Strangers in the “Ku”
Back in the days when the map of the world was full of blank spots, cartographers filled empty spaces with figments of their own (and collective) imagination: fantastical beasts, dragon like creatures, cockatrices and sea monsters. In lieu of this “unknown,” they also depicted the Garden of Eden and the Fountain of Youth. The final blow to terra incognita came with the establishing of the British Royal Geographical Society in 1830 that drew into its ranks not just adventurers and dignitaries but also eccentrics. Its members were generally recruited from the middle and upper classes, for which the Industrial Revolution had engendered “unprecedented wealth,” and who could afford to make such leisurely pursuits as travel a full-time hobby, thus the amateur was born into Victorian society. The British Royal Geographical Society would organize special courses for its members, and provide necessary handbooks, like Hints for Travellers by Francis Galton. In the fifth edition of 1883 the author advised: “It is a loss, both to himself and others, when a traveler does not observe … Remember that the first and best instruments are the traveler’s own eyes. Use them constantly, and record your observation on the spot, keeping for the purpose a note-book with numbered pages and a map … Put down, as they occur … In short, describe to yourself at the time all you see.”1 In more general terms, this instruction offers a convenient point of departure for the reading of Robert Rumas and Piotr Wyrzykowski’s Emotikon as a case of traveler’s notes.
Seen through the broader perspective of earlier works by both artists, Emotikon offers a yet another striking analogy—travels into the unknown. As well as the art project in question, these were also preceded by painstaking preparations. Rumas and Wyrzykowski had previously made individual forays into “similar territories,” already in the 1990s, the latter had conducted a series of “activities with maps.” As part of his performance Copyright (1995), Wyrzykowski had a ©, the international symbol of copyright, tattooed on his shoulder. The process of obtaining this peculiar souvenir (which coincided with the enactment of the Polish Copyright Law) was followed by a camera and simultaneously presented on a monitor placed behind a political map of Europe from which Poland had been cut out. Another “engaged performance”--Safe Poland or No Poland At All, subtitled NATO Now (1995–1996) was re-enacted by the artist on several occasions. Wyrzykowski noted: “My own chest became Europe with areas currently considered as hot spots, such as Chechnya, Ireland and the Basque Country, burnt out with cigarettes. Putting out matches on my own skin, I identified the places on the map with those on my torso. The image of a map of Europe on fire was screened onto my body from a video projector. Each performance, whether in Germany, Romania, Finland or Canada, would leave me with fresh scars.”2 The artist elucidated the position of Poland on the geopolitical map of Europe, and the reasons why it should become part of NATO, voicing his own strong support for the decision. While commenting on the current political and social issues, Wyrzykowski created art that took a “form of journalism,” where performance was a “way of articulating one’s position.”3 In a similar vein was the unrealized work titled Europe (Europa)—computer software that enabled the user to freely redefine the political map of the continent—as well as the work titled From the Vj Video Diary,4 a collection of notes on Digital 8 tapes documenting the artist’s journeys to Chicago, Berlin, Kiev, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and Moldova.
Robert Rumas has also referred to the concept of journey and travel on a number of occasions. His work Aurora (2005), an audio play based on a trip to Leningrad in the late 1980s, included an account of the curious adventures of a group of friends, a visit to a hidden underground home and a beautiful model who eventually lent her name to the piece. However, the CD with the recording mysteriously vanished from the director’s office at the institution which hosted Rumas’ exhibition, thus burying the double (official and clandestine) image of the once visited country. While the project Allocation (Alokacja) from 2007, was based on the 71 journeys of Nicolaus Copernicus which he made as the administrator of the estates of the Prince-Bishop of Warmia, in order to supervise the issues of new settlements. Inspired by Copernicus’ notes from a manuscript called Locations of Deserted Fiefs (Locationes mansorum desertorum), the artist found their contemporary counterparts in the former State Agricultural Farms (PGR), places “included in the prosperity plan of the People’s Republic of Poland, once subject to strict control and a centrally planned economy. Today … degraded, abandoned, and prey to economic speculation, just like the lives of former farm workers who inhabit the areas still to this day.”5 In 2009 Rumas kept a log of a cruise which he made as a contribution to the project Disappear on the Vistula: “I can’t detect a single sound / The countenance of nature shows no trace / I worry that down there are people, the Society / and the police—they’ve blended in / but not P[iotr] R[umas], no, that’s an expedition / Horror.”6 The journey consisted of two parts—Rumas first traveled alone, then he gave the stocked-up boat to seven adventurers who continued along a specified route. In the same year the artist conceived two other actions: Two Forward One Back (Dwa w przód jeden w tył), a sentimental project based on an attempt at following the “motion” described by the artistic motto of Rumas’ close friend Marek Kijewski7—and Step by Step (Krok po kroku), a guided tour of the shopping mall Manufaktura in which the public was blindfolded, that accompanied the opening of ms2 a new venue for the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
The exhibition Emotikon brings together a set of video installations which present five storylines that emerged in the course of a journey through the Black Sea states (Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Georgia). Arranged into an environment, they seem like subsequent chapters from a travel log which, piece by piece, reveals new details of the expedition. For example, while seeing the story of shoe manufacturers from a historical quarter of Istanbul we learn that the artists visited them twice (on their first visit they were taken for industrial spies). Further videos present other travelers—Piotr’s wife and Robert’s son, Michał. During their stay in Somcuta Mare in Romania, Piotr is reproached by Elvis who says “you don’t know nothing about songs.” But Elvis, or in fact Tudor Lakatos, a teacher in the local Roma school and impersonator of the King of Rock and Roll, does not refer to his knowledge of music. Just as he does not perform Presley’s songs for their melody, he sings them in the Romani language to make them “more serious.” “I sing about my roots and my feelings, my own life, as well as the life of the Gypsies”—he explains. Emotikon’s byplays include the story of the conversion of the traveler, explorer and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau who, as we learn from imam Sabri Suleymanov from Bakhchysarai, accepted Islam after finding a spot where fresh and salt water do not mix—which is a divine law ordained by Allah according to the Muslim holy scripture. An observant viewer will also notice hints regarding the fact that the presented footage was often an account of a meeting, rather than its main aim. Such a feeling pervaded throughout the meeting with Ivan Orischenko, a retired major of the Soviet navy stationed at a nuclear submarine base, so immersed in the past that he forgets about the artists’ intentions. The man tells his story with considerable detail and enthusiasm, however, as he begins to speak about the present day, he stutters unexpectedly: “I hope you won’t record this, well I see you’ve already set up your microphone and recorded all of it.” Then, he not only returns to the past, but also changes the protagonist of his story—ceasing to speak about himself and his professional career and recalling the dignitaries of a bygone era. In Emotikon, the viewers are faced with a constant interplay of stories, both private and public, as well as those of the travelers and the people they met during their travels. Step by step, one begins to grasp the emerging analogies. Could Emotikon be a form traveling in time? It seems that finally we reach the, at first imperceptible, motive behind the journey. As the artists explained during a conversation with the exhibition curator, they were interested in re-examining the changes that had taken place in Poland in the past. Since the theme they chose is still current, they were able to use popular means of transport, change their vantage point and (investigating similarities, rather than differences with their own native history and experience) explore the past. For the artists Emotikon is a device for eliciting and collecting positive emotions which, as it would seem, essentially belong to times past. In light of Rumas and Wyrzykowski’s previous practice, the display of footage in the exhibition is also interesting. Reminiscent of a stereoscopic theatre,8 the installation provides for “a minimum of words and a maximum of images.” Interestingly enough, while speaking of two of his earlier works, Rumas refers to them as Kunstkameras. For Grayscale (Skala szarości), presented in 2000 in the historical OSH Room BHP of the Gdańsk Shipyard, the artist prepared a monumental life-size reconstruction of a grocery store from the late 1970s, while at the Centre for Contemporary Art Łaźnia in 2004, Rumas proposed an exact restaging of the interior of a nearby restaurant which enjoys a cult following (Kameralna). No less visually spectacular was his video project Between the Kingdom of Compliance and the Sea of Hysteria (W pół drogi między Królestwem Samozadowolenia i Morzem Histerii) from 1994, inspired by a text by Ihab Hassan,9 in which the artist “attempted to find a new form for conveyed information.” He was also interested in exploring the field beyond conscious perception—an unfathomed and invisible realm that could potentially be used for communication. In the script for the piece Wyrzykowski wrote: “The method I work with challenges the traditional approach to the video image as a mere copy of reality that is used to create as strong an illusion of the real world as possible.”
Back in the days when the map of the world was full of blank spots, people told stories of mysterious disappearances of travelers and whole expeditions, coming up with all sorts of unbelievable explanations. According to the legends, some of the vanished travelers became self-proclaimed chieftains of wild tribes. A similar scenario is evoked by the message “Gone to Croatan”, left by the first European colonists of the New World, who also seemed to have disappeared into thin air. This particular episode served as a point of departure for an exhibition of the same title conceived by Robert Rumas and Daniel Muzyczuk. The recurring motif of two friends, fellow travelers, explored in the show and familiar in the context of Emotikon, has a number of counterparts in contemporary art and culture. However, the nostalgic journey of two artists in search of a world that existed before the political transformation, found in Rumas and Wyrzykowski’s collaboration, is perhaps best compared to the tribulations of the characters of a Russian sci-fi comedy Kin-dza-dza! (1983, directed by G. Danieliya). The film tells a story of Uncle Vova, a construction foreman from Moscow, and a Georgian student Gedevan, known as the Fiddler. Due to an unfortunate coincidence, the two are teleported onto the planet Pliuk, in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy. As they traverse the desert land looking for a way to return home, they encounter the local inhabitants and collect curious artifacts of the alien civilization hoping to donate some of them (after their return to Earth), to the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals. Even stranded in a “foreign land,” the Soviet travelers don’t forget the proper socialist etiquette, and associate all signs of the “exotic”—such as a modest-sized spaceship—with capitalism. The planet is governed by a caste system, whose inhabitants are divided into two categories: the Chatlanians and the Patsaks. However, the only way in which the latter can participate in “public life” is to perform musical tunes to entertain the privileged group. In this way, and for the lack of other opportunities, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler become… artists. Their adventures in a world where verbal communication has been reduced to just two sounds (“kyu” [kew]—a swear word, though acceptable in social situations, and “ku” [koo]—standing for all other words), is quite different from the accounts of other travelers’ expeditions. It is also devoid of romantic, heroic overtones and the pathos that traditionally accompanies such feats. Rather, the protagonists of Kin-dza-dza! give a display of East-European resourcefulness (the Fiddler steals a “gravitsapa”—a component necessary for intergalactic travel), solidarity (with their companions in trouble, they give up the opportunity to leave the planet), and brotherhood (the ease of establishing contacts between cultures of the soviet bloc appears to translate into whole galaxies). It is, among other things, this virtuous way of travelling—showing due respect to the traditions and customs on the planet—that unites Emotikon and Kin-dza-dza! There is, however, something else—something which, it seems, Rumas and Wyrzykowski had not anticipated, but which they could not avoid, if we consider their artistic careers. Starting out on a trip, like Uncle Vova and the Fiddler, they actually set out to find a way home, but the journey yielded an almost journalistic commentary on a nearby yet distant reality: the last enclaves of handicraft, the relations between the Turks and the Kurds, or, the contemporary problems of the Roma people. In doing so, they also fulfilled the Fiddler’s dream—a dream of collecting relevant research material and, consequently, earning a place in history.
Agnieszka Pindera
1David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, New York 2009.
2Piotr Wyrzykowski, Czym bardziej ciało jest moim ciałem, tym coraz mniej jest zauważalne. Wyznanie Cyborga-EveryBody, Gypsy Hill, August 21, 1998.
3Łukasz Guzek, Wola ciała (general analysis of selected themes in Piotr Wyrzykowski’s oeuvre),1999, http://free.art.pl/qq2001/wyrzyklipskfr.htm (accessed 5.03.2012).
4 The work was presented at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art as part of the first edition of Views—Deutsche Bank Foundation Award (2003).
5Robert Rumas, http://robertrumas.pl/pliki/dokumentacja/alokacja/allocation.html (accessed 5.03.2012).
6Robert Rumas, Dziennik pokładowy, fragments in: Disappearing. A User’s Manual, K. Chmielewska, M. Kwaterko, K. Szreder, B. Świątkowska (eds.), warsaw 2009, p. 117.
7Robert Rumas’ memories were later made into a script for the work Dwa w przód jeden w tył: http://obieg.pl/teksty/4642 (accessed 5.03.2012).
8First German stereoscopic theatres of August Fuhrmann ran on “software” provided by commissioned photographers who set out on exotic journeys. The peak of their popularity coincided with the establishing of the Society for German Colonization (1884). Initially their Russian counterparts mainly presented scenes from the Bible. This became a popular form of entertainment, emerging at fairs and markets from Moscow to Odessa. With time, the “show” also included French fashion and presentations of scientific discoveries. Based on: Johnathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge–London 2001; http://www.muzcentrum.ru/news/2012/01/item5807.html (accessed 5.03.2012).
9“The unimaginable lies somewhere between the Kingdom of Compliance and the Sea of Hysteria. It balks all geographies; bilks the spirit of the traveler who passes unwittingly through its space-realm; boggles time.” Quoted from: Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays In Postmodern Theory And Culture, Ohio State University Press 1987, p. 38.
Back in the days when the map of the world was full of blank spots, cartographers filled empty spaces with figments of their own (and collective) imagination: fantastical beasts, dragon like creatures, cockatrices and sea monsters. In lieu of this “unknown,” they also depicted the Garden of Eden and the Fountain of Youth. The final blow to terra incognita came with the establishing of the British Royal Geographical Society in 1830 that drew into its ranks not just adventurers and dignitaries but also eccentrics. Its members were generally recruited from the middle and upper classes, for which the Industrial Revolution had engendered “unprecedented wealth,” and who could afford to make such leisurely pursuits as travel a full-time hobby, thus the amateur was born into Victorian society. The British Royal Geographical Society would organize special courses for its members, and provide necessary handbooks, like Hints for Travellers by Francis Galton. In the fifth edition of 1883 the author advised: “It is a loss, both to himself and others, when a traveler does not observe … Remember that the first and best instruments are the traveler’s own eyes. Use them constantly, and record your observation on the spot, keeping for the purpose a note-book with numbered pages and a map … Put down, as they occur … In short, describe to yourself at the time all you see.”1 In more general terms, this instruction offers a convenient point of departure for the reading of Robert Rumas and Piotr Wyrzykowski’s Emotikon as a case of traveler’s notes.
Seen through the broader perspective of earlier works by both artists, Emotikon offers a yet another striking analogy—travels into the unknown. As well as the art project in question, these were also preceded by painstaking preparations. Rumas and Wyrzykowski had previously made individual forays into “similar territories,” already in the 1990s, the latter had conducted a series of “activities with maps.” As part of his performance Copyright (1995), Wyrzykowski had a ©, the international symbol of copyright, tattooed on his shoulder. The process of obtaining this peculiar souvenir (which coincided with the enactment of the Polish Copyright Law) was followed by a camera and simultaneously presented on a monitor placed behind a political map of Europe from which Poland had been cut out. Another “engaged performance”--Safe Poland or No Poland At All, subtitled NATO Now (1995–1996) was re-enacted by the artist on several occasions. Wyrzykowski noted: “My own chest became Europe with areas currently considered as hot spots, such as Chechnya, Ireland and the Basque Country, burnt out with cigarettes. Putting out matches on my own skin, I identified the places on the map with those on my torso. The image of a map of Europe on fire was screened onto my body from a video projector. Each performance, whether in Germany, Romania, Finland or Canada, would leave me with fresh scars.”2 The artist elucidated the position of Poland on the geopolitical map of Europe, and the reasons why it should become part of NATO, voicing his own strong support for the decision. While commenting on the current political and social issues, Wyrzykowski created art that took a “form of journalism,” where performance was a “way of articulating one’s position.”3 In a similar vein was the unrealized work titled Europe (Europa)—computer software that enabled the user to freely redefine the political map of the continent—as well as the work titled From the Vj Video Diary,4 a collection of notes on Digital 8 tapes documenting the artist’s journeys to Chicago, Berlin, Kiev, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and Moldova.
Robert Rumas has also referred to the concept of journey and travel on a number of occasions. His work Aurora (2005), an audio play based on a trip to Leningrad in the late 1980s, included an account of the curious adventures of a group of friends, a visit to a hidden underground home and a beautiful model who eventually lent her name to the piece. However, the CD with the recording mysteriously vanished from the director’s office at the institution which hosted Rumas’ exhibition, thus burying the double (official and clandestine) image of the once visited country. While the project Allocation (Alokacja) from 2007, was based on the 71 journeys of Nicolaus Copernicus which he made as the administrator of the estates of the Prince-Bishop of Warmia, in order to supervise the issues of new settlements. Inspired by Copernicus’ notes from a manuscript called Locations of Deserted Fiefs (Locationes mansorum desertorum), the artist found their contemporary counterparts in the former State Agricultural Farms (PGR), places “included in the prosperity plan of the People’s Republic of Poland, once subject to strict control and a centrally planned economy. Today … degraded, abandoned, and prey to economic speculation, just like the lives of former farm workers who inhabit the areas still to this day.”5 In 2009 Rumas kept a log of a cruise which he made as a contribution to the project Disappear on the Vistula: “I can’t detect a single sound / The countenance of nature shows no trace / I worry that down there are people, the Society / and the police—they’ve blended in / but not P[iotr] R[umas], no, that’s an expedition / Horror.”6 The journey consisted of two parts—Rumas first traveled alone, then he gave the stocked-up boat to seven adventurers who continued along a specified route. In the same year the artist conceived two other actions: Two Forward One Back (Dwa w przód jeden w tył), a sentimental project based on an attempt at following the “motion” described by the artistic motto of Rumas’ close friend Marek Kijewski7—and Step by Step (Krok po kroku), a guided tour of the shopping mall Manufaktura in which the public was blindfolded, that accompanied the opening of ms2 a new venue for the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
The exhibition Emotikon brings together a set of video installations which present five storylines that emerged in the course of a journey through the Black Sea states (Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Georgia). Arranged into an environment, they seem like subsequent chapters from a travel log which, piece by piece, reveals new details of the expedition. For example, while seeing the story of shoe manufacturers from a historical quarter of Istanbul we learn that the artists visited them twice (on their first visit they were taken for industrial spies). Further videos present other travelers—Piotr’s wife and Robert’s son, Michał. During their stay in Somcuta Mare in Romania, Piotr is reproached by Elvis who says “you don’t know nothing about songs.” But Elvis, or in fact Tudor Lakatos, a teacher in the local Roma school and impersonator of the King of Rock and Roll, does not refer to his knowledge of music. Just as he does not perform Presley’s songs for their melody, he sings them in the Romani language to make them “more serious.” “I sing about my roots and my feelings, my own life, as well as the life of the Gypsies”—he explains. Emotikon’s byplays include the story of the conversion of the traveler, explorer and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau who, as we learn from imam Sabri Suleymanov from Bakhchysarai, accepted Islam after finding a spot where fresh and salt water do not mix—which is a divine law ordained by Allah according to the Muslim holy scripture. An observant viewer will also notice hints regarding the fact that the presented footage was often an account of a meeting, rather than its main aim. Such a feeling pervaded throughout the meeting with Ivan Orischenko, a retired major of the Soviet navy stationed at a nuclear submarine base, so immersed in the past that he forgets about the artists’ intentions. The man tells his story with considerable detail and enthusiasm, however, as he begins to speak about the present day, he stutters unexpectedly: “I hope you won’t record this, well I see you’ve already set up your microphone and recorded all of it.” Then, he not only returns to the past, but also changes the protagonist of his story—ceasing to speak about himself and his professional career and recalling the dignitaries of a bygone era. In Emotikon, the viewers are faced with a constant interplay of stories, both private and public, as well as those of the travelers and the people they met during their travels. Step by step, one begins to grasp the emerging analogies. Could Emotikon be a form traveling in time? It seems that finally we reach the, at first imperceptible, motive behind the journey. As the artists explained during a conversation with the exhibition curator, they were interested in re-examining the changes that had taken place in Poland in the past. Since the theme they chose is still current, they were able to use popular means of transport, change their vantage point and (investigating similarities, rather than differences with their own native history and experience) explore the past. For the artists Emotikon is a device for eliciting and collecting positive emotions which, as it would seem, essentially belong to times past. In light of Rumas and Wyrzykowski’s previous practice, the display of footage in the exhibition is also interesting. Reminiscent of a stereoscopic theatre,8 the installation provides for “a minimum of words and a maximum of images.” Interestingly enough, while speaking of two of his earlier works, Rumas refers to them as Kunstkameras. For Grayscale (Skala szarości), presented in 2000 in the historical OSH Room BHP of the Gdańsk Shipyard, the artist prepared a monumental life-size reconstruction of a grocery store from the late 1970s, while at the Centre for Contemporary Art Łaźnia in 2004, Rumas proposed an exact restaging of the interior of a nearby restaurant which enjoys a cult following (Kameralna). No less visually spectacular was his video project Between the Kingdom of Compliance and the Sea of Hysteria (W pół drogi między Królestwem Samozadowolenia i Morzem Histerii) from 1994, inspired by a text by Ihab Hassan,9 in which the artist “attempted to find a new form for conveyed information.” He was also interested in exploring the field beyond conscious perception—an unfathomed and invisible realm that could potentially be used for communication. In the script for the piece Wyrzykowski wrote: “The method I work with challenges the traditional approach to the video image as a mere copy of reality that is used to create as strong an illusion of the real world as possible.”
Back in the days when the map of the world was full of blank spots, people told stories of mysterious disappearances of travelers and whole expeditions, coming up with all sorts of unbelievable explanations. According to the legends, some of the vanished travelers became self-proclaimed chieftains of wild tribes. A similar scenario is evoked by the message “Gone to Croatan”, left by the first European colonists of the New World, who also seemed to have disappeared into thin air. This particular episode served as a point of departure for an exhibition of the same title conceived by Robert Rumas and Daniel Muzyczuk. The recurring motif of two friends, fellow travelers, explored in the show and familiar in the context of Emotikon, has a number of counterparts in contemporary art and culture. However, the nostalgic journey of two artists in search of a world that existed before the political transformation, found in Rumas and Wyrzykowski’s collaboration, is perhaps best compared to the tribulations of the characters of a Russian sci-fi comedy Kin-dza-dza! (1983, directed by G. Danieliya). The film tells a story of Uncle Vova, a construction foreman from Moscow, and a Georgian student Gedevan, known as the Fiddler. Due to an unfortunate coincidence, the two are teleported onto the planet Pliuk, in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy. As they traverse the desert land looking for a way to return home, they encounter the local inhabitants and collect curious artifacts of the alien civilization hoping to donate some of them (after their return to Earth), to the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals. Even stranded in a “foreign land,” the Soviet travelers don’t forget the proper socialist etiquette, and associate all signs of the “exotic”—such as a modest-sized spaceship—with capitalism. The planet is governed by a caste system, whose inhabitants are divided into two categories: the Chatlanians and the Patsaks. However, the only way in which the latter can participate in “public life” is to perform musical tunes to entertain the privileged group. In this way, and for the lack of other opportunities, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler become… artists. Their adventures in a world where verbal communication has been reduced to just two sounds (“kyu” [kew]—a swear word, though acceptable in social situations, and “ku” [koo]—standing for all other words), is quite different from the accounts of other travelers’ expeditions. It is also devoid of romantic, heroic overtones and the pathos that traditionally accompanies such feats. Rather, the protagonists of Kin-dza-dza! give a display of East-European resourcefulness (the Fiddler steals a “gravitsapa”—a component necessary for intergalactic travel), solidarity (with their companions in trouble, they give up the opportunity to leave the planet), and brotherhood (the ease of establishing contacts between cultures of the soviet bloc appears to translate into whole galaxies). It is, among other things, this virtuous way of travelling—showing due respect to the traditions and customs on the planet—that unites Emotikon and Kin-dza-dza! There is, however, something else—something which, it seems, Rumas and Wyrzykowski had not anticipated, but which they could not avoid, if we consider their artistic careers. Starting out on a trip, like Uncle Vova and the Fiddler, they actually set out to find a way home, but the journey yielded an almost journalistic commentary on a nearby yet distant reality: the last enclaves of handicraft, the relations between the Turks and the Kurds, or, the contemporary problems of the Roma people. In doing so, they also fulfilled the Fiddler’s dream—a dream of collecting relevant research material and, consequently, earning a place in history.
Agnieszka Pindera
1David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, New York 2009.
2Piotr Wyrzykowski, Czym bardziej ciało jest moim ciałem, tym coraz mniej jest zauważalne. Wyznanie Cyborga-EveryBody, Gypsy Hill, August 21, 1998.
3Łukasz Guzek, Wola ciała (general analysis of selected themes in Piotr Wyrzykowski’s oeuvre),1999, http://free.art.pl/qq2001/wyrzyklipskfr.htm (accessed 5.03.2012).
4 The work was presented at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art as part of the first edition of Views—Deutsche Bank Foundation Award (2003).
5Robert Rumas, http://robertrumas.pl/pliki/dokumentacja/alokacja/allocation.html (accessed 5.03.2012).
6Robert Rumas, Dziennik pokładowy, fragments in: Disappearing. A User’s Manual, K. Chmielewska, M. Kwaterko, K. Szreder, B. Świątkowska (eds.), warsaw 2009, p. 117.
7Robert Rumas’ memories were later made into a script for the work Dwa w przód jeden w tył: http://obieg.pl/teksty/4642 (accessed 5.03.2012).
8First German stereoscopic theatres of August Fuhrmann ran on “software” provided by commissioned photographers who set out on exotic journeys. The peak of their popularity coincided with the establishing of the Society for German Colonization (1884). Initially their Russian counterparts mainly presented scenes from the Bible. This became a popular form of entertainment, emerging at fairs and markets from Moscow to Odessa. With time, the “show” also included French fashion and presentations of scientific discoveries. Based on: Johnathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge–London 2001; http://www.muzcentrum.ru/news/2012/01/item5807.html (accessed 5.03.2012).
9“The unimaginable lies somewhere between the Kingdom of Compliance and the Sea of Hysteria. It balks all geographies; bilks the spirit of the traveler who passes unwittingly through its space-realm; boggles time.” Quoted from: Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays In Postmodern Theory And Culture, Ohio State University Press 1987, p. 38.