Performance at Slowacki Theatre in Krakow for Zachęta Project Room.

https://zacheta.art.pl/en/wystawy/malgorzata-markiewicz-pimoa-chthulu?setlang=1

link to the video https://vimeo.com/702763953

(…) Pimoa Chthulu is a project prepared especially for the exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room. The main part of the exhibition is a large-scale object made of black sheep’s wool — resembling a spider web, an octopus or human bodies joined together. The sculpture was made using crochet techniques by the artist and women of different ages and from different localities, acting as the Spider Grandmother. Collaboration with other artists or craftspeople in the creation of projects is another distinguishing feature of Małgorzata Markiewicz’s creative method. (Her earlier works already featured the theme of invisible women’s work or work as a social value that brings income and self-reliance). This time, the artist’s Facebook ad was answered by pensioners, women looking for employment, often in difficult life situations. The artist treats them as partners, not anonymous subcontractors. This is evidenced by the fact that portraits of all the project participants (including Małgorzata Markiewicz Pimoa Chthulu the author) with oversized crochet hooks under their arms, taken using the black and-white photography technique, occupy an important place in the exhibition. The author of the photographs is Michał Łuczak. I hope that the fees for their work have helped the budgets of the ‘spiders’, and that the collaboration on the artistic project has allowed them to taste the joy of creation, at least for a while.

Markiewicz’s work is sometimes referred to as social sculpture or participatory art. The interaction and the resulting interpersonal relationships are as important to the author as the end result itself — the work of art. In the underground part of the gallery, there is a video projected which presents the created object in motion (the individual parts of the sculpture can be entered as if it was a cocoon). The recording was made in the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków with the participation of invited performers and the artist herself. A black, fear-inducing — because of its disturbingly species-indeterminate nature — organic creature moves through the richly decorated ‘palace’ interiors and makes violent convulsive movements. The music accompanying the performers was composed by Bartosz Zaskórski — Małgorzata’s friend, visual artist, composer and musician. The source material for the resulting samples are violin improvisations performed by another artist, Piotr Lutyński. Wild highlander notes can be clearly heard in the recording. The trance-like sounds and movements of the figure can evoke fear and fascination, as in the case of a spectator watching magical rituals of expelling evil spirits from the possessed. The artist cites as one of her sources of inspiration the tarantella, a folk dance from Apulia in southern Italy, inspired by the movements of a person bitten by a spider and intended to lead to purification. She writes,

The tarantella was/is called the dance of the spider or the dance of the person bitten by the spider [considered] as a folk way to expel the venom from the soul of the person bitten. Under the cover of the ‘spider bite’ were all mental problems (diseases of the soul) such as depression, mania, hysteria, sadness and marasmus. The treatment involved dancing the venom out of the body. A group of musicians would come to the sick person and try to play melodies of different tempo and rhythm so as to find the one that suited the state of the sick person’s soul. When this was successful, a trance dance followed.

Another important source of inspiration for Markiewicz’s latest project is a motif from the novel Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz. (It is worth mentioning that the artist is the author of the Kraków monument devoted to this writer). Witold, who is visiting Zakopane with a friend, becomes a victim of his own investigation. The author comments, ‘The signs that form a series catch him in their snares like a spider’s web catches a fly. Attempts to draw conclusions, to solve the puzzle in a logical manner come to nothing. The protagonist must confront the unknown, the unrecognisable, the disorderly, the illogical and the fearful’. Markiewicz explains the title of the exhibition as follows:

Pimoa Chthulu is the name of the leading fictional spider figure in Donna J. Haraway’s philosophy, a modified version of the taxonomic name of the actually existing Pimoa cthulhu spider living in California, [which] comes from the language of the indigenous Goshute people of Utah: Pimoa — big legs, Cthulhu — akin to the powers of Chaos. In Haraway’s modified second part ‘chthulu’ is derived from the word ‘chthonic’, meaning coming from the subterranean world powering all that lives. The Chthulucene (another term from Haraway’s philosophy) is the era in which we now live, in which it will be crucial to our survival to seek connections and relationships with non-human beings and plants, that is, to look for ‘relatives’ not necessarily among humans. . . . Pimoa Chthulu contains the entire subterranean world giving life to what is above it, feeding fungi, plants, animals and humans, which is built on the principle of connections. Everything is connected to something, and that something is connected to something else. And death and life happen within these connections.

For Małgorzata Markiewicz, the metaphor of the spiderweb becomes crucial in describing her latest project resulting from the reflection on the human condition from a planetary perspective.

Text by: Magda Kardasz and translated by Paulina Bożek