Biodegradable Space

The space is steeped in our phantasms. We filter it with our own eyes, and thus create it ourselves. It can be disturbing and fraught with danger; or just the opposite, sunny and sublime. In Slavic folklore, people endowed houses with anthropomorphic features: a house-body. The house was believed to be leading its own existence, playing a humanlike role in family life.

A side effect of modern urban planning’s relentless drive for development is ever more abandoned areas left behind. These sites begin the process of secondary overgrowth that Gilles Clément termed the ‘Third Landscape’. They become a matrix of the global landscape of the future, when there will be no more concentrations of primary vegetation, but only secondary ones designated a ‘Fourth Nature’.

Nature eventually devours these kinds of places.

The common denominator of the spaces we focused on are the tragedies embedded within. These are memorials to histories that were silenced and hidden away from the city, from society at large. In the countryside, everything unfolds behind closed doors. This is supported by the arrangement of rural agglomerations, with homes distanced from each other, scattered across field and forest. In such conditions, it is so much easier to conceal violence and cruelty.

The Biodegradable Space project is conceived as a ‘game’ played using VR goggles. The player-participant moves to the rooms we documented in various villages in the east and south of Poland. The scene shifts from space to space at random. The observed spaces are marked by varying degrees of time’s passage and deterioration. By returning to the same sites and documenting changes they had undergone, we were able to create a sense of multidimensionality.