The camera as a foreign body
The intermedia project Journey (2007) was an important symbol of Rumiak’s departure from his hitherto established aesthetic. The artist cycled from Poland to Venice for this work. He slept in a miniature dummy of the Polish Pavilion from the Art Biennale, which he'd created especially for this occasion. The project was documented on a blog, and in 2008 it was presented in the form of an exhibition at the Kronika gallery in Bytom.
With time, the artist was becoming increasingly interested in film – especially the relationship between film and still photography, as well as between film and space (both the screening and recording site).
The inspirations resulting from the limitations of the medium are crucial, for instance, the camera as a ‘foreign body,’ disrupting the natural course of the observed events, an unknown outside of the frame borders, the time shift between the recording and screening, etc.
– said Rumiak on the occasion of the exhibition Haxenabkratzen Cinema, presented in 2010 at the Bielska BWA Gallery
The aforementioned exhibition comprised three separate works, out of which the titular installation was key. ‘Haxen abkratzen’ (German: wipe your feet) was printed on a plaque mounted on the entrance door to the artist’s grandparents’ apartment.
The order inside the apartment, based on the contract among its occupants, has managed to resist the external historical changes for a baffling amount of time. Objects, stuck in their designated places for years, seem to ignore the laws of entropy – all of which gives the impression of stopped time, permanent values. With time, the slogan ‘Haxen abkratzen’ found on the front door of the grandparents’ apartment began to sound like ‘abracadabra’ – a spell allowing one to cross the doorstep of our little cosmos one more time, before it inevitably vanishes.
For the sake of the project, he artist shot some ten minutes of footage showing a summer Sunday afternoon at his grandparents’ place, although the film’s protagonists are present only through sound. The camera is set up behind the doorway, as if it was peeking into the room. We can hear conversations, but no one appears in the frame described by open door. Another part of the installation was a faithful replica of the spatial composition in the frame – fragments of furniture, objects, walls – except everything was cast in resin with white pigment or sculpted in a white material. The film begins with this sterile reconstruction, to gradually gain colours, life, and sound, and eventually loop back to the plain dummy.
This looped, short journey from the exhibited copy to the original – the real apartment – contains a story about the attempt to portray the grandparents. The video frame shows an armchair, to which I am trying to invite them from outside of the frame, while they, aware of the fact that the chair is within the camera’s field of vision, continue to refuse to ‘enter’ the film. The installation was conceived as my personal time machine. However, the part that is missing upon a return from this journey to the past is the most important thing – images of loved ones.
Culture as a product of nature
Sławomir Rumiak is currently working on medium- and full-length film projects. One of them was presented at the collaborative exhibition with Cristiano Mascaro titled Traces of People, which took place in 2015 at the International Cultural Centre in Kraków. The show featured Rumiak’s film essay Macunaima Returns to São Paulo.
Macunaima is a Brazilian literary classic – written in 1928, it is a story about a hero of Amazonian legends who makes a trip to São Paulo. The biggest jungle in the world is located in Brazil, while the biggest city in the southern hemisphere is São Paolo. I interpreted that book as a telling mental shortcut – the history of our species’ journey from the wilderness to the city, or rather a history of developing the urban system, as I believe in the evolutionary continuum; in the film, I treat São Paulo as a natural creation, similar to other self-organising systems, such as for instance an ant colony or a termite mound.