MO: As you’ve mentioned, ‘The Sculptresses’ is yet another of your collaborative pieces. Pursuing the idea of sisterhood in your work sounds noble, and nowadays we utter words such as ‘care’ or ‘collectivity’ with ease. I, however, am also interested in difficulties, dark sides, falterings, lapses, aporias. What’s the biggest challenge involved in artistic collaboration? What does partnership mean to you?
MF: Sisterhood is a really broad subject and an ever more popular catchword. Several years ago, when we were beginning our collaborations and got interested in the topic, the word seemed quite unfamiliar. For me, it was a space of curiosity, of the potential to name relations in a different way than through the term ‘brotherhood’. I sensed that we could speak differently about the support, power and dark sides of women’s collaboration. Nowadays, hearing the word ‘sisterhood’, I see women’s circles associated with care and empathy, but my experience tells me that it’s one of the many faces of sisterhood, which in reality is more complex. I believe that this term now functions in a simplified way and can easily be hijacked as a commercial slogan.
WP: Magda and I delved into sisterhood because we didn’t know what it meant. I graduated a girls-only school, where sisterhood shimmered with all its colours, to put it half-jokingly. While going into the topic, we asked ourselves a multitude of questions, for instance about how we could respect one another’s individuality. We noticed that we tend to consider differentiation to be more common among the male gender than among the female gender. I understood, for instance, that there are more male iconic figures in my thinking than female ones. On the level of choreography, we explore sisterhood exactly as a kind of great degree of independence in something we cultivate together. We’re interested in collective work that doesn’t cause a loss of singularity. The more individual we are, the more common our goal is. Magda’s and my collaboration has worked out perfectly naturally. We can tackle even the most difficult subjects through dialogue; we give each other space so that we can hear one another. Sometimes we don’t hear one another, and so we come back to each other, saying ‘I need more time; I need to wrap my head around this’. While working with the body, we must take on the fact that our bodies are our archives. Collaboration is the ability to set boundaries, to search for methods with the use of which these boundaries can be set before they are transgressed. We make use of the tools of creative feedback, communication without violence, at the same time giving expression to the emotions rubbing off on us. Sisterhood shimmers in The Sculptresses, sometimes exposing competitiveness in conflict with care, sometimes reinforcing it. Perhaps we wrongly assume that care cannot also constitute power…
MF: … and, on the other hand, care can also constitute violence.
WP: Perhaps that’s why we’re interested in the process of sisterhood rather than its representation.
MF: Process understood as a quality of sisterhood. To me, it’s most prominently incorporated in The Sculptresses. Getting started on the project, we would go to the gym three times a week, lift, perform a great number of actions on each other. Then I realised I was pregnant and that I wouldn’t be able to do certain things anymore, so the process of building strength was supported by care and alertness on both sides. The proportions of our activities changed. Weronika was open enough for me to feel safe. I felt that I could work creatively with this condition, that pregnancy didn’t exclude me from our project, and that our tools enabled us to achieve what we wanted without my having to lift heavier weights than I was able to. For me, fluidity is a crucial aspect of sisterhood in the creative process. We set off from a certain point, we set ourselves a direction, but we both reacted, in concert and on an ongoing basis, to what the circumstances brought us. We didn’t attempt to forcibly push anything forward in a certain direction.