Today, we are facing the threat to nature and the presupposed stable cycle that founded ancient philosophy. Many of us have lost all connection with nature and live in the anxiety of its inevitable collapse. By travelling, consuming, heating, we leave a constantly renewed carbon footprint behind us that reflects the condition of the Earth. We are responsible for the destruction of our environment, but can our attitude towards nature change without restoring our relationship with it? It is therefore necessary to rediscover the totality of all things as they can be the objects of our senses.
Since 2019, Wiktoria Wojciechowska has been researching for The Study of Traces, a project, mixing installation, photography and performance, to create imprints of natural elements on the body, ephemeral sculptures on the skin, coming from branches, leaves or grass, symbols of an entanglement with nature. Two organic materials - the skin and the plant - influence each other. They create a surface of connection - and a contact, which leaves visible evidence on the skin. The trace is symbolic, carrying its own time and form, only existing with the elasticity of the skin and the blood circulation.
The actions of The Study of Traces generate experiences that has to be shared with others. The ‘structure’ in which the visitor can experience, touch and rest on natural materials, will enable these experiences.
Place your face on the cold stone, look into the darkness of the cold stone, look with closed eyes, smell the ground.
Place your hand, find a space for your fingers, touch, feel the softness of the green stone, feel the roughness of the brown stone.
The project Imprint - Sculptures uses stones collected in nature, as a catalyst for experiences; a project born from the cultural meanings and values of stones, the belief in their supernatural property, drawn on the geological transformations that bear witness to the Earth’s history.
The stones are collected locally from abandoned or active quarries. They contain various elements, fossils or varieties of minerals, sparkling flints, chrysoprase, calcite…
They are all imperfect, too hard or too soft, heterogeneous in their composition.
The forms are simple, inspired by the shape of the found stones or boulders from a natural site. They match parts of the body, but remain raw enough not to impose themselves as a representation of the human body. By playing with relief, carving and polishing, these forms can be intuitively identified. The sculptures exist only through a physical interaction. They mobilize the passer-by, inviting him to do his own performance, like a ritual act that would cure him of his own ’’amnesia of nature’’. In exchange, the stone itself is polished and modified by multiple contacts.
These objects are inspired by primitive sculpture and evoke, in their ritual function, the ex-voto of the healing temples found in all Europe.
The sculpture is the stone, the body, and the space in-between.