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In the “You will never walk alone” project I refer to the context of collective performativity related to the Women’s Strike protests. When observing the correlations between politics and urban architecture, I chose a street in which one house became particularly distinguished over the period of the past six years. The mass protests, in which I participated as well, changed my perception of collective experience being mass opposition. The section of Mickiewicza street, which I chose and reproduced on a flag material, is empty today and thus points to how quick our memory fades, how quickly emotions become blurred – originally vivid and shocking, like those from October 2020. This way I allude to Sally Mann’s concept about a landscape haunted by a memory of war, coming from the “Battlefields” photograph series. The part of my work where I invoke the audial sphere of the protests is the contact microphone placed in the project space, which senses the vibrations caused by footsteps of the people passing through the building hall.

 

Mateusz Kowalczyk

Mateusz Kowalczyk – lives and works in Warsaw. Graduated from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, received the Herba Polonica diploma in Prof. Mirosław Bałka’s studio (2020). Laureate of the II Prize under the Hestia Artistic Journey (2019), as part of which he participated in a residency in Rupert in Vilnius. Acted as an assistant in the Studio of Fundamentals of Staging at the Faculty of Media Art for the past year. The area addressed in his practice refers both to the border and ritual experiences in performative actions as well as activist and community actions with the social dimension.