EVERYTHING CHANGES, NOTHING DISAPPEARS
2021
soil, water, textile, metal
7m x 7m x 6m
Wieniawski Park, Poznań, PL
in collaboration with Iwo Borkowicz

Site-specific installation made by the use of the soil dug directly on the spot – the public park. As an independent artistic project created for the MALTA Festival Poznań, the installation was also an arena for the open-call program Zaklepane / Ground Rules, co-curated by the authors. After days of festival, soil came back to its initial place, filling the hole and leaving the space of the park as it was before.

Seeing a heap of sand on the construction site, you often don’t see the pit which from it came, several hundred kilometers away. All things have their pit, their resource, and origin.
Installation/fortress raised from the soil in Wieniawski Park is a reflection of the circulation of matter, and its constant movement. Situated in an area of public space, the place was cut out of it – the brutality of this act exposes the anthropocentric rules of the game and the way we perceive Earth as an infinite resource.

Like children playing Scattergories – I cut out a piece of earth with a knife, an area in a public park, proclaiming it my temporary property.
I appropriate the surface: a piece of the Earth’s crust, a city, a park plot based on a local zoning plan. I mark the boundaries of the territory on a map. I seize the space above it – the void to be defined and filled, the arena for potential events. All goods I find in the area, from hundred-year-old trees to bottle caps and butt-ends.
The underground is mine, along with all living organisms, billions of geobionts, and geophiles. I rule natural resources, elements of inanimate nature, reaching to the very core.
I declare independence standing on the ground formed with human hands. I build a fortress with it.