now there is a question of how to think of progressive politics, how to think progressively about the world moving beyond on one hand, this imposed collectivity, this authoritative collectivity and on the other hand, this extreme individualism, extreme selfhood. So in this version we include all individual versions in the framework of jointly created reality that seemed the most sensible. In principle it seemed the only answer to the dilemma.

In such a way one can make agreements, create relations, and build alliances which could alter the course of politics. It was a question we were asking ourselves and answered pretty much solely by creating groundwork alliances or such alliances where everyone has an equal voice.

We want to rethink in what way to create collective projects so they could have a real driving force. This is extremely difficult from our perspective, such a small institution, it is just not feasible in a longer perspective, on a greater scale, but in the framework of testing or our sort of small scale activities, it is very possible to achieve.

BF: I would say these are a bit of prototypes. By this I mean that what we initiate is not always on assumption they have to work, be hyper effective and feasible long term and on a large scale. Our main goal is creation of such prototypes to act in the real world with real challenges.

Jonas Staal said once that the Biennale was an infrastructure creating or producing infrastructures. It is a bit like an institution or organisation which is creating or producing some forms of institutionalisation, or some forms of organisation, checking movement in various circumstances, in relation to different topics, testing how to do something. How not to restrict only to a solely small closed group focused on only a narrow section of reality.

DLoI: I really believe that in your case, it is less important if the creation of a collective lasts as one, same collective in the long term. It is more essential that the method of working is to think collectively. Consequently, emerging collectives will change or break apart, new will re- form and so on, but the way of collaborative action stays the same in principle as it is grounded in working together, based on thinking collectively.

As always, it has been a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for the great conversation.

Biennale Warszawa 2022 : *Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley*

Digital infrastructure and material objects of the Web, invisible and often overlooked in the conversation about technology; algorithms and artificial intelligence, considered by many to be neutral and objective, but in fact affecting all spheres of our lives; reactionary ideology and conservative politics hidden in the modern garb of technological development – these are, among others, the themes around which the works of nearly thirty artists from around the world, which will be shown at the main exhibition, are centred. It is accompanied by a public program that will include performative lectures, debates, workshops, presentations and seminars. In the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, works and speeches in which artists analyse authoritarian political practices made possible by new technologies that assume special significance. These practices are based on mass surveillance of citizens. They use artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics for political, military and economic violence purposes and for cyberterrorism. The situation in Ukraine has led us to work with the artists, researchers, and scholars participating in the Biennale Warszawa 2022 to create new exhibition and public program elements that will allow us to adequately address these themes.

The second edition of Biennale Warszawa entitled Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley was be held at Wars Sawa Junior Department Stores in Warsaw, 104/122 Marszałkowska St. It will last from 3 June to 17 July, 2022.

Anna Galas-Kosil, curator, theatre studies expert, translator. She was involved in the preparation of the first Polish exhibit at the international exhibition of set design – The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space in 2007, 2011 and 2015. She worked with Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz, R@port Festival in Gdynia and Warszawskie Spotkania Teatralne. In 2015–2020 she was President of the international On The Move network involved in issues of mobility in the cultural sector. Until the end of 2017 she managed the department of international cooperation in the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute. From 2018 she curates the programme of the international Biennale Warszawa. Co-curator of the 1st and 2nd editions of the Biennale Warszawa.

Bartosz Frąckowiak, curator, director, culture researcher. Deputy Director of Biennale Warszawa. In 2014-2017 he was the Deputy Director of the Hieronim Konieczka Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz and the curator of the International Festival of New Dramaturgies. Curator of the series of performative lectures organised in cooperation with Fundacja Bęc Zmiana (2012). Theatre director, including “Komornicka. The Ostensible Biography” (2012); “In Desert and Wilderness. After Sienkiewicz and Others” by W.Szczawińska and B. Frąckowiak (2011); performative lecture “The Art of Being a Character” (2012), Agnieszka Jakimiak’s “Africa” (2014), Julia Holewińska’s “Borders” (2016), Natalia Fiedorczuk’s “Workplace” (2017) anddocumentary- investigative play “Modern Slavery” (2018). He published in various theatre and socio-cultural magazines, including “Autoportret”, “Dialog”, “Didaskalia”, “Political Critique”, and “Teatr”. Lecturer at SWPS University in Warsaw, co-curator of the 1st and 2nd editions of the Biennale Warszawa.

Paweł Wodziński, director, curator, director of the Biennale Warszawa. Founder and head of Towarzystwo Teatralne, an association formed to promote contemporary dramaturgy and socially engaged theatre. In 2000–2003 he was the Managing and Artistic Director of Teatr Polski in Poznań. In 2010 he became the programming director of the 5th International Festival of Polish Contemporary Drama R@PORT in Gdynia. In 2014-2017 he was the Director of the Hieronim Konieczka Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz and the curator of the International Festival of New Dramaturgies. Author of dozens of performances, including “Solidarity. Re-enactment” (2017), “Solidarity. The New Project” (2017), “Global Civil War” (2018) and texts published in “Dwutygodnik,” “Dialog,” “Teatr” and the Polish edition of “Le Monde-diplomatique”. Lecturer at SWPS University in Warsaw, co-curator of the 1st and 2nd editions of the Biennale Warszawa.

*all photographs are courtesy of Biennale War

https://biennalewarszawa.org

Patrycja Wojciechowska 15/01/2025 Patrycja Wojciechowska 15/01/2025

U5. Of Dreams and Islands.

Originally published on 22 May 2022.

In a way, U5 is a perfect art collective. Their way of working continuously evolves directed at creation of seamless practice void of individual authorship. The collective’s identity is never multiple, but rather liminal, simultaneously that of a singular person and part of an integrated collective body. U5 uses transformation as means to run a constantly changing practice. The collective lets go of ego and ownership of individual credit. Practising in an organic manner, U5 uses chance and unpredictability as a tool. Its transformational identity, a certain fluidity of morphing individual and collective selves, is reflected in the open to change and chance character of the project.

Everything around U5 has an impact. Cultural position of the collective’s latest project, the Recreation Areas makes every area, somehow a product of multifocal influence. Driven by way of working and being, identity and entanglements of the material, archive and memory, U5 explores dreams and cultural codings we filled our realm of existence with.

For more than 10 years, U5 has been working with found materials, a result of their interest in everyday, colourful things, handicraft, kitsch, and mass-produced items.

In Recreation Areas, found objects and dreamt out desires act as an anchor of a specific piece (island), mapping archipelago of memory and cultural relations. Manifestation of these dreams and threads, encompass continuous feedback. Feedback from the collective itself, from the artwork, from PALM (the collective’s video livestream camera) and from the public. Each lasting, yet temporal dream equally individualised and standard.

Recreation Areas, 2021-22

1.
THE DREAM OF RECREATION. ARCHIPELAGOS OF DESIRES.

It is so good to see you again. During our last interview, we discussed in depth your practice, collaborative dynamics and working methods. It was a really great conversation and by then I already knew I would like to talk to you again. This time I have in mind to focus on your recent project; the “Recreation Areas”.

The idea of ‘Infrathin Interviews’ was conceived with the notion of a continuously evolving archive in mind and I think that it is something you probably appreciate from the position of your practice.

I wanted to discuss the origins of an ongoing project tapping into the concept of a Recreation Area. Recreation Area is a dream, a memory, a desire, a product and possible tool of power. The underlying structure is availability and offer of dreams (and to dream). You buy dreams. And you buy INTO dreams. In the “Recreation Areas” you’re kind of playing with this idea and I wanted to ask how that came together?

U5:
The “Recreation areas” initially emerged from our ongoing practice of building models. This time we didn't choose to build the whole structure with the networks in between. Instead we chose to have just buildings, the location itself, like islands without further surroundings. It starts with a selection process of different islands, which in turn get connected to one another. And the person making the selection holds this ecosystem together. And also can move them around and connect or disconnect them.

Among the Recreation Areas there are the Centipede Lobby, a Beauty farm, a Sprouts Garden, the Ridgewood Condominium, Moby Click, etc. They are metaphors and if you put them in connection with each other, new levels of meaning emerge. The selection is influenced by your own mental state. What is currently in your consciousness, what do you exclude, what do you repress?

You place the Malibu Beach House next to the Fast Food Restaurant, but what happens when the atomic wasteland borders those sites ? Networking the sites initiates a relational thought process, which reaches out from a retreat into your dream house to complex real life problems like land reclamation or gentrification.

We also looked more into making models and the use of models in our society. We make mathematical models to understand or architectural models to build, but we thought maybe we need models to believe? And then maybe we could find out: ” What do I believe? What do I want?”
The key question is: “Where to place the desires to dream and desires of dreams? We really love to ask this and to see what people choose. Which models would you choose and how many or if you could choose between all of those, which ones do you desire and what games do you want to play”.

PW:
To me, the process of creation of islands comes from the need to create worlds. So the game is to pick the unit and to create your own little world, your own little universe. And in a sense, that's what I was thinking about when I
mentioned archipelagos. Because it's almost like an act of mapping, mapping of the dream, but also mapping of dreams as a product. I think of patterns in culture, where you are being convinced what sort of dream you should have. How to buy into a dominant pattern and process of being influenced by it. And then, you re- create.

U5:
Absolutely. We also think of bringing this further with a kind of 365 days book, a calendar. The idea is to have one Recreation Area for each day, so the sites will be connected with temporality. They also belong to certain categories we established, like the elements: earth, water, fire, air or categories like routine, pleasure, labour, obsession. Through this ordering system unique combinations arise for each day, which can be further interpreted. Through the combination patterns can be recognised, thoughts can be sorted and coded solutions to not considered problems can be found.

Cemetery; Egg White Clearings; Moby Click; Preserve Areas; RA, 2021-22

2.
PARKS AND RE-CREATION

When I Google-searched your project, what came up was mostly football practice pages, or overall team sport’s websites. What do you think about that? I mean, I kind of like it. It is an almost accidental extension of a project. I personally think of island resorts and island cruises when prompted by the notion of a recreation area.

U5:
I'm not sure because if I Google it, I have a fishing spot, playgrounds, rivers, people barbecuing. On the other hand, maybe it's the result of an AI suggestion based on your search history, etc.

PW:
Maybe it's also because I Googled: U5 + recreation areas. And of course, what comes up first is your project.
Actually, it was pretty funny. On the top came up your project’s page and below, about 10 different links on where you can find recreation areas. And it seemed to be always the same page, which was coming up with these ideas about soccer practice, football team and different meeting spots. It made me think about the title, which taps into the idea of what sort of dream one should have, what sort of sense of belonging. Because the island itself is a form of belonging or somewhere where you want or don't want to belong. Like those game sports and recreation areas. It made me think about how is different my idea with islands and cruises, Google’s AI, your own, someone else's and so on.

U5:
After I read this question, I thought of your suggestion, and I kind of liked it. I think the way you find recreation and the way people define it, very individual. You also gave us an idea that we need a football spot. We would love to have a football recreation area and we would definitely change the rules of the
game. We discussed it because we are not football fans at all.
So we said, “Okay, I will be a football fan if there's a change or a
new rule added”. For example, the first half of the match would be played by a female team and the second by men, and only the common end result counts.

* Toscana

PW:
When I initially looked at your project, I immediately thought about islands, that sort of very commercial sale of notion of a holiday, of the idea of the paradise that is supposed to be recreation. Place where we are expected to
re-create.
But when I found that football page on Google search, it reminded me of the fact that a few decades ago recreation was something that happened within the city space in specially devoted places, that was within the team and people were doing things together. It made me think how incredibly individualised and single cell-based the contemporary culture has become.

U5:
Recreation nowadays is ingrained in your life cycle. You recreate yourself during your time off so you can go back to work and be productive during the week, and get yourself in form and to go back into the capitalist life fully functional. To take it further, we consume while on holiday; maybe go to a yoga camp, or spa, and you pay. It too, is a business.

PW:

It's less social and community-based and more of a product. And in a sense you yourself are a product too.

Recreation Areas, 2021-22

TOPOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY.

You have been working with found materials throughout your practice. We spoke about it earlier extensively, but in the case of this series, they are very much at the heart of the creative process. Object is an impulse or a spark to a specific piece, specific dream, or the beginning of a story. It is also a memory, each material has a history of its own. So the memories layer; cultural memories, U5’s, memories of the material itself, of the working process, of the work’s life-being exhibited, documented, received, etc. The memory is the inspiration, an actual source of each work’s topic and form. So it's like an archive and archipelago, it is a process of mapping. What do you think the map will eventually show?

U5:
We discussed it, not completely, but it came up. Mapping is an infrastructure, it's an act of putting things in place. The project is ongoing and ephemeral; the material is also ephemeral, something we continuously throw away. But sometimes we have this urge to keep just one sheet of paper or a shell that we found during the vacations, because we loaded it with memory. In other societies people learn from dreams and get inspired by their own ideas or problems, not by pushing them to the site so that they don't deal with them. We say they dream, because dreams can be a form of communication within societies, a form to deal with memory amongst us.

So the best way of understanding this is that a map that comes with models to believe, should be ephemeral and ongoing and include dreams, desires and memories. We need new Recreation Areas and maybe older ones will be exchanged because nobody believes in this or that recreation area anymore. Some areas are the hinterland for a while, but soon they come back into play. Maps are a bit partisan, because of their baggage in Western culture and that's why we define the project through notions of ephemera and the ongoing character, choice and transformation.

PW:
What you’re saying reminds me of Peter Weir’s movie” The Last Wave”. It’s story of a lawyer in Sydney representing pro bono tribal Aboriginal Australian in a murder trial.
As the story progresses it changes into this oneiric tale. Lawyer begins to have strange dreams, and references to native Australian culture become more pronounced, telling the story of impending catastrophe, disaster coming to destroy the land. The Last Wave. At one point, two main protagonists are having a conversation. And the client says, “You have forgotten what dreams are” exposing the core failure of Western culture. It is also a reference to the concept of dreaming, where there is an entire spirit realm that exists subsequently with the real world, an interwoven, yet universe separate.

Silo Bunker Club; Birch Forest; Centipede Lobby; Luxury Recorder One; RA; 2021-22

MEDIA

I also wanted to talk about titles, billboards and videos. They are in equal measures playful and critical. There is something about the idea of creating cheap plastic objects with hot glue, cultural (and actual) recycling of material, visual and commercial cliches of dreams and manufactured experiences. Do you think it is almost like a recreational Babel? The dreams provided and standardised versus recycled and poeticised?

U5:
We see titles as an entry point for imagination. They give the audience a hint that could let them recognise things more easily. If you look at something you start to read it and then you discover by yourself, “oh, there's a bed or this could be tables and drinks on top so it could be a bar or a restaurant”.
We like that recreation area sculptures are mobile and small, but the screen accompanying the work is like a vastly oversized iPhone. When we install works in museums, we put the huge screen and the recreation areas next to it and the arrangement comes with a kind of a catchy soundtrack attracting attention. It's a mixture between screens in shopping malls or in public spheres and the home TV. It definitely plays with the attraction that advertising carries. The video shows the titles of the recreation areas and some of them have been chosen to let the audience dive deeper into it. There are small stories about their function, or dysfunction, the category and element the recreation area belongs to and the abilities that it can release.

PW:
To me, they are really a mixture of commercial wasteful cheapness and selling strategies. They’re so tiny, needless, made out of glue and waste. Like tacky plastic toys, something not really needed, easy to throw out, a disposable dream, something that very easily loses its own meaning. And is being immediately replaced by someone else's proposal for dreaming. The title is an anchor, but actually you can fill it up with anything you want, but in a sense you already are filled with something.

U5:
Yeah, absolutely. Dreams are individual. We cannot translate or bring them to other people directly. We need other mindsets and ways of communication. And we must not forget dreams can be part of everyday resistance.

PW:
I think that's why I like this project so much because it reminds me of so many different things that exist in culture. In politically charged John Carpenter’s “They live” aliens secretly run the Earth and you cannot see them for what they are, unless you wear special sunglasses. The main protagonist discovers this, puts the glasses on and looks at the billboards around the city, streets, and shopping malls. And instead of the advertisement for products, it actually says ‘OBEY' or things like that.
What you did, made me think as well about that kind of play with obedience and control built into the commerciality of things.

U5:
Advertisements want to sell you something you don't need and it's often something you don't want. Often, things that can be bought are a substitute for values that cannot be bought. Recreation areas could make you suspicious.

PW:
It points to the cheapness of dreams constructed in our culture. I think, in a sense, that this is what you're talking about. The tension between how we are supposed to see things and how we see them ourselves. Just that tiny moment. Minuscule difference.

U5:
Sometimes you go to this place and it’s a disappointment due to the tourism industry, but we end up thinking, what would I have done if I had not been there? We do not have to see all this or that, maybe imagination gives us more pleasure than actually going there?
Also in the digital age, there is the question whether there is still such a thing as being there - or not being there. Aren’t we always in different places at the same time?

Evil House; Gelateria; Grotto; Paw Lounge; RA, 2021-22

5.
WAYS OF PRACTICE

I decided to pose this question to all people in the project. I wanted to ask how do you see practice as such? I know we discussed this previously, but it is a different day, things happened in - between and we are in different points of our respective practices. So I thought it could be interesting to approach the subject from a different angle, so to speak.

I have been thinking about the notion of practice as such. When practice is discussed with artists, the assumption is that the focus of investigation is the creative working method. But there are many other practises and many ways of practising things. They frequently mix and cross-over. One can even say that the experience of being a member of society is a form of practice, that our daily routines are a way of practising life and completing its rituals.

How do you see your practice in context, or more to the point, in relation to daily practice of living (as a part of a collective, community, a social body)?
We spoke about your attitude to the collective as a creative body and working process, but I wanted to discuss you as a collective in relationship(s) with another, larger body, a larger collective-society.

U5:
Something that comes to mind, is what Mierle Laderman wrote in her manifesto where she spoke about Balinese saying that we do everything within our daily moments. We do not need an app. We can do everything right in our daily life. I find this so beautiful. We lost a connection with our daily rhythms, and in a way, it would be awkward to go back fully to them. Now we live in this split life, we have an iPhone and metaverse, but we don't want to end only with them. On the other hand this is our daily routine, that is what we use, how we function right now.

PW:
I think it's almost like a change of rhythm. To me, the notion of practice is something that consists of rhythms, of the sense of, if not exactly repetition, but specific structure within it, but now everything has become so temporary and so chaotic and so disposable that it's very difficult to create that grid underlying structure of things.

U5:
Over last month we went back to what we can describe as our old way of practising. We went back into, I would say, more making things by hand, because it is a process which allows talking about everything that has been going on. And this way of practising comes with time and embedded tempo. We do a lot of ceramics, which is a lot about the doing and the waiting. It's not so much focused on the object, but on the process of sitting together. The handcraft gives you a rhythm.
You have to wait until one stage is ready and then have to go back again. You wonder and feel happy or disappointed and you repeat the process and you do it again. And it's the same as with creating the recreational areas. It's super playful.

PW:
I personally have to say that recently I had to spend quite a lot of time on monitoring and developing my own rhythms, because I realised how many rhythms were actually imposed externally on me. Once this stopped, during the lockdown it was easier to stop and reset altogether.

There's one more thing I wanted to say at the end of this encounter. You've mentioned that it was almost like coming back to the beginning of how you had started to work together.

And I think it's just the fact that this project, like the recreation areas themselves, is so playful. I believe that ‘playful’ means you need other people to be playful with. Playful is more than one person. In a sense, it delves into this idea that you solve this individual dream that you're supposed to just fulfil yourself. But actually what the whole project is, it's play, it's fun, which means, it's other people. During the production process, but also in its making, in mapping, in connecting.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you so much.

Recreation Areas, 2021-22

U5 is an arts collective that is opposed to traditional notions of individual authorship. U5 actively pursues historical and contemporary approaches to research in art, especially approaches that transcend disciplines, or produce new forms of art and knowledge.

The collective U5 first formed at Zürich University of the Arts in 2007 before graduating as a group in 2011. The working method depends on unanimous founding principles:

• All members have equal rights, but consensus is not necessary.

• All works are created in cooperation.

• Presence and absence influence the work equally.

Since the collective‘s foundation, all work processes have been documented and archived in real time with the help of a self- developed live camera (PALM). The handling of this absurd amount of material and data forms the basis of production.

U5's artistic practice is diverse. Media and materials are chosen and pursued in depth according to interest and urgency. Single works like objects or images are combined into expansive installations for exhibitions and can appear in them both analog and digital. They thus take on different states, formats, and attributes, and are further influenced by light, scent, temperature, and sound in the immersive installations. U5 sees itself as an organic practice that celebrates ongoingness. U5 invents its own working techniques in which the principles of reuse, un-use, repair and collage combines materials and objects to create new works. The accumulation, (as the cultural technic, that was always overshadowed by tools and weapons to serve as an explanatory pattern for our coexistence) of digital and analogue materials is an important component of the artistic approach, both a ballast and a trove at the same time.

U5 works at two locations. The studio in St. Gallen is located at Sägegässlein 20 and can be visited every Thursday or by appointment. The Zurich Studio XOX is located in the attic at Flüelastrasse 6.

The collective’s studio XOX is an event space, a permanently transforming, semi-public place. During four years the Automatenbar took place every Tuesday: a live format for music, performance, screenings and discussions: more about XOX

https://u5.92u.ch/index.php?title=Main_Page

https://u5.92u.ch/xox

Patrycja Wojciechowska 07/12/2024 Patrycja Wojciechowska 07/12/2024

Felix Lenz

The Air We Breathe.

The interview was originally published on 20th January 2024

Felix Lenz, *Political Atmosphere*, 2020, side view, photo: Felix Lenz

The conversation between Felix Lenz and myself originates in the idea to approach his practice through lenses of Duchampian Infrathin, the category which lies at the roots of this project.

When I first thought about inviting Felix to take part in the DLoI, I was considering how different his practice would look in this context. On the surface research-driven, ordered and explicitly articulate the practice is defined by bold edges sharpened by the scientific paradigm. But to me his work is beautifully fluid, haunted by apparitions, echoes and residues of different interwoven presences - heroes, villains and collaborators, organic and artificial, human and beyond, living and nonliving.
At closer look, an intricately layered image emerges, punctuated by immeasurable spaces of ‘in-between’, gaps where hard edges prove to be not as hard and impossible to question as we like to think of them. The practice is at its core of liminal nature where sharp edges of objects become blurred, frazzled, boundaries separating things become increasingly porous and collaborators expand beyond human and in fact, beyond living.

Felix Lenz, Angela Neubauer, Eszter Zwickl, The Cleanroom Paradox, 2021, film stills, photos: Felix Lenz

The most often quoted example of Infrathin is the warmth on a recently vacated chair seat. That warmth, that frequently unnoticed consequence of presence, of physical connection is at the core of things. Moments and marks of interaction, of fleeting contact deemed inconsequential. Similarly miniscule inter-relations, chances and consequences bind what is at the core of Lenz’s practice. Practice where work through data and its interpretation places it simultaneously as subject of the very process. What is questioned-investigated becomes a question-subject of investigation itself.

What if that arbitrary language of numbers is challenged by chance, by endless variations of irrational? This element of putting in question the absolute certainty of science is something that I see a lot in the way Lenz performs and presents his investigations, with his methodology including elements, accepted and embraced, of flexibility, liminality and chance.

The focal points of the interview are :
liminality, way of working, bio-machine(?), human and beyond, cloud, skies and the weather.

PATRYCJA WOJCIECHOWSKA:
It is so good to have you here Felix. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I am really excited for this conversation. As I mentioned, I want to try to contextualise your practice in the category of Infrathin, a category I have been interested in primarily due to its intangibility, its undefinable nature. One can deliver its definition only through examples. Anyone who hears the examples of Infrathin, immediately, intuitively knows what they refer to. Yet, the said definition remains elusive.
I recall reading how Duchamp was once asked who he was. He responded simply saying: ‘je sui respirateur’-”I'm a breather”. Personally I see it as an act of self-identification happening through change, which originates in a body. To me this change is creative. These two notions, of the infrathin and the breather-respirateur, are connected. The idea that one creates in the framework of continuous body transformation, in the daily act of breathing, is fascinating. I feel what Duchamp proposes in this instance, is to work through the immeasurable ruled by chance and to ironically question the certainty of numbers and dominance of the scientific paradigm.

FELIX LENZ:
Most of the time there are several factors that affect the way I formulate the thesis or the shape of the hypothesis explored in my work. Additionally, I often sense a huge disconnection – especially in atmospheric and climate sciences – between how things are studied, understood and contextualised, how they are received by the wider public and finally, the way in which the knowledge is applied. I feel that my task is to build a bridge over this conceptual, associative gap, not only through translative, but also through transformative processes. It’s not science communication. Rather, it’s an attempt to unpick and to disentangle the way we look at things.
I'm interested in questioning the very infrastructures and modes of seeing, thinking and computing the world. This interest frequently centres on a lot of modes and different contexts of extractivism. On the one hand of course, there is the literal extractivism through which we treat other lives, entities, resources, and materials as if we owned them. On the other hand, I try to question the modes of knowledge extraction which occur before the actual physical extraction takes place, carried out through anthropocentric, colonial means of rationalisation.
I have an ambivalent attitude towards working with science in the context of the artistic process. I often take a path parallel to scientific research, but sometimes this relationship becomes vertical through the process of unpicking.
We frequently forget that science is not an absolute state. It's a continuum. We refer to facts as absolute and non dynamic in their nature nowadays. We like to quantify and categorise everything. We express ourselves and our world through data. This tendency leads to a very narrow, very limited image of the world. It does not account for the cracks and spaces in- between things. I believe that my task is the exploration of the spectrum set in-between these binary states. Maybe this is the connection of my work to the liminal or the Infrathin.

Felix Lenz, The Cleanroom Paradox, 2021, film stills, photo: Felix Lenz

PW:
I feel that there is an internal conflict within science tightly bound to this desire to categorise and classify everything. But just as you said, science is not static. The need to put everything within a firm grid, doesn't leave space for the cracks in-between, for what is immeasurable. The idea that we can define each and all, and assign a value to everything, is of course bound to the faulty conviction of assumed superiority of Man above all the other beings.

You also said how we live by the data these days. The imperative of constant access to information is almost overwhelming. It's as if one is not allowed to ‘not to access’ information. Not necessarily not knowing. That's not the same. There is just too much data nowadays. It's simply too vast to analyse. If one lives in a situation like this, then equally every choice made is, in a way, a selection made by the principle of chance. You, on the other hand, apply a different thinking in terms of inquiry and how we look at things.

I wanted to ask you about that occasional verticality with the scientific investigation you mentioned. and the importance of chance, the immeasurable in this context?

FL:
To respond to your question concerning scientific investigation and art: I've recently been to a panel discussion on art and science. One of the panel members was a climate scientist studying clouds. She understood her work as slowly increasing the certainty over how our atmosphere works and operates. I very much wonder if that can be a sustainable or even achievable goal. When it comes to climate models, I wouldn't necessarily agree, but I also come from a different field.
I believe we should invest our resources in learning how to deal with uncertainty, rather than attempting to ‘reduce’ or ‘solve’ it. In fact a lot of the methodologies researchers apply to study various phenomena, do themselves mess with the very assemblages they are meant to measure. Sometimes the act of knowledge extraction inflicts even greater uncertainty. In atmospheric sciences, for example, the sensors are sometimes the polluters. Aircrafts, for instance. Without planes and their measuring instruments we wouldn't have as precise models and data, but on the other hand they themselves are of course partially responsible for a changing and more uncertain atmosphere and climate.
As Karen Barad delineates, every measurement is a ‘cut’ between what is included and excluded from what is being considered. Nothing is inherently separate from anything else. Hence every observation is a bidirectional ‘intra-action’ rather than a unilateral extraction of information. I believe this is why we won’t be able to solve our problems by means of measurement and computation alone.

But let’s get back to what I wanted to share in connection to the notion of chance. When it comes to climate change we oftentimes don't know when and where the consequences of our actions might next come into effect. The term hyper-object can be useful in describing the immense distributions in time and space related to climate change. So again, there is a huge disconnection between our actions and the consequences they cause. It is also important to consider factors or concepts like ‘slow violence’, which describe developments that are often latent for several decades or generations before reaching a certain tipping point. Oftentimes we can only comprehend the full scale and temporal extent when experiencing the tipping point. While these processes are non-linear and chaotic in their nature, it is important not to conflate them with ‘chance‘ as they are of course subject to clear structural imbalances arising from colonialism. The effects of climate change are always unproportionally distributed, affecting the Global South more than the countries causing the majority of the pollution. In my work I sometimes try to bridge the gap between action and consequence, so we can learn to take responsibility for our actions again, no matter how latent, non-linear or complex their consequences might be.

PW:
You said something very poignant- the moment one begins to observe the phenomenon is the moment one steps out of the situation. This makes me think about claims how human beings removed themselves mentally and emotionally from the natural world, and how they created the concept of nature as something separate from humans; how we convinced ourselves we could organise and rule it and do whatever we wanted to it, while standing comfortably outside of what's happening with no consequences.
What an illusion.

Felix Lenz, *The Cleanroom Paradox*, 2021, phone dissolved in acid, photo: Felix Lenz

FL:
Yes indeed. We have always been inside the petri dish that we believed to be glancing at from a safe distance. We thought that those two spaces were separate, but of course, nothing is further from the truth. Only now we are slowly starting to realise the effect of our strategies of measurement and intrusion as they feedback to us through our environment and the atmosphere. The computational modelling of clouds affects the clouds themselves and in turn introduces even more entropy. There is no certainty. Nothing is absolute.

PW:
Another problem is the inability to accept that perhaps uncertainty is not a bad thing. That being in-between, liminal and immeasurable, subjected to change and positioned within the crack we spoke of, is not necessarily something that should be seen as a problem.

FL:
I agree. Perhaps we need new metaphors, new ways of coping with uncertain states. And to me, that's one of the most pressing challenges. We always begin by trying to put things in black and white, zero and one, but the world just doesn't work like that.

PW:
Your projects involve multiple collaborators, human and beyond. I wanted to discuss the notion of collaboration as a part of your process.

FL:
I very much like working in groups and clusters of people. It adds multiple perspectives and lenses of filtration to the process. The various forms of exchange are why I value it so much: to speak, to inter- and intra-act with each other and not necessarily only with humans. Sometimes it is other entities, materials or landscapes. Intrinsic knowledge and databases can be found in soil, stones or many other seemingly inanimate entities.
In many instances, I attempt to tackle macro- and microscopic at the same time, something that can be quite difficult. Looking at a large range of scales is interesting; especially as within them different modes of collaboration might too be encountered. There are also questions of how to incorporate non-human entities or other ways of perceiving, of seeing our world.

In the project, “Restitution of a Glacier”, an installation I presented together with Ula Reutina, Sophie Falkeis and Carmen Farr during the London Design Biennale in 2018, we explored the concept of legal personhood granted to non-human entities, a legally binding concept that has been applied in several countries already.

What we did had a more speculative character. We put together a "‘Declaration of Rights for Natural Entities’, a speculative legal framework, issued by a future government, where endangered entities are entitled to certain rights, including the right to bring proceedings in front of court.

We selected the case of a glacier, as it was the most prominent, perhaps the most visible entity suffering from our impact on the environment. Through this legal framework, represented by its guardians, the entity can claim restitution through civil forces in the form of physical rebuilding. This Sisyphean, hypothetical task is expected to last for several generations, as an attempt to re-establish the injured entity’s dignity.

The work aims to invert our assumed perspective of humans as the centre of our ecosystem, making us rethink our interdependence with non-human entities on the planet.

PW:
It is a tricky ground to incorporate non-human entities into an anthropocentric framework. It may not necessarily be the best solution to humanise them, so to speak, at least from my point of view. At the same time, I think it may be the most immediate option for now. To help to translate non-human needs for the people who find it challenging to see things from the other point of view.

Felix Lenz, The Cleanroom Paradox, 2021, installation views, Digital Art Festival Zurich 2021 and Warsaw Biennale 2022, photo: Felix Lenz

FL:
It's definitely a dilemma.

PW:
This brings us to the question of sentience. What is a sentient being and how do we apply this definition in order to give something or someone rights and agency?

FL:
There is another analogy I would like to share in connection with the notion of collaboration. I was thinking of the late New York based artist Mark Lombardi. Throughout his whole practice he paid special attention to open access materials and information. He read the indexes of hundreds of books and created index cards with listings of people and corporations, which he then cross-referenced with where those names and locations appeared in other literature. What he ended up with was a vast network of relations. Interestingly it's a similar approach to how patterns are extracted from data by neural networks nowadays, but Lombardi’s work has a more human and personal perspective. He followed logical, structural rules built within his system, but he defined his own process.
In the end, he drew these beautiful, huge mind-maps of interrelations. I think that working or processing and transforming these sorts of open access materials may as well be understood as a form of collaboration with existing archives of knowledge.

PW:
This leads to a concept I find very interesting, a bio-machine. I see bio-machine as more of a form of hybridisation resulting from the Anthropocene and our activities, rather than something that is purposely designed and built.

In “The Clean Room Paradox”, the project that you've shown at the Warsaw Biennale in 2022 things continue to happen and change. The transformation happens within the residues and traces of different presences encountered and researched in the project. Human dust, toxic materials, disease in the protagonist's lungs. All of this is a source of change that essentially creates a form I call bio-machine, a merger of human, other substances and beings.

It's a little bit like the plastic in our blood these days. It didn't happen purposely. It's a byproduct of the Anthropocene, but in a way it changed us completely. I think “The Cleanroom Paradox” touched on how we see the ever-present dominance of binary model. Put in proximity are sterility and dust, organic and technological, biological and artificial. But in truth they are not the opposites in the work and process described happening within it, is neither. They sort of mingle and they move into that crack that we've spoken of and become something new, somewhere else.
A place, a state in-between.

FL:
I think that's very interesting. And the notion of residues that you touched upon goes really well with these ideas. I was also thinking of bioaccumulation. For instance, when we conducted research for the “The Cleanroom Paradox” we studied the history of Silicon Valley and its colonial beginnings. For example, after the US West Coast was colonised, and the land was exploited through unsustainable forms of agriculture, gold was discovered. Since quicksilver was used as an accelerator in the gold extraction process in Santa Clara County, it polluted groundwater and rivers and was hence carried all the way to the San Francisco Bay area. As toxic residues enter the marine life they in turn become another layer of residue, this time in the food chain. In the San Francisco Bay area still now, people suffer from the consequences of these toxic residues. Affected are mainly people of lower income groups or minorities. These residues feed back to us in a socially unjust manner. And I think that's the real issue.

PW:
I have this preoccupation with bodies altered by the Anthropocene and with landscapes haunted by past lives affected by it and future extinctions it caused. I see mercury poisoning, we just discussed, a form of haunting. Those presences still inhabit the landscapes in point. In a sense, that makes it both a residue and a bio-machine. In the case of San Francisco Bay the introduction of quicksilver becomes a hybrid of nature and of our presence, which can be considered an artifice. We can see how it expands across entanglements and scales like the micro- and macroscale you spoke of.

Felix Lenz, *The Cleanroom Paradox*, 2021, installation view, Digital Art Festival Zurich 2021, photo: Felix Lenz

FL:
With our work, “The Cleanroom Paradox”, we wanted to dismantle the deceptively pristine image of the high-tech industry; what has been happening there for quite some time now is pretty dramatic. At first, the industry was perceived as very pristine and clean, since there weren't huge smokestacks or clouds of dirty air hanging above production sites. But the issue in Silicon Valley was that the smokestacks were, figuratively speaking, buried underground. Toxic substances and chemicals would enter the soil and pollute waterways and groundwaters.
And again, it has been mainly people of low income neighbourhoods that were affected. In our work we tried to take on a more holistic approach for all the things that go into computation and its associated technological infrastructures.
We dissolved several smartphones in acid – reverse engineered their manufacturing process so to say. That's how we ended up with this black gooey mass we used for screen-printing. It was still acidic and toxic, but we believe its aesthetic better resembles the actual context in which our high-tech products are manufactured. Over time it will disintegrate the very paper we used for printing. Similarly to the semiconductor factories’ workers’ bodies being affected by the same chemicals over a period of several years.
The issue here is the temporal time span. The affected workers do not present symptoms straight away as these kinds of health issues barely ever manifest immediately. It requires a long term exposure to toxic substances, radiation and chemical fumes present at the production sites to cause this level of health deterioration. But legally you have to prove that your health has been affected directly by the working environment of the industry. And that's something that is extremely hard to do.
Again, we are back at the topic of uncertainty. With cancer it can never be proven with absolute certainty where it comes from. It's barely possible, in many cases, to show cause and effect contingency. Of course the industry takes advantage of that and very much tries to cover up their history in order to sustain their pristine image.

PW:
The necessity of providing a proof of the disease being an advantage of a capitalist entity is for sure a troubling aspect of this situation, but another is an issue of visibility. The image of pristine clarity and cleanness, a transparent, pure image we tend to associate with high-tech industry, is part of manipulation with our subconscious need for assurance of safe and antiseptic purity. You mentioned certainty in a context of proving that an environmentally toxic workplace can cause disease. I'm thinking about the certainty that imagery used by Silicon Valley offers, this picture of technological development where nothing that is harmful can possibly get in.

FL:
There is a huge, paradoxical part about the image of semiconductor manufacturing sites. They are, as you said, extraordinarily clean. There are no particles of dust or even dandruff in the air, as they could potentially harm the products. Even the light is controlled. The airflow is controlled. Everything. But the production sites are kept clean for the products, not for the workers. The workers are still exposed to toxic fumes or other substances. They have to wear overalls to protect the products, but not to protect their own bodies. Especially outside of Europe, after the whole industry has moved to Southeast Asia, occupational and toxic hazards at semiconductor production sites are a huge issue.
When we talked to Jin, a former Samsung factory worker, she said that the workers were put under a lot of pressure. They didn't have a seven day work week. They had an eight day week. They had completely different structures than other people that worked standard jobs. They were continuously controlled and observed in order to meet their protocols and to be efficient at all times. So even when toxic spillage occurred they wouldn't have the time to follow all the security procedures as they would be algorithmically monitored and penalised for not completing their tasks in time. The whole work environment, not just the architectural components of the production sites, also the social components and the whole atmosphere were very toxic.

Felix Lenz, Sophie Falkeis, Ula Reutina, Carmen Farr, Restitution of A Glacier, 2018, installation view , installation scaffolding,London Design Biennale 2018, photo: Felix Lenz

PW:
Across your whole practice and especially in “The Cleanroom Paradox” you instigate change by introducing a series of residues and exposing them to transformation based on passage of time. You took this sterile, or at least presented as a sterile environment and by dissolving mobile phones and making this goo, this horrible goo, the hidden residue of toxicity gained a visible and tactile presence. The presence of the workers, of human bodies in this very pristine environment introduced a series of changes and gave visibility of layers of residues.

I wanted you to talk about making things more tangible, the element of tactility in your works (while still being immeasurable) in your practice.

FL:
In “The Cleanroom Paradox” we could achieve a different readability of the material as soon as it transformed into this granular gooey mass. It unveiled a different aesthetic. This toxic mix of components, elements and resources cracked the industry’s surface open, allowing us to look into an in-between space.

PW:
The residue emerges as a tangible presence. I think that's what it is.

You've mentioned working with clouds. In your earlier project “Political Atmosphere” you explored instances of looking at weather as a political agent or something that can be used for political gain. Something that again, is at its core so changeable, so fluid.
Work manifests through flux, something that is somewhere between being tangible, experiential and immaterial. That is what a cloud essentially is, a vapour that looks solid, as if it is possible to touch. At the same time, it has very concrete effects on the world. And it is political now, and it is social and it is economic. I find it absolutely fascinating.

FL:
It's also a very mystical figure, a cloud. It has cultural and metaphorical values attached to it. It's symbolically really loaded, but at the same time, we again very much try to put it in a box and exploit it as a physical asset or to extract information about it by processing it, and ironically, processing it in the cloud.
The installation “Political Atmosphere” is based on my investigation into the work of the British meteorologist and peace-researcher, Lewis Fry Richardson.
He was one of the first men to compute weather by numerical means. And as it was before the time of computers, he did it all manually with the use of differential equations. First, he drew a grid over Central Europe and assigned a square for each section of the atmosphere. He then computed the differences and inter-relations between the grid’s sections using differential equations.
What happens nowadays in the process of analysis of contemporary climate science and models, is basically the same thing. Just now, the grids and numbers get smaller and smaller.

Felix Lenz, *Political Atmosphere*, 2020, installation view, Where Is My Friends Home, Hyundai Motor Studio Busan 2023, photo: Felix Lenz

After completing the first weather prediction by numerical means, he experienced the tragedies of the First World War. He imagined that if it was possible to compute something as complex as atmospheric turbulence, then it might as well be possible to predict something as intricate as political turbulence and war. To achieve this he gathered data of various conflicts and tried to apply similar mathematical mechanisms to compute emerging correlations. Of course, he didn't end up with a working formula. It's impossible to compute something as complex as human conflicts.
What I tried to do in my work was to contextualise his research; to put it in the context of the Anthropocene where connections between climatic and geopolitical phenomena become increasingly apparent. I attempted to trace the invisible connections between flight turbulence, climate change and war.
I was particularly interested in a specific index, the Richardson Number. It is something that is still used in climate science today to compute the likelihood of a specific type of turbulence – clear-air turbulence.
Clear-air turbulence is defined as sudden severe turbulence that occurs in cloudless regions, particularly affecting aircrafts. It is amplified by increasing carbon dioxide levels, in part emitted by the aircrafts themselves. And while aircrafts are dependent on precise weather predictions to avoid such dangerous types of turbulence, increasing CO2 levels also further decrease the ability to detect, model and foresee them. Furthermore, phenomena like clear- air turbulence are intricately connected with larger phenomena like the jet stream, which in turn affects extreme weather events, such as intense droughts, worldwide.

PW:
I find very interesting that we have computing called cloud computing. Again, the name which is a reference to something very difficult to define as tactile and yet having in reality such a solid presence.

FL:
The cloud is a failed metaphor. It is everything but a cloud. It is constituted of technological, physical infrastructures. It is also the reason why I have decided to make my website solar- powered and self-hosted. I wanted this relation to be a bit more tangible. Server racks that constitute the cloud use an enormous amount of energy and resources in order to be maintained. Every time we access something digital, it has a very physical counterpart. In a lot of my works and research investigating these physical counterparts takes on an important role.

PW:
And it is also political.

PW:
I really want to ask if you would consider non-human as Infrathin?

FL:
It's a difficult question. There is an associative gap between how we think about the non- human and the way the non-human is becoming through modes of computational thinking and seeing. There's a very thin middle ground between these two notions. It connects to what I said in the beginning. Every act of observation and measurement, feeds back to or has a concrete physical impact on something.

Of course, talking about the non-human, we are part of the same system or assemblage. We are intricately entangled with the non-human. However, our senses and ways of sense-making got very much dependent on our technological infrastructures and tools. Thinking is not merely a neurological act anymore, but it's equally, or even more so, a computational act nowadays. I think this technocratic development unfortunately has profound consequences for the non-human world.

PW:
Like the smallest difference that it's impossible to define, but possible to be felt.

Finally, I would like to briefly discuss the notion of liminality, a subject which, in a way, has been a starting point of this entire conversation.You've mentioned being out of stasis. Liminality is not only about being positioned in- between. It is about change. Not necessarily perceivable change, but even the potential of it.

FL:
Precisely. For me, the liminal somehow connects to how we deal with uncertainty. On the other hand, it is very much connected to fluctuating states.
For instance, I'm thinking of cartography. A map is usually presented as something static, but in fact, it's a collage made of data put together from several time zones, dates and locations by applying different tools and methodologies: satellite imagery, drone imagery, ground shots, infrared- and other multispectral imagery. These composites are then colour corrected, merged and ultimately presented as something static and universally applicable. We have to acknowledge that our landscapes and territories are in a constant process of change and that the ways we capture and represent them shall be fluid and manifold as well.

Felix Lenz, Political Atmosphere, 2020, installation view, Digital Photography Lab, ReiseBüro – The ism in Tourism, Quartier am Hafen, Cologne 2023, photos: Felix Lenz and Martin Plüddemann

PW:
This made me think about how things are interwoven.
Did you hear about the term describing distance measurement called ‘Sinik’? It is Inuit concept involving understanding of relation to distance, environment and space. As far as I know, mostly Greenland communities use it. It means ‘sleep’. You measure the distance in ‘sleeps’, in how many rests it takes you to get somewhere depending on the conditions of the weather, time of the year, if you find animals that you hunt on the way, migrations, all of it. It is a perfect example of a different approach to one’s surroundings.

FL:
Oh, that's beautiful.

PW:
It changes the meaning of travel and distance from something that for us Westerners, means going barely from point A to B, always the same, to a fluid, changeable, receptive and sensitive relationship. It presents an attitude towards landscape where people accept to see themselves as part of it. They don't observe outside of it, from above. Instead, they are on the same level. They live it. Entangled.

FL:
It incorporates so much more. It even incorporates the health of the ecosystem you travel through, because you need to sustain yourself.

PW:
I find this concept enormously beautifulI, but also more sustainable. It keeps you alive through the understanding of your environment as you being the very part of it. I think this is actually a really nice way of finishing this conversation. It has really been a great pleasure, Felix. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

FL:
Same for me. I think the whole exercise of seeing parts of my work through the lens of the Infrathin and liminal was super inspiring for me. I haven't seen it through those lenses before and I think it's beautiful.

FELIX LENZ

Felix Lenz is a research-led artist, designer, and filmmaker based in Vienna.
His analytic investigations in geopolitical, ecological, and technological matters translate into meticulous installations, films, and strategies. By carefully untying the complexities of an increasingly uncertain world, his works unpick the way we look at things in increasingly uncertain world, his works unpick the way we look at things.

Lenz's video works and installations have been exhibited at various international museums, festivals and biennials including the Beijing Art and Technology Biennale, Ars Electronica Festival, Digital Art Festival Zurich, European Forum Alpbach, Biennale Warszawa, the Istanbul Design Biennale, the Vienna Biennale and the London Design Biennale and are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna. His works were awarded an honourable mention from the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, were nominated for the STARTS prize and received an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica. Lenz’ works have been profiled in the New York Times and various other journals.

Besides his independent practice he worked at the renowned design studios »Formafantasma« in Amsterdam and »Studio Folder« in Milan. He also worked as guest- researcher and -lecturer at Humboldt University's Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« in Berlin and has been invited to hold guest-lectures and workshops at the Royal College of Art London, the Design Academy Eindhoven and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. More can be found his solar-powered website under www.felixlenz.at.

Patrycja Wojciechowska 18/11/2024 Patrycja Wojciechowska 18/11/2024

Kyriaki Goni.

Poetics of Trust.

Posted originally on 24 February 2023

The Future Light Cone 2022©Kyriaki Goni, installation view, Warsaw Biennale

Topography of dwellings and visitations.
Conversation over the waves hidden (between) archipelagos.

Ever since I first encountered her work, I became preoccupied on how to structure a conversation with Kyriaki Goni, should it ever come to it. This led to imagining this hypothetical exchange placed in liminal space between Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, same as proposed by Anna Tsing in the ‘Arts Living on Damaged Planet’, categories I have found myself frequently drawn to. In Anna’s proposal Ghosts are enmeshments in landscapes while Monsters are entanglements across bodies. As traces and residues, they leave a trail followed by Kyriaki’s work in its unique poetic way. Finally, drawing on the idea behind this project, the Infrathin, seen as a different type of investigation, is always in the background. Infrathin seems a fitting term to apply to discuss practice driven by methodology lying far from scientific systematic assurances, an alternative approach to inquiry based in chance instead of measurable certainty of numbers. Infrathin is both presence and gap, a narrow space between movement and stasis, between hope and resignation. Here, it is a residue of presence, lingering loss, traces and particles of by-products of various explorations and exploitations left in networks and places emerging from Goni’s particular formula of worldmaking.

In many respects her work is a response to a long term linear narrative of the Enlightenment's heritage and its far reaching consequences. Mars in ‘The Future Light Cone’ is an amalgamated landscape of stars, land, Earth(soil), Space, dreams and nightmares. The artist’s collaboration with Mars, its messages and its wind embodies mythology of expansion and exploitative explorations.

Networks, archipelagos and messages, the Other, and the Homeric, histories and narratives, time modes and passages, Capitalism and Neoliberal technocracy, extractionism and exploitation, colonisations and visits. All live in Goni’s practice interwoven in a web of relationships, dependencies and exchanges, networks and layers of interconnecting stories and ways to communicate. Haunted by ghosts and monsters; by cyborgs and hybrids practice creates a world equally possessed and fully independent, thoroughly discovered and completely unknown.

LANGUAGE

Language is a category lying at the foundations of Goni’s entire practice. Perhaps because in a way, it is a practice of poetics. Practice where manner and shapes of communication, meandering narratives, interwoven stories, modes of contact, translations and exchanges form the baseline for all investigations themselves and for structure of the how, the nature of very working method.

I heard once a statement that translation may be seen as a form of defiance. I believe Goni transcribes and translates her findings in the manner which defies the dominant narratives we are so used to, the status quo. She proposes her own unique poetics and by extension politics, deeply embedded in the aesthetic system organising the body of her work. In doing this she re-purposes and changes accepted, established ways of storytelling to means of her own order.
Another matter is the performative aspect of poetry in Goni’s work. She writes poetry, recites and records it, translates (or suggests ways of translation) messages as instrumental elements of her installations. This take on performativity, equally conceptual and corporeal calls partially to Homer with records of stories passed on for generations, and partially to spoken tradition where word, not written but performed=recited then and there, felt in the body, remembered, transformed and individualised was the primary medium. The choice over different forms of stories investigated, uncovered, described and presented play on immeasurable gaps in structure of storytelling. Filled with trust, poetics of the smallest difference record an ongoing conversation between nodes of the network.

The Future Light Cone 2022 © Kyriaki Goni solo show Gallery Filodrammatica 2023 Photo Tanja Kanazir Drugo

Discrete Life of Infrathin:

Thank you again for agreeing to have this conversation. Even though this exchange is intended to be set on a grid of 5 subject-driven points anchoring all questions, I would like to start with, in my opinion, the most important for your work; language.
You consistently include content associated with the notions of storytelling, how we tell the stories, how the stories are told and how the stories are expected to be presented in certain environments and contexts. You work frequently with poetry, a form which has its own story and context to tell. I find this especially important as you are Greek and some of your texts are in Greek unavoidably drawing connection to oral tradition, spoken word and its impact on Western civilisation. For example, in the ‘Networks of Trust’ you read a poem in Greek which describes ancient origins of archipelago life, its networks and connections, stories of beginnings and gatherings on the islands. I think this gesture really calls to the notion of performing the spoken word and I understand it as something closer to lived experience than performing arts.

Kyriaki Goni:

Language is quite a tricky tool for me. I often start with writing either a poem or a text. Sometimes I write in Greek and I choose to present it in English. Sometimes I make the decision to keep the audio in Greek and have subtitles to whatever language needed for the exhibition, because in a particular case I decide it is important to have the sound of Greek in exhibition space. Sometimes I just write in English straight away. I'm very much preoccupied with the way meanings change due to this process.

You wrote something very interesting about translation, about the way it defies certain systems and how it can be seen, as a way of defiance. I found this a very intriguing idea, putting yourself in another system or in another language so that it may offer you the opportunity to stand against some things.

DLoI:
I sometimes think that maybe this is how you need to approach a translation in general. With the recognition of those little moments, gaps in narratives with other hidden somewhere in the language. It's as if breaking it down. When I think about this, it's not even how we translate things on a purely lexical level, but how we translate ideas and the use of language itself. Or perhaps, how we hear and read what someone else says or writes as a possible form of protest, a form of defiance.

KG:
It's a very interesting observation, which I have to say I haven't thought of previously, but as I try to move around mainly Greek and English, I may have experienced it. Not on a conscious level, but on a more subconscious or rather an unconscious one, moving between the languages, trying to figure out how to write something or how to pronounce something, or think it clearly. Language shapes a space, this space of in-between. Let's say that it allows us to defy things. Or it is a fluid form of defining-defying things and ways to verbalise.

DLoI:
I consider it a choice between one or another application of language, how to structure things, and it becoming a chosen way to contest the status quo. So you build different poetics.
‘The Future Light Cone’ is really a transmission from the Other. It’s both a transcript and a translation. Tapestries, transmission and the way the installation were put together are a manner of constituting an alternative form, your particular system of communication I mentioned at the beginning. The arrangement of elements, their internal relations, drawings and process of making drawings, sound of the wind, all of it is language. Weaving everything together is language in itself, story and network.

KG:
It's this experience of doing something, reducing something, of finding oneself within a process, immersing in universes, while not really knowing what you are doing.

And now, there is this opportunity to verbalise it and tell its story, so to speak.
I often start with language, I am interested in storytelling and the performative character it bears. This is important to me, especially in the ongoing installation ‘Networks of Trust’ where I collect stories. I invite people to be part of a nomadic decentralised digital storytelling network, where we don't share the stories by performing them or by reading them. We share stories through writing and storing them in the node. The node subsequently travels and other people access it and add their stories. I think that, although it's not precisely an oral tradition, it becomes oral as it's being shared and at some point, uttered. This is how it gets its voice so to speak, it gets its orality if there is a term like that, by becoming alive when articulated. The stories hosted on the nodes are not being narrated real-time, but instead in different times and through different voicings as they are moving around. It very much touches upon what you suggested about different proposals that the work provides in terms of storytelling or language. These different ways of sharing, recording, transmitting stories, of passing knowledge or experience of fears or desires of the Other happen through a platform which is not the internet and is not the most common method of gathering or of sharing stories, but is rather something in-between. Something that is still digital and behaves like a network, but at the same time is not accessible instantly online. There is no immediacy and there is a gap in time when it comes to the possibility of entering it. But on the other hand there is this sense of locality transferred in time in a non linear way.

DLoI:
When I think about ways of storytelling, I find it interesting that quite a lot of your drawings are intended as a vehicle for knowledge. They are more than just a visual notation. They are records, forms of communication, messages and art works at the same time (because art is research and research is artwork) fused to tell something and to preserve something. To me, you begin with the creation of specific poetics, which you subsequently apply across your practice. Actually, partly I think of what you do as politics as well, as you investigate so many dominant and extractive narratives addressing them through your work. I see this strategy as an alternative suggestion to the politics that we use to or that we live in. Maybe even to the reality that surrounds us.

KG:
Initially I treated drawings as a way of recording my research. Gradually I realised, and it's interesting in this context that you mentioned performativity, although I think you meant something slightly different, but it emerged during making these drawings as constitutive part of the manner in which I was working. Motion and gesture were part of the process, performed with each piece. I was applying all these different colours and I was doing it without really thinking: ”Is this complementary colour or should this like be that or not? ”. It was as if I was throwing on paper all feelings, all emotions, all questions I had, without really considering form, but rather thinking of the corporeal aspect of work, of how I could put them out there as if I myself was making this movement when drawing them.
I worked on the table or on the floor. So there was continuous motion with direction and rhythm, as if pulling away and then returning, coming back. Just to step away again. And in a way the title: “Notes on Space exploration”, reflects it. Movement, covering distance concealed in the very name.

DLoI:
I was thinking about a message from Mars and familiarity characterising exchange of letters, and it occurred to me that a story becomes an act of reaching out and making oneself open not only to the response, but also acceptance to the effects of that response on your-self. There is an element of vulnerability in it. And it is what strikes me in your work, this strange and beautiful balance between vulnerability associated with sharing what was originally private and the decision to make a story public by opening it. And then by allowing it to be read. As a result, something initially intimate has this very intimacy stripped away. I was thinking about how it is willingly exposed.
You often work against this long term narrative of endless one-direction, linear time. And your entire work process-delivery of the story and how the work is experienced is broken into different temporalities.

KG:
Yes, indeed fragility, vulnerability and openness are qualities that can describe the work and the process itself. What I would also like to mention here is the notion of time. The moment, I receive the crate with the installation, after having been exhibited, for example at the solo show SixtyEight Art Institute in May 2022 in Copenhagen or in July in the same year at Warsaw Biennale.
In both locations there were two nomadic nodes active. During the shows, I was not connected to them. I only get to read the stories people upload to the nodes, when I eventually receive the work back. This is a process done on purpose.
I could be connected to the node while it was away. But for me, these pauses between the time when stories are shared, written and uploaded, and the time when I read them, and when I receive them are imperative. That delay is important, it’s purposeful. And not only to me, but also people who would read the stories at the next stop, the next exhibition. There is time in between these two events. The stories, despite being permanently stored on the node, are only temporarily accessible for the specific duration of each installation. There are points of time when stories are visible and others that they are not.

NETWORKS

The idea of networks begins with instances of connection, of communication, evolving web of encounters, alive and always in-change. I feel similarly about archipelagos, where they are places with contact happening at the point of undefinable distance of something that is almost but not quite the same. Difference which comes into existence by moment of closeness, within a gap, a space in-between. Emergence of relationships running across its hidden core.

The nature of Goni’s practice makes me think of it as the told topography of dwellings and visitations. Systems of orientation localities, assemblages, archipelagos and intertwined overlying threads of space-time, are all explored as a possibility of alternative frameworks for horizontal relationships based in equality instead of hierarchic, vertical superiorities. Assemblages of islands (either exhibitions or works) are entangled webs of interceding stories told by haunted landscapes full of overlying threads of time containing universes inside.

Networks are depositories, memories of pre-existing relations alive in ongoing conversations and exchanges, containing all the future gifts and losses. Reaching out, meeting halfway is the only way to survive. Networks are the economy of existence.
If you listen with care you can hear old words below the hidden waves linking the islands. Poems deposited, written and voiced with trust release a lingering presence of stories edging to be told.

DLoI:
Since we met for the first time in person during your show at the Warsaw Biennale I have been thinking how to run this conversation and I kept coming back to works and their relationship within this very exhibition I encountered at that time. Spatial arrangement of installation in Warsaw made me think of networks, which are at the core of multilayering ways to converse proposed in your work. Network is the means of language application, mode of its distribution. I think how different levels of this internal dynamics affect the experience of spatial presence of all of your works.

KG:
It's something that happens in an unconscious way, at the same time it's something that I do almost on purpose in all my installations. It doesn’t happen immediately, but gradually as I produce and create most of the installation parts. I don't work first on one thing and then on the other, bit by bit. It all begins at the same time and evolves together. As this process progresses, at some point understanding comes : ”I get it now. This should have tapestries”. In ‘The Future Light Cone’ while I was working on the drawings, I realised there should also be a cube that had to be part of the piece.
It is a feeling as if something was being written in the back of my mind. I knew I had to put it on paper, and it was the signal from Mars. That’s how drawings came into existence. Eventually everything fit together. It's like having a garden, plant different seeds, water them and gradually as they grow and bloom connections start to emerge.

Once I have parts of the installation at a more advanced stage I try to make these connections as if the parts of the installation were islands connected by boats, in a way which is not visible to every viewer. To me, this is the system that I am based on when I work on the installation. So this is a very accurate observation of yours, because in every work these internal links exist between different parts of the installation. Viewers are invited to visit them as different nodes of the network and to put all relations together as if putting together a story.
Sometimes I do that very purposefully, very intently. For example, with the “Data Garden”, I made a show here in Athens in September 2020, between two lockdowns, which of course like for everyone else, was very bad timing. But anyway, some people were brave enough and they visited the exhibition! I produced a very specific route, which I asked the visitors to follow. And I hid in the main video, in the main narrative, hints to other installation parts, so the viewing experience was as if playing a game, discovering and finding things along the way. Parts of the story would click as soon as you visited the whole installation. Sometimes I go through this process in a very concrete manner because I want to make this an aspect of a work, a form of mental and emotional journey taken with and by the viewer. Other times, for example, in ‘The Future Light Cone’ it wasn’t purposeful. It sort of happened. Different nodes of the story came together creating a network.

To me networks (and not only in case of your practice) are strongly connected to the idea of archipelago, especially the way Eduard Glissant proposed it. In my mind it's also connected to the term Infrathin. I understand it as a collection of islands-beings-parts that are bound together by the smallest difference. So I wanted to ask you about that?

KG:
What do you mean by the smallest difference?

DLoI:
Well, let’s see. Archipelago is a group of bodies of land sharing a geological core. It's the sameness broken down which over time developed slightly differently. Each has its own uniqueness while being part of the whole. It shares commonality in terms of life, mineral content, how it's built and so on. But it also differs and these differences emerge equally from the distance and from the contact producing new things.
For me it started with reading Eduard Glissant. My later reflections were inspired by his thoughts. I see it with the colonial archipelago in perspective, with forcibly moved slaves creating their own identity pockets that come from their cultures, shared and exchanged, and the dominant culture of the coloniser. Of course, like the archipelago itself and every island in it, it developed slightly differently depending on locality. In addition, Creole language emerged as a hybrid shared in principle but individually and locally shaped. So it's this sort of close proximity in contact that I call the smallest difference. Term that always makes me think of how Duchamp described Infrathin, space which defines similarity, distance and junction at the same time. It’s that moment which is not exactly a gap, also not exactly a touch but a place one cannot name. All these characteristics belong to the same category, but ultimately are different. It's this impossible to define sameness and distance. You can't really put your hand on it, but it's right there. And to me, archipelagos and networks are quite similar. They consist of different anchor points, different stories, different peoples, different localities, but once you acknowledge closeness, exchange happens. Possibility of alliance emerges. So they change. They become part of the bigger multiplicity. And that again will be organised by the smallest difference, which in a sense is a commonality.

KG:
I quite like this idea that the smallest difference as you describe it in the moment actually becomes, more of a point of a connection rather than the definition of division or separation. It makes them more the same than actually different.

DLoI:
I think, in your practice it happens in every work. And more, it happens in the exhibition making and in spatial arrangement of the works. Works themselves create a network together. And further, they create a bigger network with collaborators outside joining in, Mars and research sources and so on. It's something that grows, like a mycelium, sending out messages.

KG:
Indeed there is a network expanding in different layers within the installations, at the same time extending outside of them.

DLoI:
The web of connections you create is a vocabulary and it is an alternative to the language(of power) that is generally imposed on us. Initially you look at the time that is this linear, this particular one-directional time mode of the Enlightenment. You look at the links to colonialism and associations with future expansions and exploitations. So you kind of face all these dominating traditions. To me, they are very much about absolute time, about vertical progressive buildup, about constant progress, constant growth. It's all a very straight projectile-like, wasteful and exploitative system, while you create in response work that consists of small entities, that is like an assemblage or network of assemblages, small bodies that are interconnected and have a potential to do it further and further and further.
It is such a different model where multiplicity extends on more than just number and complexity of interrelations. It consists of many times, as you said yourself it's important that it contains many temporalities, that it has different time spans and all those durations last as they reoccur across ways and beings, as they are spoken in different languages or communicated in multiple manners and through different ways of living. The network is not a total system. Instead it stands as an alternative proposal of collective survival, of how we can do things differently. It doesn't necessarily have to be transferable in any scale. It doesn't have to be translated in one language. And it's a system that in a way encapsulates whole creative practice.

KG:
I imagine works and parts of the work and all collaborations as being small nodes that disrupt these linear absolute traditions, not by neglecting them, but going in between, disrupting and presenting new proposals of new networks that could possibly allow us to approach or understand or feel things in new ways.

DLoI:
Again, like a defiant translation. I guess apart from archipelago it does remind me of constant exponential growth in a way mycelium grows, also a network itself.

Kyriaki Goni, Networks of Trust 2019, installation views, Biennale Warszawa 2022. Photo: Bartosz Górka, courtesy of Biennale Warszawa

KG:
And it is a network that grows and connects continuously. I really like the fact that it's a collaboration between species, symbiosis and where parts and partners talk to each other, often for mutual benefit. But sometimes it’s a hostile act. Alliances and necessities change.

DLoI:
My grandfather was a very avid mushroom picker. When I was growing up, we used to forage together. Mushrooms are one of my favourite foods. I have loved mushrooms and foraging since I was a kid and he used to take me along. He never gave me a proper lesson on how to pick different species. I was just learning on the go as I was watching him. But he did tell me how to treat a forest. What I realised later that despite the fact that I never had proper training, I started to recognize very quickly something that you could describe as a mushroom forest. You enter the section of the forest and you immediately think: “Oh, there will be mushrooms here”, you know? That sort of knowledge which does not come from conscious analysis. Originally I started with thinking this was probably a combination of the type of the soil, of the trees I've noticed, how everything around looked and smelled. You know, you get data and eventually neurons do their job and you arrive at the conclusion. But later I realised they were not the elements that I'd noticed. What I've noticed were relationships preexistent within the place. These were the real clues.
I mentioned this story because it's the same with a network or archipelago, web of islands, spots of habitation, one system consisting of many independent but connected parts bound by relationships, multiplied and overlapping. In order to succeed, it has to be in active transaction. It's not a collection of separate elements, it's not a dot that marks an island or location or specific node that is important. Important is the line that connects two or more of these parts. And it's the same with mushroom forest. Mushrooms without trees, without soil, without birds, insects and everything in their habitat could not succeed. Those lines really are of the primary importance. They make space alive.

KG:
I very much feel the same about archipelagos and islands. The knowledge that you have of mushroom forest is of course a result of different factors, let's say of expertise, but also part of the lived experience you had with your grandfather when you were a young child going together with him to forage.
So, it's quite a similar experience in the way that I see archipelago as a network and its islands as parts of this network that could not exist without them. This understanding happens not only through a conscious approach to the system, but through lived experience of being on the islands, hiking on the islands, foraging on the islands. Eventually you understand that you are on a piece of land, which is part of a bigger network, without which it wouldn't be possible to survive. So from an archipelago with islands forming it and organised by network, you move onto a specific island and encounter a presence on the island of another ‘Network of Trust’. Networks are interconnected, and there are different layers of networks also interconnected. This feature is something worth keeping in mind throughout this investigation of networks, be it mycelium, be it archipelago, be it notion of entanglement. A need to acknowledge its significance, to take care of, to nurture, and to repair are acts of necessity.

We previously spoke about this notion of repair you mentioned and I liked so much. Perhaps without being prominent, it is still part of ‘The Future Light Cone’ too. Because in ‘The Future Light Cone’ you can see some landscapes, which are indeed marked with traces of human disturbance, but there are also places which are still physically intact. We see and we observe them, but there is a small chance that we can repair them and by repair I mean to stop repeating the same extractive harmful behaviours. In the workshops I sometimes conduct as part of ‘Networks of Trust’ we gather together and write stories about the future and this process contains notions of repair. Stories are not only about the future. They are also attempts to figure out how we can envision what lies ahead, or rather a better future, achieved by repairing the present. When one puts down fears and desires about what is to come, both what lies ahead and the current moment becomes very clear and apparent in a way that one begins to understand things about their present temporality too.

DLoI:
Network is something that it's opposite to the so far dominant idea of linear time in a sense that it goes from the bottom to the top repeating patterns of geological strata. Networks follow a 3 dimensional model which moves across the whole spectrum of times and localities. That happened with the fossil you mentioned in the poem in the ’Networks of Trust’ even though it happened a very long time ago, the residue of the event and the residue of experience of seeing it are still within the same network and definitely of equal importance.

This notion of different times coming together and translation as defiance and the way you use different languages and create different poetics, creates in my mind a connection between how stories are being told in the ‘Networks of Trust’ and the history of gathering of women telling and sharing their stories. These gatherings were acts of story making, not language, not poetry, not word associated with Homeric tradition, but story making belonging to the community, to women exchanging stories in the circle of gathering. I think that's why your process of collecting and recording stories is conducted at slow, rhythmic pace, marked by gaps and temporalities as if you interrupt this straight projectile of the absolute language and time.

KG:
This reminds me of a lovely memory I have from the island of Paros, which is a very well
known destination in Greece in the Cycladic Archipelago, and where I was invited to, I think, three years ago. It was before the pandemic and a local festival invited me to run the ‘Networks of Trust’ workshop. I collaborated with a group of teenage girls aged 14 to 17, and this was exactly what you described, a group of young women gathered together. One could feel this very special energy, feminine, but not so feminine yet, energy of weaving together stories and sharing ideas, desires, hopes and fears for the future. They wrote incredible stories, truly incredible stories. And at the end, in a gathering in a small garden of a local municipal library, the girls read in front of the audience their stories. I have kept this memory as one of the best I had with this kind of workshop. There were only these young girls sitting on a house stone wall in the garden, reading their stories to the audience and that was actually really, really beautiful. Adults in this gathering were exposed to the sincere and powerful way of thinking of these girls. They had to confront the future through their eyes.

Networks of Trust, Paros Festival 2019, Photo: Nikos Efstratiou

HAUNTINGS

Haunting is a process always in becoming. It's a residue of time other than the present and trace of the Other left embedded within a place. It is not only an outer layer. On the contrary, it infiltrates the very fabric of it. It is there but it is also somewhere else. A constant presence and a fleeting memory.
Ghosts haunt us in many forms. Places Goni portrays and visits tend to be haunted, haunted by pasts and futures, griefs and hopes, absences and extinctions. She transcribes residues of the Other. She encounters Mars, reaching out, paying attention. She gives a form to notation of sadness and loss, grief and melancholy in this eerie, strange place. She listens with care to transmissions from elsewhere.
Ghost and Monsters inhabit lands and islands of Anthropocentric damages. Explored foreign and monstrous bodies end up recorded and remembered in past and future losses. Poetry written in particles of by-products of various exploitations.
Transmissions from elsewhere. Messages from somewhere else. Haunted messages from Mars. Distant places touched remotely, desired from afar. Microbial life in digital debris. Tapestries inhabited by caresses of stranger’s longing.

Kyriaki Goni writes poetry of networks, lyrical and haunting, . Filled with tentative hope.Categorised by interwoven landscape and worlds, stories and myth-making, broadcasts and signals of alien coded messages and strange visitations, networks are devoted to telling and exchanging stories, connections of physical and spiritual survival.

DLoI:
Whenever I think about your exhibition at the Warsaw Biennale and that installation, I always seem to come back to the tapestries, despite the fact that the most uncanny, the most haunting part of the work is the video. It's just so eerie. But it's always the tapestries I remember. That's why I use the word “weaving”. This is how you make wall textile , but also you “weave stories”. You practise recording things in different forms and apply different forms of representation. A photograph is one way of imagery creation. And tapestry is another medium, another method of creating an image. And then drawing is another and video is another one and all these different forms of visual language are woven together. All belong to the one system of communication, internal for your practice.

What I see, and this is again something to do with the “Networks of Trust”, is that because of how you assemble everything, multiplicity of localities and locations, various time modes and time spans emerge.

There is an obvious delay in delivery of messages from Mars. The long term narrative associated with exploration and extraction of Space provides another dimension. Finally, the infinity of time in Space really doesn't have an end, like the Universe itself. So we have different infinities present in work too, the infinity of cosmic time, the illusion of infinity of our(human)time, of Capitalist extractions.
Equally, it's a set of different localities, with one being the Universe, the largest locality you can possibly imagine. The other one is you in front of your computer, or in your studio putting it all together and having conversation with the Rovers and listening to the wind on Mars.

KG:
I really like that you use this expression: ”weaving of stories'. It's quite literal in the process of making tapestries, but at the same time it remains metaphorical.
I was so overwhelmed by the information I collected throughout the period of creating ‘The Future Light Cone’ about Mars, that it felt as if I was transported there. While processing this information, I kept listening to the recordings of the wind on Mars. As I was exposing myself every day to these strange landscapes, I started feeling a kind of affinity.

DLoI:
This brings me to the position and appearance of tapestries which speak of your strategy of organising the work. The tapestries create an island or even an archipelago out of an installation. They form together a narrative, materialising the story going beyond the Western tradition, everywhere, elsewhere.

KG:
So tapestries are, as you said, woven, but at the same time their emergence is my way of bringing together different elements. On the one hand the scientific inquiry and on the other hand stories about the links between technology and colonialism. On these tapestries, I put all these stories together in order to share them visually. So it is a combined act of the actual weaving and the ‘weaving’ of stories.
At the same time, during my research I was continuously on Twitter. Two latest rovers, the Perseverance and the Opportunity have both Twitter accounts and people who are running the accounts, write in first person on behalf of them. So every time, I would get on Twitter and I would read the first person tweets the rovers did, I was feeling as if I was in dialogue with the rovers far away in Space. All these different threads of research and experience are woven into the tapestries. It's accurate that we have been using the word woven, both metaphorically and literally.

DLoI:
Finally, we arrive at the notion of reverse in your tapestries. It is so interesting that you move them away from the walls making them free hanging sculptural objects, instead of flat pictorial surfaces presented against an architectural background. Once you change their relationship to space, their 3 dimensional aspect produces a place for reverse to gain importance. Something that was hidden is now being exposed. The process is not only directed at giving pieces a sculptural quality, it also serves another platform for communication given to the hidden history.
Mars tapestries possess this incredibly realistic and visceral quality. Photographic images are mirrored on fabric, and yet woven in. It makes realistic quality of photography merging with tactile, bodily quality of the thread. They feel like a cross-section of digital and corporeal. They are a bit like a dream giving away the sensation of strangeness, of Freudian uncanny. Like an unknown hybrid. It’s like continuous translation in flux, back and forth. Haunted image and haunted movement.

Kyriaki Goni, The Future Light Cone 2022, installation views, Biennale Warszawa 2022. Photo: Bartosz Górka, courtesy of Biennale Warszawa

KG:
I have edited and manipulated many found images, then the final images have been digitally woven. They are not printed, they are woven. There is a relationship between technology and the history of weaving, which is also subtly addressed in this materiality. I knew from the very beginning that I wouldn’t hang the tapestries on the wall. I was interested in exposing the inverted back side of them.
The curators and architects of the Warsaw Biennale fully supported my idea of hanging the tapestries from the ceiling and we eventually created this installation of the orbiting tapestries, which I have to say really worked in space.

DLoI:
When I encounter your work, I always tend to think about haunted landscapes. About ghosts. I would like to speak about past extinctions, colonial violence, Capitalist exploitation, but also possible future losses, future griefs.

The history of land and violence so often committed against it manifests in the form of ghosts inhabiting it. When I think about Mars and the eeriness characterising the Other, I think of all of your other landscapes and of fossils you mentioned and how you repetitively choose to portray places and dwellings that are haunted.
I remember how years ago I went to Milos, which is this beautiful, completely alien landscape. And I don’t mean only Sarakiniko beach and its Moon-like white rock formation. Strangeness is everywhere. The cliffs are literally covered with fossils created by prehistoric volcanic activity. These crystallised worlds of the past are to me, hauntings. The inhabitations are built out of different traces; traces of the event, traces of the life pre-event, but also a trace of exploration and exploitation that followed or will follow, of later times and finally the haunting of my own presence and my experience, all entangled together.
The haunting is something intangible; of liminal identity. It's something that you only feel, but can't really describe. Essentially it goes into this level of unknown, right?

THE OTHER

In Goni’s practice the Other carefully relates post-humanist themes, or more importantly non- anthropocentric possibilities of living. Alien=Other selves and communication modes and systems emerge deposited in ongoing conversations. Language in flux.
The unfamiliar, the Uncanny. Sentience, mind and consciousness. Relationships and interdependencies coming into existence through continuous translation to and from the Other.

Mars becomes a merged landscape of stars, land, earth and space. Monster is a bio-machine, life changed by capitalist extractions and patriarchal manipulations. Other is any-being not- so-different but unlike us. The primal anxiety of the not-exactly-familiar.

DLoI:
I wanted to speak about another category I sense so much in your practice, the Other. You engage beings other than humans, other minds and communications. This brings us to the category of uncanny and the uncanny haunts us frequently. It's something that by the tiniest trace of strangeness cannot be defined. We cannot recognise its sameness. It's almost like us, but not exactly, still just enough to make us slightly uncomfortable. The uncanny is here Freudian source of horror, something that is almost recognisable but never truly known. Shadow in the corner of your eye. Half remembered memory. Haunting by a presence that is absent, but doesn't go away.

I wanted to ask you not exactly why, but more of how it is that you tend to be drawn to so many of these instances? I partly understand that your research subjects dictate the nature of results, but partly is it that it's a form of poetics that you use too. Is this little discomfort somehow necessary?

KG:
The answer is, I don't know. One could say that I'm working with art and technology, which is what I usually say when people ask me, :‘What do you do?' I focus on the interconnections of technology and society, and I don't know why I'm drawn to that. It just happens. Maybe it's a need that I have, which I cannot really address and understand. But it’s as you said, I start researching something that is statistically and objectively driven. I start to shift from the objective of scientific or anthropological approach and let it become something else. I look into it in a way that I cannot really explain. This is a point

where different collaborators appear and I am sort of allowing this to happen. I wouldn’t define it as a methodology. Maybe it happens because I feel comfortable, because I'm open to that sort of progress, but if you ask me to do it on purpose right now, I cannot do it. Not consciously. Not with predetermination.

It's a process of being shaped and shaping at the same time, by using the material that you have and the experience that you have with the collaborators, both human and not. In a way it is shaped both by you and the surroundings and vice versa. It's a process of shaping by relation.

DLoI:
Have you ever read the book ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaw Lem?

KG:
Yes, I have read the book and seen Tarkovsky’s movie as well.

DLoI:
The reason I ask about it is not purely because of the context of Mars, extraterrestrial minds and messages, alien planets, Space transmission and the act of reaching out. It's more of a fact that, like in your earlier works, for example “Data Garden”, you go to the place that considers existence and possible ways of working of other minds, of other forms of consciousness, of other sentient beings. Essentially that's what we are talking about in ‘Solaris’, of a sentient being that communicates in its own unique way.
The book considers failure of incompatible, misunderstood ways of communication and various language systems. What I find fascinating, and again this happens in quite a lot of your projects, is that we found ourselves in relation with landscapes that are haunted. Because of those losses and damages already occurred, there is a type of sadness present in the places researched. There is grief in it, feeling of loss. They are a little bit like recordings, not only of something that has happened, but also very often of something that failed to materialise. I think if you encounter a place that has been touched in a certain way, it’s marked.
Solaris Ocean tries to communicate with the main characters by embodiments. The Guests, which are Solaris’ messages in flesh, are manifestations of memories. They are really haunted presences of something that did not work out a constant presence of memories that haunt. The shown haunted landscapes or monstrous creatures emerge from extinctions, from long time narrative inflicted losses. So in a sense, you are like Anna* standing somewhere between ghosts and monsters, hauntings and losses and griefs.
Maybe that is the reason this framework is so fitting for your work due its unset, undefiable identity. Not only it awakens curiosity, and the need to explore further, it also awakens these very contradictory emotions that are subjects of your investigations. That's fear of something that appears familiar, that instigates recognition but scares too. It's not the scientific record exactly of what happens, but in a sense, it gives you a feeling of anxiety rooted in their almost sameness, minuscule difference.

* Lowenhaupt Tsing

The Future Light Cone_signal from Mars 2022©Kyriaki Goni video stills

KG:
You described it accurately, it is a mix of curiosity and fear or anxiety at the same time that makes me pick these subjects in the first place. Creating work inspired by these subjects is probably my way to banish or at least come into terms with the aforementioned feelings.

DLoI:
Even though subjects that you take on are very tangible and often downright viscerally scary to begin with, as you get more into them, they become a little bit blurred on the edges, not as obvious, not as easily definable as before.

KG:
Quite literally, while I'm going through the process of producing work, although it begins as you mentioned very tangibly, these are certain things that I want to look into. And eventually it becomes something very chaotic. It is a stressful period at the beginning because I don’t know where this will take me. This is something that I tend to experience with every work.
It's not a linear route that I go where I start from A and then move to B and then eventually I move on to C. It's something that I completely lose from the very beginning or don’t even know what's the destination. Instead I let it gradually form itself. But every time I go through this chaotic situation I expose myself to this kind of uncanniness.
And can I add something? You talked about temporalities and in your notes you mentioned extinctions, colonial violence and exploitation. These are indeed present in my works, but also, especially in ‘The Future Light Cone’ these are situations that are yet to come. Among Mars images I used for the installation, two or three already show traces of outside interference, marks of what is already happening; one with the drills and another one with the traces of the Rover. But most of the landscapes are still left untouched. Or more precisely, they are only impacted by the gaze of the Rover’s camera, our gaze. Photographs capture areas with traces of our interventions from a distance . They equally record or predict if you will, future interventions, traces, exploitations, extinctions and disappearances.

DLoI:
I see this gaze as an expression of the desire to possess completely. In a sense, it's like an unreciprocated interest, an abuse that originates in its need of possession, of ownership, and dominance. A desire associated with power.

KG:
You also spoke about grief. Some of the locations indeed contain a sense of grief. Grief either for something that already has happened, or when it lies ahead in the future as so far it is only Rover’s gaze that has interfered.
My method of working in this case was to leave something open-ended. And this opening is an expression of hope. At the end of the video, if you remember, there is this question posed possibly by the landscape itself, by the rocks themselves, by the ancient ocean; ”Are you here to tame or are you here to converse with us? Are you able to converse?” For me this means the presence of grief for something that has already happened, but also of a small chance that maybe we may yet to find other ways of conversing with other than human entities that are around us.

DLoI:
When I think of that gaze that watches with such desire, I hope that there is also a chance to change its aim from the desire to possess, to the desire to begin and establish a relationship, which is of course something completely different. I believe a good relationship that we have in mind is about exchange between equals. Originally that gaze is the gaze of a conqueror, a coloniser. That makes it being gazed upon as something to possess and exploit. And maybe this gaze can be changed into a gaze filled with desire to establish a partner relationship.

KG:
The desire to begin and establish a relationship, which implies at the same time desire to care long-term.

DLoI:
Experiencing ‘The Future Light Cone’ prompts reflections about Mars and ideas originating from science fiction, like contact with Alien, for example. Mars is this very metaphor of something in Space that is uncanny and possibly may have life or may have had life before. So the context of science fiction is attached to it too. Concept that quite a lot of people believe is real, or believe as a possibility that it could be real somewhere along the way. But I think Mars is not only seen from a perspective of sadness or dreadful possibilities behind future discoveries, but also about this very ultimate idea of the Other, an eerie and uncanny stranger.

KG:
Yes, exactly.

DLoI:
It is something equally terrifying and fascinating and can also be fragile as you have shown within the work. There is this idea in science fiction and in common conviction that the Alien is always the enemy. Someone or something who poses a threat, which of course beautifully writes itself into the idea that any Other, anyone and anything associated with difference, foreign, strange or out of norm, is a source of danger. So it's fine to hate or fear. It is to justify exploitations and extinctions.
But what if you present a proposal with a message that is an invitation to converse? It's also in the wind, it’s also in the land that has been already affected in a small way, but can be possibly affected on an enormous level in the future. So if it is the proposal that shows the Other as potentially fragile and vulnerable and not a source of fear at all, even though it has an uncanny quality? I think this to be an introduction to consider the Other not as something or someone that needs to be contained and subdued, but with an approach that is based on care and relation set in exchange.

It's like a map of anxiety. You frequently work with other human collaborators and exploration stories you cover.And they in the process create a hybrid environment,where even exhibition and how it is presented, is a network of different collaborations and exchanges in-between different states of being. I was wondering how you would see that in the context of the Other?

KG:
It's a difficult question. I agree that you can describe the work and installation as a hybrid, because indeed it is created and built with different parts and collaborators, both human and non-human and all these different stories that come together become one story in a way.
If you look close enough, you can see that there are multiple elements that are actually making the big whole. In this sense, I agree that this is a hybrid.
And there is a relation with the Other of course. First of all by recognizing that hybrid is a part of many others, who in turn are connected and collaborate with each other and are in a state of interdependence between each other in order to create something. So the approach to hybrid here is as something other in a way.
For example, I felt that very intensively with ‘The Future Light Cone’. When I was working on it I didn't have the chance to set it up in another space, before the installation in Warsaw. Of course, we were discussing possible installation modes with the curators and the architects. But when I went there before the opening, I felt as if it was some other place. There was this entity- the work itself- that I haven't properly met, although I was working with and on it. I felt that I encountered it in a way. Again, for the lack of a better word, it was physical. It was as if the presence of all these stories and all these others were brought together by being there in space, by materialising.
The second aspect of these communications has actually to do with the audience. How other people reach out or connect with the work. This is an important part for me. During the Warsaw Biennale I kept receiving DM and stories on Instagram from people that I haven't met. They would write, “Oh, I really liked the “Future Light Cone’. It made me think about that..., it made me feel that...” I think this is also another aspect of meeting the other in that way, an- other encounter.

Networks of Trust, workshop, Warsaw Biennale 2022, Photo: Bartosz Gorka

PRACTICE

If one looks from a certain angle, Goni’s practice falls into the form of socio-political investigation. Her research touches the very nature of how we define and treat the world we live in, how neighbouring worlds and worldmaking to be seen and how we choose to navigate it, how we compromise and negotiate it, all in relation with an-other. As such a method of investigation, it has at the core the practice of living in-between beings and landscapes existing in the realm made and born, living and existing, other and the same, by extension meaning being an active member of a community.
In a way, it grows on foundations of language as formula, form and shape of what it tries to communicate. An expression of need to tell and share a story. To define the message. Poetics web across works with inwoven and continuously evolving inter-relations; poetics of exploitation, poetics of encounters; poetics of assemblages (women planet space people resources). Dominating strategies and narratives, extractionism and exploration weave into personal stories and networks connecting archipelagos of existence.

DLoI:
I would like to ask you about a very broadly understood take on the notion of practice. One of the aspects I consider in the context of practice is seen through lenses of Duchamp’s proposal of inquiry based on chance which we spoke of, and which seems to fit perfectly with your way of doing things. The other aspect of your work is that due to the subject and nature of your research, it unavoidably touches problems and issues that have strong social relevance as although your practice is not directly socially involved, it contains a socio- political commentary that is affective and often unavoidable. Finally, you create networks on different scales and with the different participants.
I was wondering if you would consider your practice in this context collaborative? Or rather, would you consider it being in collaboration for example, with rovers on Mars or with the network itself. Would you say that to you Space is only the subject of the research or could you possibly see it as another being, a collaborator as well?

The mountain islands shall mourn us eternally (Dolomites data garden ), video still 2022 ©Kyriaki Goni

KG:
Now I am thinking of “Counting craters on the Moon” an 2019 installation. The core of the installation is a fictional conversation between a 19th century acclaimed astronomer and the third director of the National Observatory in Athens, Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt and DeepMoon, a 2018 neural network, both set to count craters on the Moon. I started by visiting the Observatory in Athens and looking into the astronomer’s diaries and notes. Eventually I was drawn in by his personal story. He was living alone with his parrot and his cat, completely devoted to science. This feeling of almost chatting with him about his discoveries, eventually was the basis for the fictional conversation. So, yes, it is as you put it, a collaborative process between myself and other collaborators.

DLoI:
This series started with a proposal coming from the position of language, and with the term Infrathin as a prism for all the interviews published here. I think of it as understanding the idea of artistic practice as investigation based in irony and chance, an alternative to the scientific Enlightenment-based method ruled by numbers and certainties, way of inquiry.
I think you fit into this investigative frame because of the way you work, and how you centre research. You start with a methodology that is widely accepted. But the process leads you elsewhere and you let it. You created unique poetics we spoke of, in order for this slight shift of direction to happen. And it happens because of acceptance of chance. You don't know where your investigation is going to lead you. This is not something that would be considered strictly scientifically done. The process is completely open.

KG:
So that's why I shared with you a story about the Rovers and the wind on Mars. I don't feel that I put something under my microscope and just say ”Okay, I will explore that”. And I will make it work. I open up and I spend time with the wind, with the rovers, with the landscapes, with the islands. The stories that emerge as a result of this process are not completely mine. I am up to some extent a mediator. While I have a part in co- creating and co-shaping stories, I'm not creating with the scientific paradigm in mind. I feel that these are other entities that share their stories with me and I am present to listen to them. Like the fossil on the Aegean island, which shared a story about the first networks in the Aegean archipelago. It is the fossil that I actually encountered while hiking on the island! This is how I wrote the Poem of the Origins of Networks of Trust.

There is this pair of words in Greek which describe an act of listening. “to listen” ακούω, which means an act of listening originating in the ability to hear, like listening to music for example, and another word αφουγκράζομαι, which considers listening “carefully”. “I lean in and listen carefully”. I feel like I try to lean in and listen carefully to these slight infrasounds that are all around us.

DLoI:
I think it's about paying attention.

KG:
Exactly, paying attention to stories. Paying attention to the carriers of these stories, who cannot share them in our language. I encounter them and I am being present, being there spending time with them. I collect and share stories of all these beings, of all my collaborators.
My experience with work on the ‘Future Light Cone’ was as if I was on Mars. I was there in a way, trying to hear or to listen carefully. To me, it's a kind of collaborative process. Although in this instance collaborators are not human beings. Of course on many occasions I will commission someone. For example, for the installation "A way of resisting, Athens Data garden” I joined forces with a women only vocal assemble in Greece. In the process before the actual production, there is another layer of partnership, which is the alliance with non-human entities.

DLoI:
I definitely see your practice in this way. It's a really beautiful way of working. It reminds me of Tomas Saraceno and the way he works with spiders. About sculptures he makes with arachnids which are listed as made by the spider collaborators. So animals are recognised as co-creators participating in the artistic process. And in this relationship different species and co-creators participating in the artistic process. And in this relationship different species and minds exist on the same level. There is a difference but no division, exchange but no hierarchy. I think it's a very beautiful approach.

KG:
I think it's soothing somehow as well. To me it is also a way of caring and of connecting with other worlds beyond the human.

Kyriaki Goni is an artist, who for ten years now engages with diverse media to explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of big tech. Her focus encompasses extractivism, surveillance, human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Employing websites, textiles, ceramics, drawings, videos, sound, and text, Goni's installations construct alternative ecosystems and shared experiences by bridging the local with the planetary and intertwining the fictional with the scientific.

Recent solo exhibitions have been showcased at The Breeder Gallery in Athens, the Blenheim Walk Gallery at Leeds Art University, Drugo More in Rijeka, SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen, KVOST Art Collection Telekom in Berlin, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and Aksioma in Ljubljana.

Goni's work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as Art and Technology Biennial INDEX, Braga, 1.5 Degrees at Kunsthalle Mannheim, 2nd Warsaw Biennale, 8th Gherdeina Biennale, The New Digital DealArs Electronica, Modern Love at EMST, 24th Thessaloniki Photobiennale, 13th Shanghai Biennale, Transmediale2020, 5th Istanbul Design Biennial.

Goni has been commissioned from prestigious organizations such as the Shanghai Biennale, Gherdeina Biennale, Warsaw Biennale, Onassis Foundation, PCAI, Ars Electronica, and Art Collection Telekom. Her work has garnered recognition through prizes and fellowships from Allianz Kulturstiftung and Bertelmanns Stiftung, Ars Electronica and Telekom, as well as the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, Greece, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Her art is included in institutional and private collections.

In addition to her artistic pursuits, Goni frequently lectures, writes, and delivers talks. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Prior to that, she pursued graduate and postgraduate degrees in Social and Cultural Anthropology in Athens and Leiden, Netherlands.

Patrycja Wojciechowska 03/11/2024 Patrycja Wojciechowska 03/11/2024

Max Limbu

Limbu’s work is about strange visitations and orders of strangers, of cubes and alien landings, of forgotten or lost cultures and civilisations altered forever. It is about orders, systems and ruins; about power, domination and collapse.
It is the work of someone in liminal position between the worlds, fragmented from their homeland and not exactly merged with the new habitat. Forever in-between.

Infrathin lies in the Monolith. Practice, positioned on undefiable separation of colonised and colonising, cultures and stories interwoven and over-imposed, tells of not exactly successful rewriting. It deals with the impossible to define and difficult to describe, entangled intricacies of internal dependencies, like scarring of ‘old’ and ‘new’ narratives, of self or familiar and the other estranged. It is a story of cultural perils of old and new colonialisms and the tricky road of having more than one belonging and being subjected to more than one order of dominance.

Strange landings.

Objects are being handled and examined, young green shoots grow out of building equipment, a strange cube-like object stands in the middle of a rice field. Like visitors from other times and places it simultaneously evokes mystery and menacing power. My experience of Max Limbu’s practice began with the conversation. We were working together and spent most of our time discussing ideas on creative practice, social engagement and community contexts, both dominant and dominated.

Discrete Life of Infrathin:
The cube-like, modernist form of the New Ruin keeps on reminding me of the iconic

Monolith in Stanley’s Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey ''. “New Ruin”/It Seems to belong to imagery of science-fiction. I actually see a lot of very subtle references to cinema overall in your work. And perhaps, it originates in this strange parable between the event of the alien race imposing a new order of so-called evolution happening in Kubrick’s masterpiece (which in the movie is so strongly connected to violence) with the event of colonial order (bringing many new and future ruins along with it) imposing ew domination even in the process of its collapse.The Monolith, its strangeness, its otherness originates in its complete unfamiliarity with the place. It belongs to another order.
What do you think about this idea of connection between strangeness, dominance and mysteries like those of the Monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and this new ruin you positioned in the landscape with all layers of their colonial histories, failures and manipulations? I suppose this really is a question about ruins and orders, because for ruin to occur there first, there has to be order to fall into it. What is the order collapsing in your work?

Max Limbu:
The concept of New Ruin originated in my dream. It was during a difficult period of life, I was filled with doubt, alienation and confusion. I used to constantly dream of this cold concrete environment where I would be stuck. That claustrophobic environment was something that inspired me to design the sculpture itself.

I can see the comparison of New Ruin to the Monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. The arrival of the alien monolith. In that aspect, yes, my intervention in the creation of the 10-foot-tall concrete structure in the village in which I was born - was unannounced. But the brutality in my context is nostalgia. In the sense of the loss of my personal identity - being an immigrant in the UK and being considered a “foreigner” in my birth country, Nepal, when I returned. The idea of the sculpture was conceived during my time in the UK but the only place where that work could exist was in Dharampur, then a rural village.

The violence is the interruption of the topography: agricultural land disrupted by an unannounced object. The structure has another meaning and this relates to my nostalgia connected to the local water reservoir that I grew up swimming and fishing in. A flood in around 2011 demolished the reservoir exposing its bare foundations and revealed that the structure had no metal rods or any support, just cement and bricks. I wanted the New Ruin to juxtapose with the reservoir. Hence, it’s built with a strong foundation and framework (iron rods and stones), to last longer. So, to return to the question of my relationship to the village I suppose I am trying to preserve my memory through the banal structure. I guess this action of mine can be read as a certain kind of colonial imposition of nostalgia.

To quote Mark Fisher, “The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something.” The absence of water in the reservoir exposed the presence of this functionless object. And the Monolith in a Space Odyssey is portrayed as a totem of eerie objects. I have used the singing of Kirati Mundhum (the tale of a Limbu culture as a background music) that in itself to me is a reference to an ancestral language which I can’t speak or understand.

Talking about cinema, I am very much influenced by Asian new wave cinema. Especially by the works of Wong Kar Wai, Park Chan- Wook and Takashi Kitano. Recently I have been looking into the works of Bi Gan, Apichong Weerasethakul and Diao Yinan.

DLoI:
I remember when we were discussing the project I have been working on and we spoke about the notion of epistolary exchange as a relationship performed at distance and enacted in solitude. I remember you telling me you did a lot of writing yourself. I love your written piece “Piss Off” about a dog named Kalu. How important is written word and the lexical in your process and what position it has within your creative practice?

ML:
I draw a lot of my influence from philosophical sources - exploring and experimenting with forms of epistemology, logic and archaeological thought. Text and narrative are devices I use to contextualise the broader subjects I mesh together in a work.

Writing is something that has been the most important part of my life. Growing up, I never read anything until I arrived in this country and in my late teens I picked up a novel or any creative writing. But since I was young, I have always found solace in expressing my feelings in words. I used to write a lot of prose and short stories but I always separate the process of making art and writing. Writing to me is meditative and very personal. I hadn’t found enough reason to combine these two practices until the earthquake of 2015 in Nepal. By now you can guess why that event is very crucial to me; that tragedy affected me. The art works I have produced since then are all in some sense a personal love story to my birth country. It might have an undertone of socio-political commentary but ultimately the texts I use are very personal. “Piss Off” was written in a spur of the moment and it involves similar themes to New Ruin: the outsider and my place in the village. The inevitable changes the villagers want and what Kalu needs.

When I think about the title of a work, I always intend to get straight to the context of the work. Therefore, most of the titles are usually one or two words of implication.

DLoI:
Let’s talk about “Vendors”. Personal and intimate stories act in the film as reflection of global economics and foreign influence (repercussions of colonialism, impact of neo-colonial economy beyond the impact of pandemic). The shot that really gets me every time, is a caged, emotionally disturbed Moon Bear. This traumatised, abused bear seems to be a metaphor for otherwise gently, delicately and sensitively shown trauma and precarity present in the story. Which brings us to nature shots in the film. They leave the underlying impression, almost as if being half-forgotten references to the classic period of Asian and Western cinema portraying this part of the world. I believe that there is a certain tension between dream-like quality and dream-like artificial orientalism of this imagery and your work. I am genuinely curious if i have a good intuition if it comes to this aspect? Did you have these in mind when working on the project?

ML:
That shot of the bear was taken in this obscure Zoo, in Jamun Khadi, a wetland in Eastern Nepal. I first encountered that place during my trip to Nepal in 2016. The living conditions for the animals in that place are atrocious. That trip really affected my perception of this whole “New Nepal” image the politicians were telling people about. All I could see was the rapid pace of houses being built with the prices of land skyrocketing. The Zoo was located in a wetland but instead of securing the space for the animals that live there, the stakeholders had planned to cage all sorts of animals and birds in the dire conditions for human entertainment.

Four years later, when I went back in 2020, the place had begun to deteriorate. The living conditions of the animals were probably even worse. I took a day to film various animals, monkeys, snakes, wild cats, deer, vultures etc. but the interaction of the bear and the kid in the clip stood out the most. The kid can be seen singing a popular Nepalese rap song by VTen where the hook goes, Sahi hoo, Sahi hoo! (That’s right. That’s right) while the bear bobs his head side to side while he moves up and down. The irony of the song and the naivety of the child who doesn’t realise the bear is tormented; the movement of the body isn’t a dance but a distress signal.

Vendors itself tells the story of precariously surviving as a vegetable vendor during the time of the Pandemic where I purposefully used the higher saturated imagery to underpin the reality of the conditions, while we look through the prices of vegetables in comparison to the highly inflated price of gold and silver.

In terms of dream-like sequences in my film, I am conscious about the pacing and the editing of my work. It’s very collaborative when it comes to my film-making. Sustika Limbu, with whom I have collaborated for nearly a decade, is an equal partner in the process. It was as much her decision as mine to use a certain fade and overlapping transition which are quite prominent in old classic cinema. Black and white filters are something I always use in my films. That can be seen as an homage to classic cinema or the transition of the mood in the film.

Parai, 2019

DLoI:
Your latest work “Harbinger ’brings again this juxtaposition between the natural and the artificial, the local and the imported/-the invasive which re-occur in your practice. I sometimes think of it as a quality similar to that of bio-machine, where morphology is created by the new collapsing into old. ‘New Ruin ’crushed into the land(scape) repeating the fate of local ancient monuments, while here the machine’s original function is taken away; now it is a ruin overgrown, containing new life. All brought, performed and enacted in solitude. I wanted to ask you about this layering of various forms of decay coming back in your work. By decay I don't mean only the breakdown of things, disintegration of matter. I also mean collapse of economic, political, systems and cultural influences and invasions.

ML:
Juxtaposition has always been a theme of my art practice. From the ‘New Ruin’, that contrasted the topography to importation of curio-objects in ‘Usurp’, 2018 where an old iron lock is performed under a discursive light to give it a different life as an art object. I guess, my interest in this stems from the idea of slowing down, opposed to the whole concept of accelerationism. I wonder what if we are to slow down and look back. That’s where I guess the whole notion of hauntology comes into play in my work: as the memory of the past resurfaces through these stark objects.

I think I touched on the notion of decay in a response to a previous question where I mentioned how a geographically diverse nation like Nepal, which can produce most of its own agricultural produce, is so reliant on imports from India and now China. Vendors resonate with some of those issues. This is mainly because of immigration and the country’s reliance on remittance as most of the youth after the civil war in the 2000s has fled the country for better paying jobs and better livelihood. This has led to rise in housing costs and the abandonment of rural villages for affluent towns. Here I see the decay in our social and economic systems and also in our traditions. While the villages are turning into towns, the remote parts are overgrown and taken over by nature. Once the reforestation has been successful vis a vis the congestion and pollution is rising rapidly in cities.

I guess my work ultimately deals with this subject of change and the loss of tradition and cultural activities and value.

DLoI:
I wanted to ask how do you see practice as such? I ask everyone participating. When practice is discussed with artists, the assumption is that it is the creative practice that is always the focus of investigation.

ML:

Practice is not only about doing things and the process leading to them. It is also everything around or sometimes separate. Consists of tidal rhythms, sequences and repetitions; but also of connections, networks or solitudes.It is not only about people (other & person practising). It is also about places, things, states, experiences.

Practice is built (and co-creating it) around the grid of someone’s life.

DLoI:
How do you see your practice in context, or more to the point, in relation to this daily practice of living (as a part of a community, or an individual within a social body)? Does it include the tension placed between an individual addressing a group and an individual within a group?

ML:
Throughout my art practice I have always questioned myself: do I want my artwork to specifically mobilise a new social movement and to document the changes it makes? Or should I separate myself from the actual activism and have a more malleable approach and work with sculpture and objects as an evocation of the problem?

The intellectual core of my work is inspired by the British cultural thinkers like Stuart Hall and Mark Fisher whose primary concerns were rooted in a reflection on the political situation of the diaspora in Hall’s work, neoliberal tendencies, cultural studies of cinema and music. I use it as a vehicle to think about my own involvement in cultures and in relation to my relatively privileged position, but also to consider the sense of otherness I experience as a Nepalese immigrant in the UK, responding to the political situation in Nepal through art. This field of theory and research has also helped me think about what it means to produce art works that speak for others or speak about others in Nepal.

Max Limbu's practice explores the relationship between culture, heritage and politics through the lens of architecture and artefacts in the context of contemporary Nepal. He seeks to reconfigure objects and narratives that address and highlight local struggles confronting rapid urban change in a globalised world. He is particularly interested in the role of communal memories and narratives as a way of documenting historical changes and envisaging political possibilities. He often works with found or repurposed objects and use film as a primary medium to present collected narratives and myths that tell the story of urban conflict and cultural struggle, loss and change.

https://vimeo.com/574774939#_=_

https://www.instagram.com/maximuslimbu/

Patrycja Wojciechowska 12/10/2024 Patrycja Wojciechowska 12/10/2024

Giulia Ottavia Frattini

The cosmos is essentially elusive. It is regulated by both order and chaos and simultaneously by the absence of the two. It is not a monolithic presence thriving on stasis but rather an energy in perpetual becoming. How do you tune in to the undetectable, then? This impossibility is most seductive.

Of Rabbit Holes and Breathing.

PATRYCJA WOJCIECHOWSKA

Ever since you first agreed to speak with me for the ‘Discrete Life of Infrathin,” I have known that this particular exchange should have a truly conversational tone. Just to start, I've noted a few keywords for us to use as navigational frame . : exophonic writing, a physicality of language, a lyricism disruption, unfolding of identity, and then later on, you added these lovely ideas of pulmonic writing and phonetic alphabet system. You also jokingly mentioned a rabbit hole, which I actually would like to include. I wanted to think about your practice in the context of breath, body, self, land, and the notion of others. The reason I want to adopt this corporeal tone is because I feel you treat language in a very physical way, like flesh.

Equally, what is very present in your practice is the self. It is a constant fleeting formation and re-formation of identity in all that you do. It never really stops; it constantly moves. There is a connection between land that symbolises body and self, and in reverse, self being a metaphor of body and land, a place of their residence.

The land that you inhabit is pretty specific, which is, I think, the land of a screen, a realm of cyberscape. Even the visual language, the layout, and the way you deal with the page refer to the phone screen. Its appearance is like a presentation of the language. The physicality of the language means the others as very loosely associated with the sense of difference in a way we monitor the distance from someone other than ourselves. It may be just a different body; it may be just as well that the difference in question is more ontological.

To quote the Infrathin, this is the undefiable, smallest distance between one thing and another. This impossible to evaluate an ironic turn onto the certainty of numbers. It is impossible to measure, and yet it is there, elusive but undeniable, like the space between the trousers and the skin of your leg after it touches it. Like fleeting moments of lingering presence. The warmth of a chair that someone just vacated is like a residue of someone else that you measure by distance, either distance of difference, the distance in time, or a physical distance, your distance from others.

Sometimes others-ness may be your body or something that's associated with your body. If I'm not mistaken, you kind of write about it sometimes. I can see this in your Instagram account, starting with your profile picture. There is this person inhabiting a pixelated screen that exists within the digital space, and she holds the camera, a camera that is a phone, an object we handle every day. For hours. An object that, in a sense, is an extension of the body, but at the same time, it's something that is other. The two are ‘together’ but separated. There is a distance between them. Distance that is the smallest and undefiable. There's something I wanted to read to you. A quote comes from Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s book we spoke of.: “Breathing: Chaos and Poetry.”. He mentions another philosopher in this Friedrich Hölderlin, and it’s about poetry and the nature of poetic rhythm. He states that there is a poetic rhythm, and he emphasises the ontological meaning of rhythm itself. Foundationally, rhythm refers not only to vocal omissions or to the sound of our acoustic matter but also to the vibration of the world.

“Rhythm is the inmost vibration of the cosmos. And poetry is an attempt to tune into this cosmic vibration, this temporal vibration that is coming and coming and coming."

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, “Breathing. Chaos and Poetry," semiotext(e) intervention series 26, 2018, p. 17.

GIULIA OTTAVIA FRATTINI:

And also, poetry conceived as an attempt to find sintony within chaos.

In mythology, Chaos was often represented as a sea serpent, and I can only think of the symbol of the ouroboros, the circle with no end and no beginning. This idea of eternal making and cycling is very similar to creative production, I believe.

The structure of Bifo Berardi's book “Breathing” is interesting to me; it is divided into three parts that seemingly mirror the cyclical phases of existing: inspiration, conspiration, and expiration. And all that happens in between, I’d say, glancing at the concept of Infrathin you refer to.

The screen is definitely a threshold where contradictions can be enabled, and I always gravitate towards any form of liminality and ambiguity.

I tend to perceive language-making, both in written and spoken forms, as a physical performance—a series of gestures produced by the body, in the body, and towards another body. Here, the connection with the action of breathing fits nicely. Recently, I started practicing yoga. The discovery of respiration in this context made me think a lot about breathing, because in the end it is about presence.

Before enrolling at the Art Academy, I attended Economics and Languages for a while. There, I came across Phonetics and Phonology. I was studying English and French, and these branches of linguistics are fundamental to understanding how to pronounce words correctly. It is the study of the production and perception of speech sounds. I remember how shocked I was when the professor mentioned the organs of speech for the first time. I never recognised until that moment that language is, first and foremost, bodily modulated in that sense. Vocal cords, lips, tongue, teeth, lungs, and even the womb move and vibrate when articulating and vocalising. You create a sound, and the sound touches back to a meaning. Practicing with these organs differently according to the language you speak is fascinating.

I translated some of my poems into the phonetic alphabet: the standard written representation of speech sounds. It is quite beautiful because the signs are like hieroglyphics, and when using it, you create a sort of acoustic installation on the page. Breathing plays a crucial role.

I realised more and more how physical and visceral language is, and this helped me shape other poems. Where in my body do I feel a word or a sentence? Where does it stem from? Perhaps from the liver, the skin, or the throat. It is as if our organs and body parts radiate emotion in different ways.

Finally, exophonic writing is a fundamental point for me. I mainly write in English—certainly, English allows me to extend the reach of my work in comparison to Italian, but mostly, writing in a language that is not my native one enables me to be more experimental.

This freedom and the process of absorbing a second language make me ponder deeper about the use of certain words, their meanings, their social weight, and their etymologies. And I also grew fond of the power of punctuation. I relate to language as tangible matter that asks to be moulded continuously. When you speak in your mother tongue, it is very automatic; you are born with that linguistic system, which limits your curiosity. Learning a language and writing in this language that doesn't belong to your origins is a very different process.

I am truly curious about your process in this context. In a sense, we both function in English. In my case, it happened due to the fact that I live in the UK, and use English as my first language. The change was organic.

You've chosen the language that, to a certain extent, is removed from the place that you live. Berlin, which, even though very international, is still a German-speaking city.

I wonder, how do you find it?

There is this impression that I have when I consider your work, that it's never solidified enough, almost as if the work was a reflection of how you work and how it's always in a place that is somewhere else. I don't mean only its presence in the digital sphere or on a page or the land, but that is always within a particular space that is not within us. Even though, as you said yourself, it's very physical. I think of it as something that is in the corner of an eye, a moment that is a place that is unreachable and yet, in which, we reside through the temporal experience of the poem. It comes from the deep sense of the visceral, but it is also very much removed. It has this very strange quality of being in, for lack of a better word, the Netherwhere.

I wondered that maybe that's why you also have chosen this particular form of removal from everything that binds you to the physicality of the actual environment. Because the real environment is the environment of your poetry. I think of your poems as something that I need to chase. As if they were hiding in a maze.

GOF

It is about an attraction to the fluidity of language. German doesn't attract me in that sense, for example. Italian has its own multilayered complexity. English, for me, really owns this quality of being malleable, pliable. Also, English has always, as for most of us, infiltrated my daily life. It is a creature that keeps on growing.

Poetry just happened to me during my studies in Curating. It was an international program, so lectures and books were in English. The way I started writing poetry came from this theoretical background. I was reading or listening, and usually, on a page or within a speech, a few words would stick with me. My attention fell towards them, so I would extract them from that context. Starting from those single words or sentences, I was drafting a poem.

I naturally and inevitably transpose my Italian and Mediterranean sensitivity into how I write in English. This might be visible in the grammar or syntax I use. There are two souls, two breaths that merge through poetry without ever really touching. But this creates a sort of friction anyway. Maybe that's why my poems might sound a bit ungraspable: I feel free when I allow myself to be open to making mistakes. My English is spoiled by inaccuracies, and at times, this is truly beneficial for escaping domestication.

Also, I would define my work as metamorphic. It is about unfolding. Passages and borders remain blurred or inexpressible most of the time. It may sound a bit childish, but, through writing, I do try to explore and reach my identity, questioning or even dismantling the “I”. You know, in writing, the subject becomes very evident.

It is about longing, and desire is nothing but the craved chase of a lack. I write to cut across this distance. It is also merely a matter of catching a wanting that cannot entirely be caught. It is a negotiation with sense and opacity, too. I am not so interested in plots but rather in anti-narrations.

I have this project I've been working on for some time now. It is titled “Chrysalis” and is in three stages, mirroring the phases of development from the cocoon to the butterfly. I think I can say I concluded the first one for now, which is poetry-based—it's a collection of poems, and the red thread of the whole collection is hard to detect for me, but it touches upon what I'm talking about. I use poetry as an attempt to come into being. It's a fragmented and spasmodic expression. It's visceral; it's physical; it's this exophony. You write in verses. You're trying to give a hint on an impulse, on a feeling, and it's scattered along the page, so you are trying to make sense of the world in a sort of disrupted format. It is a space where language is embedded into flesh and vice versa. SPASMODIC AND THEREFORE RHYTHMICAL is the poem I am currently working on.

I feel sometimes that you purposely fragment your poetry on an almost ontological level when you say you're trying to, within the space of your poetry, write out your identity. When we started to discuss the possibility of this conversation, I mentioned Roni Horn and her work with poetry. She works with poetry in a very visual way; the poems manifest in sculptures, and the words are present physically in the works. But most importantly, what Ronnie posts is that the identity is ungraspable, that it never solidifies. It's always in the state of becoming. Always fleeting in a fluid state of sort of blurring that we were talking about. The boundaries between self and place it occupies are porous.

I think we experience it on a daily basis. The acceleration of everything has caused this sort of response within our psyche when we constantly go through recurring development. Constant chrysalis. We continuously break out of the shell just to encounter a new shell to break out from. It is in the moment of becoming; it's never before and it's never after. We are in-becoming all the time. That's the feeling I have, but I digress. You said something about the use of English and the way you were drawn to it as a language of choice.

GOF

English is, in a way, a permissive and affable language; it is relatively easy to understand how it works. This was convenient to me because I always think the moment you understand a system, you can break and disrupt it. If you don't get it, it's impossible to create an alternative. This stance allows me to imagine a different shape of the language I use.

I constantly work in translation. I find it interesting that, as a bilingual, every time you speak, you decide which part of yourself you kill. You always commit a sort of inner suicide.

Also, there is this persona that is the one writing, and then there is me. The “I” is in between. Borders are elusive. So the decision is about which part I want to keep alive in each sentence. How I overwrite myself. I don't really have an answer why English is the tool I have chosen. Simply, it resonates.

When I silence English to save Italian, it works. And when I do the opposite, it works again. For me, it's just a very nice pairing. And even if I write in English, the Italian will always be there, contained in the structure behind. I’m fond of etymologies, with reference to Ancient Greek and Latin. These origins are rooted in my way of thinking about language; I try to delve into the primaeval formations of meaning.

I personally feel like we live in translation. That we translate our-selves to others every day. Perhaps, with your poetry being a hybrid of visual arts and words, you need the language that is, or the approach to the language that is, quite hybridic.

There is something that I wanted to say about breath. I don't know how you look at this, but as you know, I've been obsessed with Duchamp. Towards the end of his life when everyone thought that he stopped working with art, and while he was secretly completing Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), of which no one really knew about, he was just pretty much playing chess and working in the library.

And he was asked, Who are you now then? Are you just a librarian? Or are you just a chess player? And he said, “Je suis un respirateur"—"I'm""a breather”. I'm a person that breathes. And that’s enough. I think he basically says that if I breathe, then I create. I create through change. I breathe in oxygen, and I breathe out the CO2, and that transformation happens within my body. So my body and my breath, are that moment of respiration, as you said. And that eternal rhythm in the body makes me creative; it changes my status from stasis of non-life to movement of creation.

In a way, when I look closely at what you do, because you have such a bodily approach to language, I want to acknowledge the notion of breath in connection to your work. Because of that constant movement, of change, of transformation that we keep on talking about, maybe this is the eternal breath. Within our bodies and within our collective cosmic body.

GOF

I do love this answer by Duchamp. Breathing and creating is such an ancestral metaphor.

Actually, when someone asked me some time ago what I was, I answered, “I'm a walker,” because I walk a lot. I really need to walk to think, and there, I'm very connected to breathing.

I take the same approach when I write, too. I move and activate different body parts to make sense (or non-sense) of myself and the world, to coexist with it.

When you walk, you have external impressions of the city, of the landscapes, of the smells, and you internalise all of it in one way or another. It is always a mutual relation, an exchange of particles. Inhalation and exhalation.

Movement is perpetual also in its apparent absence, and since poetry is movement for me, I never know how to end a poem. Sometimes, I decide to break that motion violently, maybe with a sentence that appears totally disconnected from the rest.

Talking about breathing and using that as an analogy, I perform a sort of suffocation there to move on to another writing.

You create a convulsion in time, and its tremors lead you somewhere else. Like choking a little bit and then expanding the chest and lungs for another poem. In between the verses, sometimes respiration flows spontaneously; sometimes it's just spasms. In the end, it is about creating a lot of movement. And, for me, movement is rarely harmonic; it goes from peaks to abysses.

It's a little bit like Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring”. It’s such spasmodic music…

But now, another thought occurred in my mind, and it is bound to something that you mentioned—that you are, mentality-wise, somewhere close to the origins of poetry. When it was vocalisation that was breathing out performed by all beings.

I was thinking about the beginnings of Western poetry in Ancient Greece, where it was still very much connected to shamanistic rituals, about Maenads, who were going through transformational ecstasy, screaming out their poetry through their bodies’ spasmodics. And the reason I mention this is because, in a breath, there is also something else that happens with the language and with the phonetic language that you spoke of and the physicality of language, and that is the utterance; the moment when you speak out.

I think your utterances are really quite interesting because, again, they are very fragmentary. You suffocate the utterance a little, and it makes it so difficult to grasp.

I don't know how to exactly express what I feel, but there is a tactility within the language, but the language is not tangible.

GOF

Shamanism and poetry share the drive to transcend the constraints of the ordinary and are indeed strictly interrelated. Thank you for mentioning this.

I have been researching the Pythia, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi; she served as its oracle and was known as the Oracle of Delphi. It is a figure that perhaps bridges quite well with the shaman. While researching, I found these words by Heraclitus: “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.” This sentence possesses a prophetic trait and, to me, beautifully points to what poetry could be.

I am not attracted to poetry that is self-explanatory. I tend to search for the indiscernible, the unthinkable. I approach artworks similarly, and maybe that's why my connection with images is so deep. In my way of conceiving writing, I attempt to express this impossibility of having it all explained; I seek displacements. That is why the oracular way of uttering is a source of inspiration for me. It's captivating as a model because the ambiguity it entails allows freedom, failure, and transformation. And ambiguity just feels more authentic, despite authenticity being quite illusory.

Nowadays, technologies can be somehow considered the oracles of the present, they share something with seances: the idea of a network, of the Internet itself, where everything is somehow connected and evocable but still blurred and obscure. It's like a source from which you have to detect and question your beliefs. Also, from a tactile perspective, technological devices have this constant light radiating on you; you can feel the iridescence, and objects literally heat up. You stare in front of the screen, which is a sort of mirror, a void, infinite chaos.

I started writing my poetry on the Notes App of my iPhone, and it was very important for me to have my writings on a screen and in a format I could hold in my hands at any time, even in the dark. The sense of touch has always been essential.

Have you seen a science fiction movie “Annihilation”? It is about this alien entity that lands on Earth, doesn't really have a body, and changes the whole environment by spreading a constant iridescence. It looks like a moving rainbow, so immaterial, and yet, it changes everything on a bodily level. It mixes DNAs and creates something new by employing mimicry. And then at one point, one of the protagonists says that the rainbow, the alien, was like a prism, a prismatic mirror that changed everything and reflected everything at the same time.

When you talk about reflection and a mirror being the internet, I thought of it as a prism. And this leads to this lovely notion of a rabbit hole that I am so fond of. What is the rabbit hole? Rabbit Hole is Alice, who went across the mirror who entered this different world that was changing according to her in a very physical way. And it was responding in a very physical way to her body. It was reflecting her.

It made me think about the Solaris Ocean, which was the ocean, which was the planet, which was the mind, which was the language. It manifested through the physical. It spoke through physical manifestations of the thought. And that's the rabbit hole I'm talking about.

I think you stated in one of your essays that you have a sculptural approach to the language. And that's why I wanted to go down that rabbit hole, exploring how poetry is a manifestation and again, a fragmentary one.

GOF

Going down the rabbit hole fits how the process of thinking works. It is, in a way, linear but not necessarily logical. And it is close to the stream of consciousness in writing, I would say. I often find myself inside this trope when in the process of making my texts. As I mentioned before, sometimes I take inspiration from books and readings. Just one word or sentence becomes relevant to me, and then I try to reshape it, and from there, I carve my textual body. Most of the time, the outcome has nothing to do with the meaning of the word I started with. For me, it feels like a rabbit hole occurring in reverse—I don't fall inside, swallowed by mere distraction; instead, it is a path or a portal that leads me to a process of unearthing; it is an ascending motion, actually.

In my essay “Poetry as Apocalypse”, which I wrote in combination with a poetry workshop I led for the Poetry Foundation, I pointed out my approach to writing, which happens as a process of removal. Writing happens to me by way of subtraction, as sculpture does, instead of through addition, more as painting works. I write and then delete, erase, and subtract some parts. What is left exposed is the ruin of the initial text, or maybe the bone of meaning, the essence of it all. This has to do with the idea of unearthing, the seemingly schizophrenic quest to which the rabbit hole takes you. This sculptural approach serves as an anchor to avoid getting lost in the quest. It helps me to understand the difference between navigating the infinite and trying to put the infinite on the page. So, I would say that I sculpt while I write to some extent, and I like the fact that sculpting entails such a physical endeavour and multi-dimensionality.

The very title of the essay has to do with this dynamic of removal. Apocalypse is a word I learnt to regard not with its catastrophic connotation of “The End,” a vision dominated by a spreading sentiment of doom, but rather in its literal and etymological meaning of revelation (from Ancient Greek apokálypsis, the word is a derivative of apokalýptein, “to uncover, disclose, reveal”).

The notion of revelation is quite sculptural for me. You reveal because you remove layers, you sculpt away, and you reach some sort of (un)consciousness and "knowledge." Most of the time, knowledge is uncomfortable, yet it is more about the process than the finding.

Like Michelangelo and his slaves, right? He always was saying that the body, the sculpture, was already in the stone. It had to be uncovered, liberated.

GOF

Exactly. And I also think that in every artistic practice, you have to have the courage to accept when to end a piece. Having this metaphor of sculpting was helpful in this sense. I can't go on sculpting away, editing forever; otherwise, I'm left with nothing. Meanwhile, in painting, you can go over paint several times, perhaps. In sculpture, there is usually no way back from a cut.

Painting is a little bit more forgiving. That is very true.

Let’s briefly speak about lyricism disruption. I think, in a sense, it's connected to exowriting. I was told by Kyriaki Goni when we spoke in this project that in the Greek language there are two words that describe hearing. And what distinguishes them is the level of investment in the act. Listening or attentive listening, putting your ear to the things. I find it really quite beautiful—this notion of attentive listening. What is important is that it is embedded within the language, within the vocabulary. As a result, it changes the approach to relationships with everything: in conversation, with the language, with the others altogether, not only other people but other beings and entities.

GOF

When one speaks or writes, more attentive listening instead of just hearing is generally contemplated. Also subconsciously.

Attention needs to be nurtured, and concepts need to be digested. Sometimes, one tends to reject things when diverging from expectations. I can imagine that when you read my poems, at first it can be a bit rejecting. It seems to me that readers normally aim to understand with immediacy. Digestion in that sense requires will and time, but most of all a loosening of preconceptions. The readership, or the audience, is essential to opening up what goes beyond the mere poem, I think. There is a universe around what can be the poem, which actually dwells outside of the poem itself. Distance and closeness intertwine with each other.

For me, one of the most rewarding events that can come about to a writer is if the reader engages in re-reading, either to reinforce the rejection or to get somewhere else. The second encounter that occurs within a key sentence. It is almost impossible to tell in advance what this is truly about. You just perceive it, I guess.

Like a vanishing point, right?

GOF

It is also an anchor paradoxically.

Yes, it could be an anchoring point, that key verse that you mentioned, but I don't think you have an anchor. There really is no ground to anchor to down below. The rabbit hole goes on endlessly. I have to say that your poetry is quite difficult, fragmented, and ungraspable, but I find these qualities very seductive. It really enfolds the reader in an act of attentive listening, attentive reading, and attentive watching, as they also engage in different forms of experiencing poetry, so to speak.

Recently I saw this incredibly eerie and very, very scary and very, very beautiful, at the same time, I suppose oracle-like, video from NASA with recorded sound coming out of the Black Hole. Sound, which was this rhythm and breath and darkness and something so alien and so strange. Yet, incredibly, you find yourself drawn to it. It really is a rabbit hole, isn't it?

I don't know. It was pretty... The feeling was sort of similar to my response to a video, which was something that I found almost profound, despite the fact that it was so abstract that if not for the commentary, you wouldn't probably know what you're looking at. It was the video from the Solar Probe as it was passing by the Milky Way. It looked like just some particles moving around you, and then you realised that these were stars and the galaxy itself and that sense of, again, rabbit hole. The vastness that speaks to you on this simultaneously very abstract and almost a Zero-One form of language, being also very bodily, very much scale out of scale, led me to this place of Elsewhere. I think in a way it reflects how I think about your poetry. An anchor that you need to find. The way you need to pay attention to find your bearings around it. And you know that you will never find them completely, that there will always be a sort of wobbly feeling to it. ‘I'm not standing on my ground here, I'm going down the rabbit hole; there is no question about it."

GOF

I once found out about Saturn’s rings’ sound. It is incredibly uncanny. It is a noise that comes from out of time, and, in such a state, feelings are not so detectable anymore.

I suppose I am not able to provide solace or guidance to the reader with my poetry. This somehow mirrors my way of existing. I think if you want some sort of quiet, you don't quite find that in poetry.

The last thing that I wanted to talk about in a very literal sense reflects that category of others. And that is the workshop that you did for the Poetry Foundation. I read the text written for the workshop, which contained your thoughts on the Apocalypse. You also set up the workshop as a ritual. We spoke today about the Oracle. I wanted to ask you how it felt to create an experience of poetry in a ritualistic way with others. And again, it happened online. I think that's also quite important that it wasn't a bodily presence of a gathering.

GOF
The ritual structure was critical in giving order to the workshop sections. I divided it into three phases: the first was Initiation, the second was Transformation, and the last was Recollection. Also, the ritual is a metamorphic process. You go through a transition.

As it was an online workshop, I wished to give a somewhat spiritual feel to it and touch upon a more inner level. I implicitly asked the attendees to bring something uniquely personal into the workshop, specifically because performing a ritual is about holding onto what is most intimate and secret.

I wanted to create a path into the workshop. Online, it's very challenging to keep the engagement alive. It isn't easy to build empathy. This structure helped in that sense to create a participative environment, a trigger, and a bond, even if temporary.

It has been rewarding to hear from the participants afterwards that the workshop was a starting point for them to dive somewhere else, without “guidance” once offline.

The ritual is life itself, and I felt this was a good image for the purpose of a poetry workshop.

What you've done is essentially a rite of passage. These are the stages: preliminal, liminal, and postliminal; the withdrawal from society, the change, and the return. It's an initiation; you pass the threshold, and then you incorporate the transformation in the life after. There is something liminal about the way you overall approach poetry. It's like liminal spaces that we experience in real life, and some of them are very ancient, like stone circles. I live in Britain, and I've been quite obsessed with them. One of the main reasons is because it's an architecture that is made for the change, for the transformation. It never stays still. You have a stone; you have a gap. It's an enclosure, but it's outside. It's inside, but it's a part of land. It's constantly becoming something different; you almost feel how it moves; it fluxes continuously. The same thing happens when you stand in a doorway; you're never either inside or outside. You're sort of both and neither at the same time. And in a way, for me, digital has this equivalent quality when the glitch happens.

The way you present your poetry, especially on Instagram, is like a glitch. It has this jarring quality and aesthetic that makes you stop in this place that you can't really define and recognise where you are. As we were saying before, this idea of attention is in contrast with, for example, Instagram, when you just scroll the stories, one after the other, and then there is one that you really cannot pass. Maybe you have to listen more carefully or to look more carefully at the image, the video, or the text, whatever it is.

GOF

In the beginning, Instagram was my main space for sharing poetry. Now I don’t use it anymore as before. I would post screenshots of poems composed directly in the Notes App—this relatively little but luminous white page was a stimulus to make myself easily visible out there and a push to expose my work.

Since Instagram was born as an image-based social network where text is definitely secondary, the intrusion of poetry into Instagram felt like a combination of opposites. This discordance was interesting to explore and to ignite. And this is perhaps closer to the glitch you mention.

It also allows me to compose a diaristic archive to combine poems with pictures.

It was such a long time ago when ‘The Matrix’ came out; you were a baby at that time! Anyway, there are two moments I want to recall. First, the déjà vu, as happened in the movie, when a black cat disappeared and then reappeared, and there was another black cat walking the same way. Like a glitch. It makes me think about your poems appearing on Instagram. You notice that there is something different. It's almost like a deja vu, but it isn’t at the same time. The second moment is where Neo goes through his Kung Fu training and Morpheus asks him, “Do you think you breathe in the air now?” I think it circles back to this notion of breath that we were talking about, that it's a cosmic rhythm of the world, but here it's set in the digital space that we moved ourselves into, and the breath is still there, but it's different; it's ironic, maybe convulsive, maybe spasmodic, and it does not necessarily need air.

GOF

Existing between these two realms is indeed like a constant convulsion, or hiccup, perhaps.

I like that.

I'm pretty much the same. With my paintings, I always knew when to end them. There was this visceral feeling to stop. But with the writing, it never stops for me. I keep on editing.

It was such a great conversation. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.

Giulia Ottavia Frattini

is a poet and writer based between Berlin and Milano.
She studied Art Communication and Didactics at Brera Fine Art Academy and pursued Advanced Studies in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts. She is currently enrolled in the Master Programme in Cultural, Intellectual and Visual History at the University of Milan.

Her practice lies at the intersection of writing, art and critical theory. She intends language as the essential medium through which subjectivities inhabit the perpetual “now”. In her writings, she deals with the experience of self-determination and identity definition, exophonic writing, the physicality of language and anti-narrative textual forms.

Her words have appeared in several outlets, including single-poem publications, interviews in art magazines, and hybrid contributions. In 2023, she was selected as a Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. The same year, she self-published a poetry chapbook titled “CHRYSALIS” in limited printing.

Warsaw Biennale.

Dreams of reorganising the future.

U5. Of Dreams and Islands.

Felix Lenz

The Air We Breathe.

The conversation between Felix Lenz and myself originates in the idea to approach his practice through lenses of Duchampian Infrathin, the category which lies at the roots of this project.

Kyriaki Goni.

Poetics of Trust.

Max Limbu

Strange landings.

Giulia Ottavia Frattini

Of Rabbit Holes and Breathing.

Giulia Ottavia Frattini

Discrete Life of the Infrathin