Joanna Rajkowska, Andrew Dixon RHIZOPOLIS

Rhizopolis by Joanna Rajkowska
Artists: Joanna Rajkowska, Andrew Dixon

Curator: Anna Mituś

Rhizopolis by Joanna Rajkowska tells a story of coexistence. This city of roots is an underground world into which we should descend to consider our dependence on biological processes, both outside our own body and within.

The Kalisz presentation of Joanna Rajkowska’s renowned project is a story about Rhizopolis, using the languages of film, sound, and photography. Instead of simply moving the installation to another space, its idea is transferred to a new location. For this purpose, the artist used sensitive means of registering image and sound: extra large-format photography with highly accurate reproduction and a recording of a performance made by the Rajkowska’s musician partner, Andrew Dixon.

The first part of the exhibition is a film of the Dark Solstice performance in Rhizopolis on August 7, 2021. The performer’s naked body is buried under bark chippings. The artist’s vocal, fed through digital effects and amplified, resonates through the surrounding space of the installation. Sound circulates throughout the room, as the camera’s gaze glides over the roots. The space fills with the intensity and persistence of the life of the roots. The eyes adjust to the dimness. The performance lasts a few minutes – it is worth getting comfortable to let the vibrations flow from the head into the body to the feet.

From here we enter the interior of Rhizopolis. Surrounded by the photos of the underground life of trees, usually invisible to the human eye, we better understand the sound of the first room. We look at the inverted landscape. The world of the roots thickens at the level of our eyes. It reflects the world above the ground. We imagine trees that no longer exist. They have been cut down. Our eyes follow their threadlike bodies emerging from the darkness, catching on their porous structures. It tangles in countless, delicate combinations.

Widok wystawy Joanny Rajkowskiej Rhizopolis, 01.02 – 08.08.2021, fot. Jędrzej Sokołowski, archiwum Zachęty  – Narodowej Galerii Sztuki.

The root balls together with the stumps, were intercepted by Rajkowska, thanks to the help of foresters, while felling was still in progress.

Foresters guided Rajkowska to the piles of stumps with their roots that remained after the industrially valuable parts of felled trees had been taken. By using them, the artist also removed them from the energy production cycle: they would have been chipped and burned in furnaces. Instead they have been used to produce other types of benefits, they have become part of the production of knowledge that can reveal a lot about ourselves. Accustomed to considering any activity in Western, anthropocentric terms of profit and growth, we learn a different lesson in Rhizopolis. This is a lesson in compassion. It flows from an image of the world that, in order to understand itself, had to go underground. Other strategies work here. One of them is mycorrhiza, one of the main forms of mutualism, i.e. mutual symbiosis, occurring, for example, between a tree and the thallus of a fungus. The former receives water rich in mineral salts and microelements, and the latter carbohydrates. Another is commensalism, which means to gain without harming others. Both assimilation tactics have been mastered by root hairs, the tiniest and most distant root structures. It is with their help that plants take food, water and oxygen from the soil, some of the cells have even developed suicidal mechanisms to give shelter to the life hidden beneath them.

Widok wystawy Joanny Rajkowskiej Rhizopolis, 01.02 – 08.08.2021, fot. Jędrzej Sokołowski, archiwum Zachęty  – Narodowej Galerii Sztuki.

Originally, Rhizopolis was created at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art as an entire installation. It was an mesmerizing environment operating within the aesthetics of immersion. In the gallery, Rajkowska recreated the sensual, multidimensional reality of the forest underground, with all the richness of intense sensations, smell and humidity, and playing with the perception that arises when we stop relying on sight as the only sense of orientation. The author herself described it as a film set in which every person entering the space of the installation becomes the director and actor of his or her own film about the coming catastrophe. The end of the Earth as we know it. A film in a completely literal sense, because the installation was equipped with cameras relaying delayed footage to the adjacent room. Each person could see themselves on the screen, wandering among the roots hanging from the ceiling.

The parallel reality created by the artist moves away from other post-apocalyptic visions. Rajkowska’s science fiction replaces tales of cosmic expansion with a new chthonic myth. In order to survive, we must learn empathy. The underground life of trees is also a story about the processes taking place inside our own bodies. We cannot survive long without the mutualism that occurs between our tissues and the colonies of microorganisms that inhabit us. “We will not run away from here, because we have our bodies,” says Urszula Zajączkowska to the artist in the conversation that accompanied the creation of the installation. When we fantasize about the future, perhaps we should observe more closely the bodily relations from which we emerge as mere fleeting subjects. This is why the artist abandons the rhetorical scheme of suspense and the narrative logic of the development of the action in her film vision. In the stretched, contemplative, horizontal Rhizopolis continuum, we are closer to the east, with its notions of closeness and embodiment.

Rhizopolis by Joanna Rajkowska is a place where we should reflect on how privileged we are. The privilege of understanding the world of other species and that we ourselves are one of the products of the Earth. When we cross the border of biological competition, we must see “the others,” as Urszula Zajączkowska calls plants in an interview with the artist. Therefore, when creating the city of roots, the artist stated: “I try to make people aware of a fundamental interdependence with other persons, such as trees”.

Anna Mituś.

Joanna Rajkowska, a versatile artist, is best known for her work in public space, where she uses real-life situations, energies, organisms and materials to construct sites, installations and ephemeral actions. She utilises elements as diverse as plants, buildings, found objects, water, smoke or sound. De-familiarizing, de-humanizing and relating are her operating devices. She is interested in the limitations and the limiting of human activities, multiplicity of agencies and human and non-human relations. The outcomes of her works range from urban axes and architectural projects, through geological fantasies, excavation sites to underwater sculptures. Both alongside and separately, she produces films, photographs and models.

Most of her works happen, live and age in public space. Thus, her practice embraces all the entities involved as well as their relations, including organic and inorganic beings. The artist understands her projects like organisms, as she focuses on matter in its molecular or cellular dimension, its life cycle, growth and ageing. With a strong conviction that we, as humans, have failed to produce a viable, sustainable culture, she often confronts historical and sociopolitical contexts with the lives of species other than human. Tinted with disappointment, her work visualizes and questions the notion of the nature-culture divide.

Andrew Dixon, was previously believed extinct until recently rediscovered under a stone in the forests of central Poland. He has since been seen playing a single instrument with a single string, performing either solo or in the duo (or trio) Mutant Goat with white voice singer Ola Kozioł in stone circles, synagogues, prehistoric mounds, caves and forests.

Organizer:
The Jan Tarasin Art Gallery in Kalisz, Culture Institution of Kalisz

Exhibition architecture:
Hubert Kielan

Graphic design of the exhibition identification:
Daniel Szwed

Media Patronage:
Magazyn SZUM, Notes Na 6 Tygodni, Radio POZNAŃ, Radio Centrum Kalisz, portal Calisia.pl oraz Ziemia Kaliska

Gallery partners:
Ergo Hestia, Polifarb Kalisz S.A., M&P ALKOHOLE I WINA ŚWIATA.