An interview series with participating artists and artist collectives of the event: archive of futures II by Montag Modus, July 2023. These conversations are to give a deeper understanding on artists’ working methodologies, their thoughts on the dichotomy of East and West, and in particular, the works they present at Montag Modus’ archive of futures II. Interviews were conducted with Przemek Kamiński, Alicja Rogalska, Marta Ziółek, and Hollow by curator and art historian Zsu Zsuró on the occasion of the event.
The five video works presented at archive of futures II are available in their full versions on Vimeo with the links here below:
The Feast
Dark Fibres
Dreamed Revolution
NOVA
News Medley
Zsu Zsuró: Can you talk about your PhD in connection to your artistic practice?
Alicja Rogalska: It is a practice-based PhD at the Art Department at Goldsmiths College in
London where I also did my MFA. I am researching future imaginaries and speculation as
method: trying to collectively verbalise and visualise desired futures in the context of
emancipatory, ecological and political struggles. In the last ten years, I have been focusing on the issues of labour, social and economic inequalities, migration and feminist issues in my work. Eventually I became more interested in a constructive approach in addition to the
critical one, although they are two sides of the same coin because every time we are critical of the status quo a new horizon opens up. Activists create speculative fiction all the time whilst trying to make it reality.
I’m also interested in the notion of utopia but not in a 20 th century, totalizing way. I see it
more as a research method and as a kind of micro-collective practice of envisioning what
society we would want to live in in the future and how we can enact it now, in a pre-
figurative tradition.
The PhD is practice-based, but I also engage with theories and discourses from philosophy
and social and political sciences. The recent explosion in future-studies and speculative
approaches in the context of the climate catastrophe shows that the less future we have, the more urge there is to collectively re-invent it.
The first explicitly speculative project I did was ‘Dreamed Revolution’ (2014). The title is a
paraphrase of the Polish title of ‘Sleepwalking the Revolution’, a book by the cultural
philosopher Andrzej Leder in which he talks about how WWII and the communist rule
radically changed the whole structure of Polish society, but also how it was a top-to-bottom, violently imposed revolution which was ’sleepwalked’ by most society. I was interested in what kind of revolution could be dreamed up collectively now.
I was commissioned by Muzeum Sztuki and Teatr Nowy in Łódź to do a project looking at, on one hand, the legacy of avant-garde art, and on the other: socialist realist theatre in Poland and what their relevance was today. For me the bold visions for the future, the ideas of creating ‘a new society’ and ’a new man’ - in all their differences - were the unifying
approach of both socialist realism and the avant-garde, as observed by Boris Groys.
Still from "Dreamed Revolution"
I decided to work with local activists as the people who have the drive to create different
futures. I was curious to find out what the bigger visions are behind the often very specific,
localised struggles.
In my search for a tool that could help people unlock and articulate their political desires - as we’re almost conditioned not to do so by the current neoliberal temporality - I came across progressive hypnosis. So I hired a stage hypnotist, and invited activists and audience members to take part. The actual work was a 2,5 hour long live performance with about 100 people participating and the video is based on the documentation.
Zs: You often choose very specific topics that you tackle in your projects. How do you find
the narratives you want to unfold? For example, in the case of News Medley?
A: I’ve been interested in singing as a form of social commentary and in protest songs for a
long time, including peasant songs that accompanied uprisings and different kinds of social upheavals, especially in Central-Europe. In 2019 I was invited by the Hungarian Vienna-based curator Katalin Erdődi to make a new work for the 2020 edition of OFF Biennale and she proposed a reiteration of one of my previous projects (Broniów Song, 2011). We then invited an all-female folk choir from the village of Kartal near Budapest and a folk musician Réka Annus to join the collaboration. The result is very different from the Polish original due to the group’s different repertoire, the fact we rewrote five songs and not just one, but also the different social context and interests of the choir. The lyrics were based on the conversations we had with the choir members and their life stories and though we didn’t really anticipate it at first, it became an explicitly feminist project.
Still from "News Medley"
It’s not a speculative project as such, even though the women also consider various futures
for their village, but it engages with various temporalities in the post-socialist context.
Dark Fibres is based on a similar strategy of rewriting lyrics of existing songs. This time I
changed the lyrics of Chakrulo - a hauntingly beautiful medieval Georgian song about
peasants preparing for an uprising against their cruel landlord. The new lyrics were inspired
by the story of Hayastan Shakarian, an elderly woman who allegedly cut the internet cable
between Georgia and Armenia when looking for scrap metal to sell. When she was arrested
she supposedly said she didn’t even know what the internet was. I initially wanted to
collaborate with Ms Shakarian, but then I found out that she was quite traumatised by the
arrest and the media attention she received, even a few years later. Therefore I decided to
make the song into a kind of tribute to the story without bothering her again.
Still from "Dark Fibres"
The song was written in English, then translated by the Georgian poet Shota Iatashvili and
finally performed by a polyphonic choir in Tbilisi. The lyrics touch on issues such as the digital divide and ownership of infrastructure, land, and the fibre optic cables. The video was produced a few years later, during my DAAD Artists in Berlin fellowship (2020-21), and
shows the production process of fibre optic cable. It is not only very seductive visually, but
also makes one more aware of the materiality of the internet. It took a very long time to find a place that would allow me to film - many companies thought my project was some kind of
elaborate industrial espionage mission. In the end the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena agreed to help. Dark fibre is optical fibre
infrastructure that is not yet in use but is laid down by companies in anticipation of
exponential data growth.
Zs: Can you talk a bit about News In News Medley and NOVA, also from the perspective of
the participants? What was their experience?
A: You would really need to ask this question to the participants, as I can only speak from my perspective and tell you a bit about the feedback we received.
For the News Medley project, in terms of gaining the trust of the collaborators, understanding the social and cultural nuances and then working on the lyrics, I was heavily
relying on and closely working with Réka and Katalin, because I don’t speak Hungarian. It
was crucial that the whole team was involved on a deep level as we spoke about various
taboos e.g., domestic violence, unhappiness in marriage, frustration of providing care work
for the entire family, etc. It took us some time to figure out how the private stories could be
relayed publicly in a safe, but also honest way. Some women took a bit longer to open up,
especially for the performances in Budapest where they talked more about their personal
stories, but apparently they found this experience really empowering.
As for NOVA - a video also on view during Montag Modus - I was interested in Live Action
Role Playing as a tool for radical empathy. When you embody a different person or entity,
and you act it out physically and emotionally, it’s very different to just speculating on an
intellectual level. I was also interested in the revolutionary potential of play and collective
world building. People often get locked into their identities, and to go beyond oneself in
order to try to understand others can be rare. But even if failed, such attempts can still
contribute to developing a different kind of engagement with the world.
I collaborated with another artist, Ana de Almeida, on the script for NOVA which we wrote
specifically for feminist and queer activists, We located the LARP in a speculative future, in a post-patriarchal society, and wanted to explore using it as a tool to try to figure out different ways of dealing with very current issues such as conflicts or sharing resources. The game is made up of 4 chapters. In the first one everyone invents their character – interestingly many participants chose a post-human hybrid form. Then they come up with social groups – either organised by function or affinity and then relationships between those - forming an ecosystem or a community of beings. In the final chapter there were 4 different events (such as an opportunity or a threat) affecting their world and the participants had to act according to their individual and group interests but also considering the world as a whole. We have run this game three times already and the result is very different each time depending on the participants. In the first run of NOVA at VBKÖ in Vienna in the autumn of 2019 the threat was actually defined by the participants as a global pandemic, which, thinking about it now, is kind of creepy. The feedback we often get from the activists participating is that the LARP opens up something in them that isn’t easily accessible otherwise - a playful space for shifting beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
Still from "NOVA"
The goal of my projects is often twofold: I want them to have a hybrid status as art but also
as something beyond that. On the one hand, I don’t believe in art’s autonomy or the purity
of artistic practice and want to do things that can be useful outside of the art context, such
as in activist practice or education. On the other hand, I don’t reject the power of
representation and symbolic gestures - these can sometimes be the most powerful.
Zs: Your projects often feature stories of people living in peripheries. What are your
thoughts on showing these projects in Western context?
A: As an Eastern-European artist living in the West I often feel like I’m expected to perform
my identity and to self-exoticise - a burden of representation of a kind. Having spent almost half of my life outside of Poland, mostly in the UK, and being a ‘naturalised’ Brit, it seems rather absurd to me. When can a migrant start speaking out about local issues? Perhaps the problem is that it’s often easier to engage with political struggles elsewhere, or in the past - because it allows avoiding the discomfort of proximity or even being implicated and it doesn’t require any change in the here and now. A project with folk singers from Eastern Europe for instance, seems more consumable by a Western audience than one about migrant agricultural workers picking potatoes in the West, even if both deal with issues of invisible labour and economic inequality.
My most recent video shown as part of Montag Modus is The Feast. It documents a
metabolic feast happening sometime in the future, when humans harness and distribute
surplus energy generated by their metabolisms and movements. The dinner-ritual
commemorates the end of humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels. The guests consume various
substances once used in energy production, such as coal, crude oil, diesel, lithium and
uranium, whilst discussing the strategies employed by the society in the past such as
mourning, fighting, redistribution and decolonisation in the struggle to wean themselves
from dirty energy and avert the climate catastrophe. Like in many of my works, the dialogue is largely improvised and the video shows a particular iteration of an artistic method using speculation to talk about current concerns.
Still from "The Feast"
Zs: How do you navigate between local and regional topics and global issues?
A: My projects are often developed in hyperlocal contexts but with a global perspective in
mind, given the ubiquitous interconnectivity and interdependence of our world. I wouldn’t
romanticise the “local” too much though, I think for any substantial social change to happen there needs to be a new global hegemony as its horizon. As an artist I have specific tools and skills that I can use to support certain struggles, but very little power to change things on a large scale and to think otherwise would be megalomanic. Having said that, large scale changes often happen as the result of small, seemingly insignificant gestures and local actions. No wonder protagonists of a lot of sci-fi films where time travel is possible, go to the past to amend a tiny detail in order to completely transform the future - they're present.I think that art still has an important role in society even on a small scale - it contributes to a cultural change necessary for other changes to be even imaginable and for hope to prevail.
Because if we don’t believe that any substantial change for the better is possible, and act
upon this belief, then it will not happen.
Alicja Rogalska is a Polish interdisciplinary artist based in London and Berlin and work- ing internationally. Her research-based practice focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday. Ro- galska graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies from Warsaw University and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, where she is currently a PhD researcher in the Art Department. She recently pre- sented her work at National Gallery of Art (2023, Vilnius), Scherben, Berlin Art Prize (2022, main prize), Manifesta 14 (Prishtina, 2022), Temporary Gallery (Cologne, 2021- 22), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2020-21) and OFF Biennale (Budapest, 2020-21).
Zsuzsanna Zsuró is an art historian and curator with work experience in cultural institutions and relevant knowledge on contemporary art and culture. As a PhD candidate, she is researching socially engaged art practices in the Hungarian diaspora. Zsuro is specialized in modern and contemporary art theory and practice; cultural policy; alternative art institutional strategies; decolonisation in the CEE region. Zsuro writes to cultural publications as well as presents at conferences locally and internationally. She has created exhibitions such as ‘Resisting Erasure: Queer Art in Hungary’ in Cologne (DE) and ‘Let’s Alter The Narrative’ at Tate Modern, London (UK); was curator of artistic projects like ‘AUDITION’ critically acclaimed by Vogue and Dazed; and created residency programmes such as Project Hu (Ghost Relics) in London (UK). She also has an experience working in major cultural institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest.