Care Infrastructures Sopot, PL: 15.04.21 / 06.05.21 / 24.06.21

“care infrastructures is an individual and collective reimagination of what it means to give and receive care. It is also an invitation to situate our care relations in the ecosystems and infrastructures we’re enmeshed with.

Care infrastructures, like mushrooms, can at once be healing and toxic. The town of Sopot, where this open call grows from, offers a glimpse of the care relations that get folded into the toxic circuits of capitalism with its luxury care industry built around the local mineral waters. “

The open call and programme was curated by Iryna Zamuruieva and noks collective:

The programme includes: Paulius Sliaupa’s Ritual (2020), Anna Jankojć’s Nothing Happens (2020) and Maxim Finogeev’s The Season is Closed (2016).

Care practices throughout the three works are different, yet resonate and complement each other. In Paulius Sliaupa’s Ritual, an earthly creature moves carefully amongst other beings, in a dance of sorts. The dance is down in the dirt, up in the sky, it is full of air, light and life. In Anna Jankojć’s ironic Nothing Happens, she brings to light the labour often left behind the scenes: child-care, dishwashing, wiping, cooking, starting it all over again the next day with no end in sight, all of it atomized into its own box, a zoom screen, with no room of one’s own. This care work is vital infrastructure too. Finally there’s Maxim Finogeev’s The Season is Closed. The stills, carefully assembled to capture the sense of a nocturnal off-season tourist destination, create a patchy route for us to follow. The objects in the camera flashlight, blown around by the sea breeze, a collage of things that were and things yet to come, who are these all for, is this a memory or is this a glimpse of a future? 

Three digital video works also engage with care through different sites: performing an earthly ritual in the field; maintenance work in a home; tracing the remains of celebrations on a nocturnal coast. All of these are the places where it looks like nothing is happening, and where, if you pay attention, more and less care-full structures evolve with their own rhythms and (in)visibilities. – quote from Iryna Zamuruieva’s curatorial text

Ritual introduces a possible symbiosis of culture and nature and an alternative fragile relationship with the world. The character, dressed in a gentle protective suit moves slowly in an empty field surrounded by vertical branch drawings that remind of human figures and archaic struc- tures. She adapts and nurtures an alternative society which has the potential to become a forest. By performing various rituals she discovers her relationship with the environment.Performed by Elia Claessen.
Music developed by Suzan Peeters.

Paulius Šliaupa‘s (1990, Vilnius, Lithuania) works explore the relationship(s) between culture and nature, the interaction of ambience and light that affect our daily lives. From video-installations and experimental movies for the cinema to objectlike paintings, his oeuvre encompasses a wide range of artistic media. By accumulating the flow of painterly images, atmospheric sounds and poetic energy, the artist creates sensual narratives.

Nothing Happens (2020) by Anna Jankojć: the film tackles the problem of motherhood and the effort that is invisible to society, which a mother makes every day. It also presents the oppressiveness of everyday life that women have to face in solitude. The film records one day in life, accidental, like many others.

Anna Jankojć: author of videos, installations, camera performances, objects, photographs. Graduate of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw (2013),in 2014-2015 she studied Physical Theatre at Fife College in Edinburgh, and is currently completing her studies at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her work was shown in 2020 in group exhibition at Galeria Labirynt

The Season Is Closed: the project explores the night beaches of Odessa in the non-tourist period. In the warm season, these landscapes are pulsing with life especially after sunset, and in the cold season it’s on a pause. I was moving in the dark along the coast based on my memories of summer places of rest. The camera flash helped me to discover the route marked by the tourism and entertainment industry. The remaining structures and objects were transformed into absurd and surreal monuments of past celebrations. There is silence all around and only the surf of the Black Sea sets the countdown until the better time arrives. After that, the procedure of resurrecting the territory from a “dead” state will begin.

Maksim Finogeev was born in 1987 in the USSR, Odesa.