Signs of the Times is my long-term project dedicated to commemorating the pandemic Covid 19. It started in 2021 when I got interested in seeing masks as aide mémoire – a thing helping to remember. I was collecting masks trashed (intentionally or not) in the streets of Berlin. It was like performing without an audience and giving value to abjects. I follow the theory of storied matter offered by Oppermann and Iovino, saying that every kind of matter plots a story by its existence. I was also inspired by what Karen Barad suggested, that Matter is always already an ongoing historicity (2003:206). The masks contain pandemic stories to decipher.
In the project's second stage, I involved the mask carriers and their pandemic memories, stories plotted by the matter of their bodies. 11 gatherings took place to perform the ritual of commemoration. Every participant was asked to share the most vivid pandemic memory while wearing a fresh medical mask and spoiling it with the storied matter of their bodies.
All the collected memories and masks were used in the third stage of the project trajectory. The audio recordings of the pandemic stories have been transcribed, and the masks were investigated by microbiology and genetic sequencing to discover the non-human agents of the storied matter of the masks. The stories written in human language and the discovered genomes have been used in a performative installation where I work as a contemporary scribe, writing the memories/stories repeatedly and fighting the process of their disappearance.
In my conference talk, I want to present the project trajectory, particularly the Sisyphean installation performance created during my EMAP residency at Kontejner in Zagreb. I also aim to show how the project interacts with memory studies and other theories from the so-called turn toward Matter.
Karolina Żyniewicz (PL/DE) is a Berlin-based artist&researcher&educator, a liminal being, existing and performing between various contexts and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and holds PhD in cultural sciences (obtained in the transdisciplinary program Nature-Culture at Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw). While executing art&research projects based mainly on biotechnology and medicine, she also conducts ethnographic and autoethnographic observations. In her work, she underlines the epistemic and didactic dimensions of art. In 2016–2018, she cooperated with the education departments of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, running workshops and museum lessons for regular audiences and with accessibility for visually impaired and deaf visitors. She uses these educational experiences in her own liminal practice. The topics of her work are often related to broadly understood life and death and their social and biological dimensions. That is why she is a member of the Institute of the Good Death in Warsaw. Her work is strongly process-oriented, so she often participates in residencies, like the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) at Kontejner Zagreb or Coalesce in Buffalo, NY, and group projects, like Stretching Senses School by Humboldt Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity. She exhibited internationally, for instance, at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Kontejner Zagreb, or The Center of Contemporary Art Łaźnia in Gdańsk, Poland. Additionally, she is an associate reviewer of the Technoetic Arts journal.
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