Za’opatrzenie / Provision
2023
Installation, actionism
The word "zaopatrzenie" can be roughly translated from Polish as "supply", but "opatrzenie" means patching, cleansing it of something, filling it, performing a sacrament over a dying person.
After being created, the sculptures were later brought back to the places where they originated: a forest near Vitsula River, into the Vistula River, and in a young woodland in Podlasie region. This gesture is both material and symbolic. The Giants embody people whose connection to the land has been disrupted or erased — people whose presence becomes politically uncomfortable or historically inconvenient. By returning these figures to the soil, I speak of a return that defies disappearance. The figures dissolve not into oblivion, but into the very landscape that shaped them.
The materials — old bedsheets, pillowcases, duvets — suggest intimacy, the body, and sleep, but also the threshold between memory and forgetting. Fallen branches collected from the Vistula and the Polish-Belarusian border form a fragile skeleton, carrying the trace of the landscape. Plaster locks these elements together, only for the sculpture to slowly break apart again over time. This cycle of decay is not destruction but transformation. The sculptures, once monumental and still, become porous, fall back into the ground, and root themselves like memory — not to be buried, but to grow differently.
After being created, the sculptures were later brought back to the places where they originated: a forest near Vitsula River, into the Vistula River, and in a young woodland in Podlasie region. This gesture is both material and symbolic. The Giants embody people whose connection to the land has been disrupted or erased — people whose presence becomes politically uncomfortable or historically inconvenient. By returning these figures to the soil, I speak of a return that defies disappearance. The figures dissolve not into oblivion, but into the very landscape that shaped them.
The materials — old bedsheets, pillowcases, duvets — suggest intimacy, the body, and sleep, but also the threshold between memory and forgetting. Fallen branches collected from the Vistula and the Polish-Belarusian border form a fragile skeleton, carrying the trace of the landscape. Plaster locks these elements together, only for the sculpture to slowly break apart again over time. This cycle of decay is not destruction but transformation. The sculptures, once monumental and still, become porous, fall back into the ground, and root themselves like memory — not to be buried, but to grow differently.
