Sea-buckthorn Heap, the artist’s latest and probably most interesting work, started in 2018 and is still continuing today. It’s an attempt to answer the questions about the interlacing of ecology, economics and politics which were provoked by Center for the Living Things. However, this time it has a concrete geographic and social foundation – the rehabilitated areas of Greater Poland’s opencast mines.
Diana Lelonek, Sea-buckthorn Heap, photo: courtesy of the artist and lokal_30 gallery These areas, made barren due to the mining industry’s activities and turning into steppes because of climate change, are not very welcoming to most plant species. However, one plant feels at home there. Fortunately for humans, it is a plant which is especially rich in vitamins and anti-oxidants – sea-buckthorn. In her project, Lelonek advocates for the region to be rebranded as a producer of sea-buckthorn-based products. Jams and juices made from the plant are, at the same time, an answer to the regional impasse, a medium for speaking about the region’s products and, finally, yet another product of capitalism – no longer based on heavy industries and carbon but on premium regional eco-products. The latter aspect is the most interesting and enriches the work with an unexpectedly autocratic character.
In 2018 Diana Lelonek won the Polityka Passport award ‘for an original and artistic analysis of the threats posed by modern civilisation. For sensibly engaged art which questions the anthropocentric point of view’. Shortly after the 26th awards gala, the artist told Magazyn Szum:
These days it's difficult to remain indifferent towards the growing dangers. I'm mainly associated with ecological movements, and I can see that more and more artists are entering this space. For example, many protests, such as the Strike For Earth, have ‘artivist’ sections. People from different backgrounds, not necessarily related to the art world, appear there.
How to talk about the end, about change and leaving? How do we get used to the accompanying sense of danger, so that it does not overwhelm us? Diana Lelonek posed these and other questions in the Raport (Report) exhibition, which focused on finding both answers and a language to discuss climate change.
Lelonek's narrative creates a counterbalance to the insistent nature of media reports on the imminent catastrophe. The artist not only talks about the effects of the global warming on an easier to grasp, local scale, but also actively tries to counteract them. Which is why instead of spending money on publishing the exhibition catalogue, Lelonek allocated funds towards an installation of a photovoltaic screen on the gallery's roof. Although the primary role of the solar panel is being an alternative source energy used to power the exhibition, it is also a form of protest against artistic overproduction. The installation itself was seen as a performance, recorded and presented as part of the exhibition. Meanwhile the gallery's roof became an extension of the Report.
The exhibition was also a reflection on aworld without birds. Visitors had the chance to listen to the song of a nightingale as well as other various extinct species. The intimate space of the BWA Gallery in Bydgoszcz featured a photographic altar devoted to the death of birds. In the hall there was a stand with sea-buckthorn juice obtained from plants that grow in areas devastated by coal mining. The project was first presented at the exhibition Najpiękniejsza Katastrofa / The Most Beautiful Catastrophe (2018).
In 2019, Diana Lelonek's installation was placed in the Botanical Garden of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The Centre for Living Things was created as a result of long-term field research, combining social, scientific and artistic fields. The basis of the Centre was located inside the hosting institution, and the individual elements of the installation were placed around the entire garden.
Diana Lelonek's individual exhibition Buona Fortuna opened in the spring of 2020 in the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome. The exhibition presented a cross-section of the artist's work – sequences of selected fragments of broad and often long-term art projects, offering a glimpse into the artist’s model of work. All of the works, either comprehensively or individually refer to environmental issues and the outdated nature-culture dichotomy. The exhibition was complemented by a new site-specific work created for underground gallery space.
The title of the exhibition evokes a wide range of social situations, but also points to the concept of a mysterious fate, the fortuna which shapes the world we live in. Lelonek's art reveals a network of connections between people and nonhumans and their environment. It points to interspecies relationships, the recognition of which is crucial when it comes in building a future together.
In the installation dedicated to Spazio Molini, the artist replaced the figure of Saint Barbara, known from miner marches on Saint Barbara’s Day, with various species of ruderal plants— those which are first to colonise disturbed lands of former mines and abandoned industrial areas. They are the ones to bring back life to dry, post-industrial soil; these plants also carry symbolic, magical and medical use in folk tradition. The sculpture is an attempt to find a new post-industrial culture, in which intensive extraction and exploitation would be replaced by a mindful and tender bond with the earth.
