Tomasz Kawecki

Abstract:

I began to reinterpret old myths and Slavic rituals. I used amulets from the warehouse-hut. Through performative activities, objects, installations and portraits, I combined the forest space with the space of the house. The results of my actions are series of symbolic images touching on the subject of history, roots, family and the cycles of life and death.

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Description:

The house in Witowice Dolne is the house of my childhood. It is occupied by my eyes and by the ghosts I collected with great dedication during the first years of my life.

The house stands on the edge of a forest so green and virgin that you cannot help but happen upon magical creatures within it. Returning to its depths, I resume my adventures and rethink riddles left unresolved. I still seek the answers. My grandmother was my guide through this realm. It was she who led me into the forest. She addressed mushrooms, stones, and roots by their true names. Some she gave anthropomorphic features and carried home. Over the years, these objects filled the interior. Nothing was ever discarded—if she returned with something, it stayed with her forever. The house grew old with her. Everything within was subject to natural cycles.

Huge roots resembling animals, bunches of plants, and pebbles arranged on the clay of the old stove watched over us. They reconciled the home with the dark forest.

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.