CONDUCTED WORKSHOPS:
1. Daniel Sobota: Recovering the Lived Body
In my workshop, I would like to return to the history of Sokołowsko as a famous place of great sanatorium, a place where work with the body was conducted primarily according to the scientific methods of its time. We know that the sanatorium regime included walks, rest cures, frequent meals, medical examinations, and careful bodily hygiene. Yet, through the process of modern medicalization described by Foucault, the body came to be understood as matter and resource, instrument and energy – something that could be scientifically managed and governed. Recovery meant restoring the body to a state of “normal” functioning. Of course, all of this was entangled in the network of power relations and the socio-political order of the period, vividly portrayed, among others, by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain.
What I would like to focus on in this workshop is the awakening of awareness of bodily patterns and limitations that have emerged through the technicization of the body – both over the long history of humanity and within the individual history of each person. The body has been shaped, educated, disciplined, and trained according to various cultural and social demands. Recovery would mean not so much meeting a set of parameters imposed by scientific and technical norms, but rather returning to the living body as a site that exists beyond the opposition of health and illness. Through working with the body during the workshop, I would like to create a temporary opening of „flesh”: beginning from lived, internal bodily experience – from the body-mind – and seeking, if only for a moment, to free the body from some of its everyday constraints, especially those imposed by mental and cultural conditioning.
The workshop is therefore conceived as an attempt to de-technologize, de-objectify, and liberate the body-flesh (Leib), allowing participants to reconnect with its primary experiential dimensions. These dimensions are often obscured and neutralized by habitual ways of using and understanding the body, thereby limiting the emergence of creative impulses that are essential to all forms of artistic and intellectual work. To facilitate this process, I will draw upon my experience of body-based practices developed through various performative and theatrical projects.
2. Weronika Wronecka – Books to be judged by their cover: A workshop on the cover as a work in itself and on the epistemological status of the art object
The title inverts the familiar admonition not to judge a book by its cover, in the manner of a serious methodological proposal: the relation between surface and depth is, after all, never innocent, it organizes how we know things, and how we pretend to know them. This workshop examines that relation across two adjacent fields – art and philosophy – where the question of what lies beneath the visible is particularly fraught. The question, in this sense, concerns a technique of knowing that is also a technē of making – two operations that the residency takes to be inseparable.
Contemporary art, following its long entanglement with conceptualism, has come to rely on a kind of philosophical scaffolding. Discourse is no longer external to the work; it is part of its material. Yet this proximity to philosophy is uneven. Theoretical references often function as labels – markers of legitimacy attached to objects whose connection to the cited thought remains decorative. At the same time, the art object preserves what might be called a promising secret: the assumption that a silent material thing, placed within the institution of art, harbours a meaning, a depth, a value registered at the threshold of the mystical. The viewer is invited to pour content into the surface and to call the result the work.
What makes this condition peculiar is that it operates as a form of mysticism dressed in the vocabulary of rationality. The promise is articulated through theoretical citation,
methodological description, and the diction of critical analysis – yet what is being promised is, in the end, an unverifiable depth, a hidden interior whose existence is a matter of trust rather than evidence. The workshop takes this paradox seriously rather than ironically. In this sense, every work of art operates as a cover. We judge the book – the assumed content – on the basis of what we see, and what we see is often what we are willing to project.
The lectures will address the problem of knowledge in art and in philosophy: how the two disciplines understand evidence, surface, and demonstration, and where their respective certainties dissolve. The practical work will move between drawing, writing, and design. Participants will produce a series of covers for books that do not exist – covers intended to be judged on their own terms, covers that do not sell a book but communicate something instead.
Drawing will function as a way of establishing a certain field of signification, of sketching out a horizon of meaning, of marking the territory, of calling a certain universe into being – rather than illustration: drawing as protocol, drawing as contradiction, drawing as a way of thinking through the limits of the visible. Writing will involve the invention of titles, the travesty of existing literary, editorial, and poetic traditions, and an attention to language as the first material of the cover.
A particular case worth examining is the difference between the untitled artwork and the untitled book. In contemporary art, Untitled has become a respectable, almost institutional gesture – it signals refusal, openness, or a deliberate withholding of the interpretive key. In publishing, by contrast, a book without a title is closer to scandal than to subtlety: it cannot be catalogued, sold, or shelved. The asymmetry between these two refusals reveals how each field treats the relation between an object and its name or epistemic status, and what each is willing to surrender in order to remain itself. We will work with this asymmetry directly – proposing covers for books that have no title, and titles for books that will never exist.
The history of book design offers a remarkable archive of solutions to the problem of the surface. We will study some historical vocabularies, each of which constitutes a distinct theory of what a cover is and what kind of object a book is supposed to be. Each of many vocabularies can be read as both a design language and an epistemic claim – a particular position on what a surface is allowed to know. We will revisit them in the second register, as theories of knowledge: – the cover as fetish (tactile knowledge, knowledge as possession); – as sketch (allusive, deliberately incomplete); – as system (classificatory, belonging to a canon); – as advertisement (the knowledge of a promise); – as autonomous object(visual knowledge as equal in standing to textual knowledge); – as trend (knowledge as fashion, as generational signal). The cover, in our reading, occupies several thresholds at once: between book and sculptural object, between information and secrecy, between function and fetish. These thresholds are the workspace.
The drawings, concepts, and design proposals developed during the workshop will form the basis of a series of quasi-editorial objects – books whose covers are the whole of the book, presented in an exhibition at Nowa Scena UAP in Poznań and subsequently at AVU in Prague. Each participant will leave the residency with their own cover design; together, the series will function as a small library of objects refusing the usual division of labour between surface and depth.
3. Michał Rzecznik – Three paradoxes: on the nature of comics
A workshop in which we'll explore the distinctive features of comics, master the basics of its language, and create our own visual narratives – all under the patronage of Zeno of Elea.
4. Adam Mazur – Some meetings with Zygmunt Rytka: the afterlife of a Conceptual Artist
Zygmunt Rytka is not only a foundational figure in the cultural identity of Sokołowsko, but also one of the most compelling Polish artists working across the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. During the 1970s, Rytka developed a critical and self-reflexive practice that examined, challenged, and conceptualized the institutional frameworks of the art world, as in his well-known series "Some Meetings Catalog". In subsequent decades, his attention shifted toward questions of ecology and the complex relationships between human beings, technological apparatuses, and the natural environment.
Equally distinctive was Rytka's understanding of artistic practice itself – one largely devoid of grandiose gestures or heroic rhetoric, and instead grounded in process, relationality, and a sustained engagement with the material conditions of media. His work consistently foregrounded the specificity of the photographic camera, the video apparatus, the found object, and various forms of low-circulation publishing, including artists' books, zines, ephemera, and other modestly distributed printed matter.
To encounter Rytka in Sokołowsko is, in many ways, inevitable. The introductory lecture and accompanying workshop activities are conceived as an invitation to deepen one's own artistic practice through engagement with his position and methodology. Drawing on key works, contexts, themes, questions, tools, and sites associated with the artist, the programme approaches Rytka not as a historical figure to be commemorated, but as an active interlocutor whose practice continues to offer productive ways of thinking and working in the present.
And it is precisely as an interlocutor that he confronts us with an uncomfortable question – that of his afterlife. A great artist lives forever, a good one dies many times over, while the existence of a weak one can be compared, at best, to purgatory. In this workshop we will not be concerned with the market appreciation of a work, nor with the tributes paid by the friends and relatives of historical artists. Equally uninteresting are the museum and storage afterlives of works – the gradual transformation of an artwork into an object in the permanent collection of a national institution. Taking Rytka as our case study, we will take up the question of possible forms of commemoration. Can a work be revived after the artist's lifetime in a way that still makes artistic sense, and if so, how? Can the end of the career itself be a conceptual work in which an oeuvre culminates, completes itself, and receives something – well, what exactly? What is to be done with a gone conceptualist?
5. Anna Fidos – Art of Dreaming: Ontological Introduction
The workshop is based on the idea that dreams aren’t only an epiphenomenon of the sleeping mind, but a rich source for art and the foundation of philosophy. Through collage and creative writing, we will immerse ourselves in the multi-layered illogicality of dreams, giving it form in a new language of expression. No prior artistic or philosophical experience is required – all that is needed is a willingness to follow the strange logic of the subconscious, wherever it may lead.
6. Luiza Prado – A Plein Air Protocol for Atmospheric Healing
In the nineteenth century, Brehmer chose this site for his sanatorium because he believed mountain air could help treat tuberculosis. The atmosphere itself was a key technology in Brehmer’s healing protocol; a materialization of the invisible.
As early as 1970, engineers used the symbol of a cloud to represent "any unspecifiable or unpredictable network." An amorphous combination of connected elements, a threshold governed by protocols: here is where we know our cables go in, here is where they come out; where lies between is the cloud. Today that symbol names our digital infrastructure, which presents itself the same way: weightless, invisible yet ever-present. The cloud is not up there, however; it is here, with us, as cables, server farms, and heat–one of the largest consumers of coal energy on the planet, responsible for a significant and growing share of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is material systems dressed as weather, and it is changing the weather.
Pairs of artists and philosophers will move slowly between the sanatorium ruins and the surrounding forest, attending to this threshold. They are listening, smelling, touching, practicing what Anna Tsing calls the arts of noticing, and what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls reciprocal attention. What is our atmosphere–digital or not–still carrying? What does it mean to breathe here now? Each pair returns with elements for a protocol for atmospheric healing, proposed in one of four forms:
A score: a set of instructions for an act not yet performed.
A map: a situated account of what circulates, what is blocked, what finds no way through. A drawing: an act of attention that does not claim to explain.
A carrier bag: an archive of what was gathered: fragments, specimens, traces, notes. A container, not a monument.
With reference to Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015); Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity (North Atlantic Books, 2021); Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton UP, 2015); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed, 2013); Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1986).
7. John Hill – The Syntegrity Protocol: building the infosphere
Following the protocol devised by the British cybernetician and management guru Stafford Beer, this Syntegration will help organise the group into a perfectly balanced 'infosphere', where information flows evenly through the group without hierarchy or bottlenecks.
Participants will first learn the principles of Team Syntegrity, then build a three-dimensional diagram of the group itself, which will allow it to organise into overlapping sub-systems that can each address specific questions or problems.
Beer's intention with the syntegrity protocol was to allow diverse groups to come to agreement about complex issues, rendering them beyond dispute. For TECHNE, the workshop will allow participants to share and discuss ideas and positions that may be key to the week, and to start thinking about how they might organise for discussion and collaboration. It is a good way to begin, as it brings everyone into conversation about ideas right at the start.