video still

POST

2026, video, color, sound, duration: 1'47''

Video commissioned by the FRSK Foundation as part of the Ciała pamięci (Bodies of Memory) project.
The project was funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan with support from the European Union – NextGenerationEU.

Wersja polska opisu.

The back is a symbolic space of the past — a site where fear, sadness, and invisible experiences accumulate. The area between the shoulder blades, inaccessible to one’s own gaze and difficult to touch, resembles early formative experiences that are not always present in memory. The past does not exist simply “behind us”; it continues to operate in the present, shaping bodily posture, tension, and patterns of response.

Our bodies also carry the experiences of previous generations and collective histories. The space of the back functions as a blind spot — a hidden presence, invisible information, a symbolic shadow zone of desires, fears, and inherited mechanisms acting beyond awareness. What remains hidden often operates more strongly than what is consciously named.

In my video performance, the action is reduced to a minimum. The body lies motionless in a side position, while a single gesture takes place: a hand writes the word “BYŁO” (“IT WAS”) on the back. The inscription is temporary, existing only as a fragile trace between memory and disappearance.

The lying position remains ambivalent. It may suggest rest and regeneration, but also helplessness or withdrawal. These states often coexist in processes of transformation, especially when moving beyond familiar strategies and learned patterns. Here, stillness becomes both a gesture of withdrawal and a condition for attentiveness — not resignation, but a strategy that allows confrontation with what remains unseen.