Jakub Gawkowski, Monika Rosińska, Maciej Siuda: Waiting is a Socially Important Topic [INTERVIEW]
Jakub Gawkowski, Monika Rosińska and Maciej Siuda, the authors of the exhibition in the Polish pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2025, which received a prestigious medal, talk about the experience of time and its killing, social inequalities and a new interpretation of craftsmanship. The installation 'Records of Waiting' was considered the most inspiring interpretation of this year's theme of the event.
Anna Cymer: We are meeting shortly before the opening of the London Design Biennale. Your exhibition will appear in the Polish pavilion there. Tell us how the idea for it was born.
Maciej Siuda: Together with Monika and Kuba, we started talking about time as an experience that is, on the one hand, individual (each of us experiences time differently), and on the other –social. We became interested in the fact that we currently have unequal access to time as a resource. Many people suffer from a lack of it every day, while for others, such as the economically privileged or, on the contrary, the socially excluded, free time is, respectively, a superfluous excess, or a burden.
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‘Records of Waiting’, photo by Kuba Celej, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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Monika Rosińska: The exhibition is our response to the theme of this year's edition of the biennale 'Surface Reflections' - it refers to an introverted, personal phenomenon that is close to a human. We focused on the phenomenon of waiting as something prosaic, everyday and universal, which is also conditioned by social dynamics. Some, such as taxi drivers or porters, wait as part of their professional work, for others, such as those stuck in a traffic jam, waiting is a daily frustration. And for a person in crisis of homelessness waiting for a meal or a migrant waiting for a residence permit in Poland – it is something on which their entire life depends. At the exhibition, we propose an intimate story about waiting, touching on internal, individual experiences, in which contemporary phenomena and transformations are reflected.
Anna Cymer: You decided to show or tell this reflection on the feeling and experience of time using craft. This is an ambiguous association.
Jakub Gawkowski: We started with the question of whether and how it is possible to show the passing of time through aesthetics and materiality. Then the topic of carving and whittling appeared. One of the inspirations was a spoon rack – usually a richly decorated wooden slat-shelf for cutlery, which is an important element of traditional craft in Podhale. Such inconspicuous, small objects are a testimony to the richness of traditional ornamentation, and at the same time the effect of a specific relationship with time – they were created as a result of its excess. They could be whittled during the summer months of sheep grazing in the mountain pastures or on winter evenings. From this perspective, an ornament does not have to be just a decoration, it can be viewed as a record of time, a method of its visualization or a unit of measurement. It gains a new function: it becomes a language that can be used to talk about time. This is what became the axis of our concept.
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‘Records of Waiting’, photo Kuba Celej, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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Maciej Siuda: For example, I have a personal experience with whittling, because as a child I often went to the mountains with my parents. During breaks in the hike, on the stops, my dad would give me a penknife and a stick to cut patterns in and thus fill the 'boredom'. So whittling was also a method of spending time for me while waiting to resume climbing.
Monika Rosińska: Craft takes us to a completely different dimension of time. In contrast to the accelerated, dispersed everyday life, the rhythm of manual work is slow, focused, corporeal. It requires presence, patience and repetition. Time in craft is not linear and subordinated to productivity, but circular, seasonal, cyclical; as in nature, from which it originates. Minutes of work stretch into hours, but these are hours full of concentration and commitment. There are also gestures whose effects are not immediately visible, their meaning may only be revealed after years, sometimes decades. In our project, craft becomes not only a method of work, but also a way of thinking about time that is alternative to the logic of rush, productivity and immediacy.
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‘Records of Waiting’, photo by Kuba Celej, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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Anna Cymer: When talking about the process of shaping the exhibition concept, one cannot help but notice your way of working. You work as a team, in which there is no traditional division into roles, there is no boss, curator, set designer, artist. You have adopted a completely different, truly team-based model of working and cooperation.
Jakub Gawkowski: Today, the word 'interdisciplinary' is often overused, but in the case of our team, this term is very appropriate. Our entire project was an experiment, we could not fully predict what effect it would bring. Right at the beginning of the work, we told ourselves: this does not have to work. And this attitude certainly helped us open up to new ways of working and acting, gave us courage to blur roles and interpenetrate disciplines.
Monika Rosińska: And for me, this way of cooperation was something new. We managed to blur the division into curatorial, design and research roles, or conceptual, theoretical and practical ones. They shifted smoothly, which was very stimulating, but it also required a different approach and action from us.
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‘Records of Waiting’, photo Kuba Celej, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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Maciej Siuda: This way of working required us to partially quiet our egos, trust one another, and break certain constructs that we all have in our heads. It is worth adding that teamwork does not only apply to just the three of us. The exhibition was created, among others, thanks to people who took part in the research, who shared their intimate experiences with us, and thanks to almost twenty woodcarvers who made the installation by hand.
Anna Cymer: So tell us about the material side of the exhibition.
Maciej Siuda: The word 'materiality' has a great meaning in this case. In recent years, design has moved away from form and aesthetics. We decided to do the opposite: to look at ornamentation as a tool and see how to use it to talk about the social phenomenon of waiting. The centre of the exhibition is an eight-metre wooden installation, which we call the landscape of Polish waiting. It consists of twelve carved elements. Each of them shows a different situation of waiting in contemporary Poland. Time is represented by means of ornament, its quantity, intensity and expression. These are situations of different orders and durations, from 21 minutes, the average waiting time for an ambulance to arrive, through months of waiting for a psychiatric appointment covered the National Health Fund [Pol. NFZ: Narodowy Fundusz Zdrowia], to the years needed to repay a mortgage.
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‘Records of Waiting’, photo Kuba Celej, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
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Monika Rosińska: A very important part of the exhibition was the research preceding it. Its results defined the materiality of the exhibition and influenced its aesthetics, the ornament appearing here. First, we established cooperation with woodcarvers from Zakopane and the surrounding area, we observed them while making ornaments - we wanted to check whether it was possible to determine how long it takes them to make a given pattern. We studied both experienced master woodcarvers and apprentices. We created an average system in which each ornament represents a given amount of time. With its help, we present these twelve waiting situations in the exhibition.
Jakub Gawkowski: Estimating who and how long is waiting was another research task. We asked representatives of various social groups, professions, people of different ages and in different life situations to share their experience of waiting with us; the people studied kept diaries in which they wrote down their emotions, feelings, but also specific data related to experiencing time and how the waiting process defines their lives. On the one hand, the research was based on numbers and statistical data, but on the other hand, we also took into account individual feelings, emotions and experiences. The study included people with very diverse life experiences of waiting, including a doctor, a porter, a food delivery person, among others.
Monika Rosińska: We wanted to maintain these two perspectives: individual and systemic. On the one hand, we have statistical data: how long the average wait is for a psychiatric appointment, for a state office decision, or for a loan repayment. On the other hand, we have personal stories in which time does not flow, but stretches, thickens, and lengthens. Waiting is accompanied by extremely different emotions: from frustration, helplessness and weariness to anticipation and hope. We wanted to show that waiting is not just an empty break between events, but an important dimension of social life.
Anna Cymer: In the pieces created by your team and the craftsmen invited to collaborate, one can see certain recognizable motifs, inspirations from Podhale ornamentation. But these are not copies – the patterns you developed have a more universal character.
Monika Rosińska: Of course, we were aware of the 'genre weight' of Podhale design, once treated as the one in which 'true Polishness, national style' survived. Ornament has this past and legacy, it is important. However, we deal with ornament as a universal language, not one marked by identity, we were not interested in its nostalgic or sentimental features. We reached for these recognizable, understandable, close elements to tell a broader social story. We made them a visual language to talk about time as a resource to which not everyone has equal access.
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar