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.
The boundaries defining the location of abandoned places spread outwards. They are
the ghost of the previous space, a murky haze through which one gropes. These are
spaces of absence, devoid even of themselves.
Nature eventually devours these kinds of places.
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’.
With the outbreak of the pandemic, we decamped to the countryside, distancing
ourselves from the media, mass information, restrictions. We led an isolated life in
the embrace of the forest and our imaginations. The virus period supplied conceptions
of the post-apocalyptic and the void it contains. We remained in the grip of anxiety
and uncertainty. While hiking in the woods, we kept happening upon abandoned
village huts. We documented them, searched for what information we could find.
Little by little, we gleaned local legends, rumours, tragic tales. We wove them into a
novel reality replete with haunted houses and ghosts trailing us. In this way we
eluded the catastrophic vision of a deadly disease, escaping into multidimensionality
and magic. Our world was every bit as disturbing, but in an enchanted and
supernatural way. Within this alternate reality we pursued all kinds of magical
activities that would disrupt a rational approach to the subject. One such action was
binding the places we found in order to seal their stories, their physical perimeters,
and to metaphorically arrest their decay. Here was a reference to the folk magic of
knots, whereby a thing bound is stopped, and that which looms is headed off.
In a virtual reality we preserved our vision of alienation, insecurity, and flight into the
forsaken world of spirits.
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.
Project co-created with Aleksandra Przybysz, as a representative of our duo, I have all the rights to submit our work to the competition.
