'Each Time I Aim to Produce a Specific Body': An Interview With Mary Szydłowska

szydlowska_ionic_fot.valeriia_shcherbina5-s.jpg, default, Rehearsals for Mary Szydłowska's performance 'Ionic', IKOB museum_,_ photo: Valeriia Shcherbina, center, #000000

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Hermetic working environments block rather than protect me, says Mary Szydłowska, performer and choreographer. ‘Ionic’, her new performance, will be presented on 25 and 26 November 2023 as part of the finale of Marcin Dudek’s ‘Akumulatory’ (Batteries) exhibition at the IKOB Museum for Contemporary Art in Eupen, Belgium.

Marcelina Obarska: Marcin Dudek’s ‘Akumulatory’ exhibition at IKOB is dominated by large-scale installations taking up the exhibition space. How did you feel in that space? How does your performance form a dialogue with his exhibition?

Mary Szydłowska: When I work within the context of a gallery or museum space and in interaction with the works created by visual artists, I choose, in a sense, to temporarily inhabit the exhibition space.

For me, the process of exploring spaces and artworks along with the possibilities they open up happens by queering time. I tend to take quite a long time in exhibition spaces listening, observing and kind of being-with visual objects. My actions, which typically take place after a long period of non-action, often begin by seeing the artworks in ways that are different to how they appear to exhibition visitors.

Marcin Dudek’s artworks are indeed large and thus very physical, but their physicality is related not only to their scale but also to how they were produced. I see in them the presence of the physical labour that was put into their creation, and I encounter this effort, the movement of the artist’s body. Dudek’s work is connected to memory and the past; it refers not only to a specific biographical time but also to specific historical time – namely, the period of transformation in Poland. My choreographic practice is strongly focused on materiality – in the spirit of the new materialism, I’m interested in the agency held by different materials. I wonder how these various materialities inform my own body and movement, what they tell me about the artworks they co-create and how I can establish a kind of alliance with them. Ultimately, I feel that in working with the materiality of Marcin’s installations, I’m working directly with time, with transience, with the process of decay or reconstruction. I also look at the negative space – the space between the artworks. I map out the distances between the different artworks and architectural elements within the space – the walls, the windows. It’s a kind of choreographic measurement of space. I’m interested in disrupting conventional perception typical in the gallery or museum context and extending it in many directions simultaneously.

MO: Your interest in the new materialism and the agency of matter – including non-human matter – was also manifest in your previous works. In the diptych ‘SOAK’ and ‘LEAKS’ you focused on the practice of cleaning, the gestures involved in that process and the materiality of liquids.

MS: The following passage from the Brazilian-born, French-based choreographer Volmir Cordeiro’s book Ex-corpo is very close to my heart: the dancer explodes in a space to see whether the space will explode in him/her. I understand the relationship between the body and space as fluid. I see the body as a capacious but leaky container. In SOAK and LEAKS I was interested not only in the nature of gestures performed by the human body but especially in the moment when we physically touch space. What happens when we clean, when we brush our hand over a dusty surface? What kind of information flows at a molecular level from the body when it becomes part of a space? I think this is why Marcin invited me to collaborate. He saw LEAKS and pointed out that I treat the gesture of cleaning, a gesture that comes from the register of everyday practices, neither representatively nor figuratively. Rather, cleaning as a gesture was for me an object of reflection on what it activates in the body and what kind of relationality occurs between the body and the world. In that context, the body is porous: it allows a lot to flow through it; it takes in a lot and gives a lot back to the environment in which it moves.

Rehearsals for Mary Szydłowska's performance 'Ionic', IKOB museum_,_ photo: Valeriia Shcherbina

MO: Where did the title ‘Ionic’ come from?

MS: The starting point was Marcin’s suggestion that I work on a performance in relation to his installation Zakład [Hair Salon], which functions as a ‘memory box’ and is literally a hairdressing salon that once belonged to his sister, Anna Dudek-Gajewska, and was then relocated from the Podgórze district of Kraków. Marcin renovated his sister’s old salon and transferred the old furnishings, after very little transformation, into the museum space. His first intuition was that I should work with the gestures of everyday life. When I started looking at the process of hairdressing – which, like cleaning, combines labour and care – I came across information – common knowledge really – about ionic hairdryers. Simply put, ionic technology ensures that your hair does not become frizzy when dried. In ads for modern hairdryers, this technology is visually represented as a glow or a light, either pink or blue. I like this title because in a way it describes the force present in the negative spaces between Marcin's artworks that I’m interested in. This is the force that makes atoms come together and attract each other – thanks to their opposite charges, they can achieve new configurations. Especially in the context of the exhibition’s title – Akumulatory – which refers to charging, accumulating, and giving energy back. But also in relation to the exhibition’s themes of the past, violence, fan communities, self-transformation. Perhaps our generational differences, different biographies and artistic practices can meet precisely through ionic technology…? In chemistry, the essence of an ionic bond is the transfer of an electron from one atom to another, a kind of necessary exchange.

MO: Did you follow through with your initial idea about being present in the relocated hair salon, or was it just an initial intuition?

MS: At first I told Marcin that I’m not the kind of person to work on a commissioned theme. Although he didn’t ask me to develop a specific theme and showed me a lot of trust, I did stress that my works result from thorough research and observing the body within a specific space. Therefore, my artworks are never created in the context of a theatrical black box. I’m not interested in introducing ideas that were developed in a sterile dance studio into a space. When I started working at the IKOB, I had a feeling that Marcin’s installations strongly provoke the figurative imagination because their scale is the scale experienced by humans on a daily basis – they’re actual rooms you could enter. This was quite difficult for me. I realised that because these works are so full of human beings, the appearance of a performing body in their vicinity could quickly produce linear narratives – and I had no interest in that.

MO: Paradoxically, human absence can equal the presence of a certain phenomenon.

MS: The philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa wrote that gestures of care are present most strongly through their absence. However, it seems to me that, when it comes to these installations, I’m working with ghosts – through ‘matter’ towards ‘ghostly matters’. One part of the exhibition is the work Akumulator, a reference to DIY gyms installed in the basements of high-rise blocks of flats. At some point, I felt a desire to work precisely with physical power, the representativeness of a strong body. The performativity of masculinity often appears in Marcin’s work, and I wanted to examine it and work with it more directly in the context of my own fluid identity as well. But as I’ve said before, I work not with themes but rather through and with the space and the multiple layers of what it has to offer.

MO: Bringing movement into exhibition spaces is an important part of your practice. For some time now, choreography has been more boldly present in museums and galleries, and also institutions seem to consider it simply as quite attractive. What can both sides – the field of choreography and that of exhibitions – gain from such interventions?

MS: It’s interesting what you say about being attractive. It seems to me that the choreographic gesture is quite good at ‘hacking’ institutional spaces. Still, I find it rather difficult to secure good working conditions in galleries or museums. In Belgium, very few museums choose to show performances, often for security reasons and sometimes also because of the lack of suitable conditions. There are times when I do my warm-ups in an office space. At IKOB, for example, I sometimes use the director’s office before I start rehearsing in the exhibition space. These are some harsh realities, negotiable depending on the rules of the institution. On the other hand, I do indeed feel a genuine need to enter into a dialogue with other artworks, because in this way I reveal the dimension of artistic work understood as ‘labour’. Exhibitions rarely generate a reflection on what kind of work really goes into what we’re looking at. I find this fascinating. I feel that by spending hours with installations, collages, paintings in different locations, I arrive – through embodied knowledge – at how much time and effort was put into the artwork and how it was produced. I like to meet artists through their work; I typically work in dialogue with them, and I’ve also always asked myself what else can happen between the artwork and the viewer. In a sense, my performances bleed into this negative space, into the gaps and refractions between the artworks and the viewers.

MO: There’s an element of unpredictability inherent in performances within museum and gallery spaces. As you’ve said, they bridge the gaps between the artworks and the museum or gallery visitors. What about unforeseen reactions, disruptions or interference? How do you deal with this aspect of your practice?

MS: The first word that comes to mind is ‘vitality’. I think of the ways in which my artworks become organisms that react to an existing ecosystem. Although I do work with choreography that’s to some extent written in advance, each time I aim to produce a specific body, a new kind of relational logic. These relations are always filtered through their surroundings – they’re very flexible. I value being able to respond to what’s around me, and I don’t think I can imagine working in more hermetic environments – it would block rather than protect me. The way I work prepares me for these contingencies. I often rehearse during museum hours. Sometimes these rehearsals are quite imperceptible because they’re not about recreating the entire course of the performance but rather about inhabiting the space. Sometimes I spend many hours in such a space, and afterwards my body carries a specific kind of energy and attentiveness, which perhaps also influences how other people move through the space. In 2022 I presented LEAKS as part of the exhibition titled Niepokój Przychodzi o Zmierzchu (Anxiety Comes at Dusk), curated by Magda Komornicka at the Zachęta, and it was one of the more unpredictable experiences because the performance took place in the main lobby of the Zachęta building. I’m interested in working with the peripheral, and the periphery is infinite, so I can always find a space for myself in it.

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