bialy-szum-workshops

12 Nov 2024 17:00
HOW MANY THINGS WE DO NOT NEED TO BE COMPLETELY HAPPY?

conducted by: Michał Czapiewski

Collecting objects is an experience that we all know. Natural souvenirs, such as flowers or stones, often lose their value as soon as they arrive in our homes. When we create, we tend to focus on the final composition, not on the joy that comes from the creative process. Possessing objects can be an emotional burden – they require care and tidying. It is worth considering whether they truly make us happy. As we are faced with a crisis of excess, we may find out that we do not need to posses things in order to enjoy their beauty and find inner safety. In the course of the workshop, compositions were created from natural elements for which clay was the base. Each participant decided what to do with the composition: take it home or return it to nature? This provided an impulse to ponder collectively whether those works improve how we feel or whether we could be completely happy without them?

MICHAŁ CZAPIEWSKI

20 Nov 2024 17:00

HIDDEN CONNECTIONS

conducted by: Teresa Kamińska

Plants are at the core of biodiversity, an integral element enriching the cityscape – the environment of life. During the workshop, its participants were given the opportunity to focus on the life and essence of trees which we pass by every day, and plane seeds were planted in clay with the intention of raising a seedling that would stand a chance of becoming a fine specimen. Its distinctive characteristics, such as the shape of fruits, seeds and leaves, or the texture of its bark, can provide creative inspiration. This type of inspiration is exemplified, for instance, by Karl Blossfeldt’s botanical photographs. Starting from the assumption that plants are valuable artistic and architectural structures, the participants worked with ceramic clay. A deeper knowledge of city trees gives us a better understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature, and the beneficial effect it has on our well-being.

TERESA KAMIŃSKA

A primary school biology teacher with almost 30 years’ experience. She studied Plant and Environmental Protection at the Academy of Agriculture in Szczecin. Nature lover. She designed and followed for about 20 years an authorial curriculum for “ecology and tourism.” A school coordinator for the Baltic Sea Project, she attended international ecology conferences and workshops in Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Germany and Austria. Organiser of the Millennium Trees action in Ustka. Author of booklet about the educational trail Trees in Ustka. Her pupils have won numerous awards in national ecology contests. For the last eight years, she has been running the following educational projects: Benia’s Gardens and the Tomato Project at the Non-public Primary School in Ustka. She has been pursuing her new passion – ceramic sculpture at the meetings at the Centre for Creative Activities in Ustka for the last three years.

29 Nov 2024 17:00
TANGLED TRACES

Conducted by: Joanna Dudek

How to know nature in a world of post-truth? Does science exclude sensibility?
Do we need a boundary between objectivism and creation?
Is there a way for art to build ecological awareness?
Is what we do to nature a result of genuine concern or an endeavour to control it?
How can we respond to the climate crisis without defeatism?
We have no ready answers to these questions, but they may encourage new ones. As well as a creative dialogue – during the workshop we worked in clay, trying to express our thoughts through plants and palm prints.

JOANNA DUDEK

A visual artist, she graduated from the Faculty of Interior Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Bauhaus Summer School in Weimar. With a PhD in Art, she is a tutor at the Warsaw Academy. Her work addresses questions related to humans, natural environment and ecology, she collaborates with scientists, particularly biologists. She uses natural materials in her pieces; her most important projects include Ciało z Ciała, Zielniki Słowińskie. Rzeźba Społeczna, and Apoptoza // Ropa.

04 Dec 2024
QUEER VEGETAL ECOSYSTEMS

Conducted by: Liliana Zeic

A workshop in deep mindfulness that involved reflection on what a community including plants as members of equal standing would be like. The focus was on the search for connections between vegetation and our physicality and corporeality. The questions we considered: What can we learn from plants? What can we learn from them about being close to our own bodies (and to all bodies)? What can we learn from them about living a non-normative life in a normative society? Is vegetation queer? What efforts are taken by humans to order, straighten and de-wilden it? How are we to queer our contact with nature and why should we do it? And lastly: what should we do to establish deeper and more mindful relations with it?

LILIANA ZEIC (she/her)

A queer-feminist visual artist, PhD in Art. She works with artisanal methods, video, photography and text, creating intermedia and performative projects based on artistic research. She is concerned with queer ecologies, human-vegetal relationships and developing deep mindfulness in relation to the natural environment. Finalist of the Forecast Forum at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2017. She won the Audience Award Spojrzenia 2019. Her works have been shown at more than 140 group and individual exhibitions in Poland and abroad, also found in public collections (Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Municipal Gallery Arsenał). She works at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Chair of Art Mediation, and lives in Warsaw. Represented by the gallery lokal_30. She has been working under the name Liliana Zeic since February 2021.