2015 - ongoing
Mixed media installation /photography, objects*, video, texts/
Here, just some water,
There amidst the trees
The sea!
- Iio Sōgi
The project originates from a single idea: that of a personal journey to the sea through the system of four interconnected rivers, the first of which has its source near my family home in central Poland.
Embracing the process of direct involvement with the surrounding environment, but also going beyond the space-time dimension of what is plainly visible, Towards the Sea becomes a multi-level narrative that begins millions of years ago, and yet is still intertwined with the continuing history of the reality in which we live. The casual gesture of leaving home begins a journey through time, space and the various contexts of one’s presence in the world.
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Being a constant element in a familiar landscape, the river itself is never constant. Its flowing waters incessantly communicate with other rivers, and they in turn with distant seas, vast oceans and far-off lands. Bodies of water that we are intimately familiar with, perpetually take part in a complex dance of exchange and transformation.
And yet, this is a quiet process, about which we are most of the time unaware. Water silently travels through hardly accessible lands, flows underground, and travels in the air by evaporating. It then circulates in the environment by joining the breathing and drinking cycles of various living organisms, establishing a living material connection, a bond between all earthly beings.
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Rivers, on their complex meandering ways, carry sediments of places, events and times they encounter. Thus the river journey, from the source to its final estuary, becomes a non-linear narrative, that includes natural and symbolic environments, complex relations between human and non-human beings, between time, space and the ever-present change; between macro- and micro-scales of life.
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The work takes form of an intimate collection of photographs, drawings, objects, video recordings and found images. Towards the Sea becomes a private museum of thoughts, a palimpsest, where the external reality smoothly mixes with internal processes, facts appear almost fiction-like, and the prose of life unexpectedly takes on a poetic turn.
Fascination with the immediate experience of the world, Da-sein (process of ‘being-there’), grows into a Wunderkammer made of fragments of multifaceted realities discovered on the way. Together they create a three-dimensional space for experience: viewer’s own exploratory, rhizomatic journey through encounters with objects, images, texts and latent memories.
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*(Devonian coral fossil, granite ball, perforated river shells, sandstone, dried seaweed, old postcards, mud pieces, microscopic photography, sand, literary quotations, twigs, driftwood, puffball fungus, various books, drawings, maps, found images, 2 small metal cubes, bird feathers, etc.)