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DRAZNIETA I CZAHARY
(2023)


A durational performance within Duby Smalone exhibition, a public exploration of rural roots and relationship to modernization. As Draźnięta i Czahary, we inhabited the exhibition space for two weeks, testing possible body-grounded ways of relating to the stories mediated through the artworks, proposing to the audience sensible, personal perspectives which could enrich their experience.

Draźnięta i Czahary (in Old Polish - nipples and scrubs on marshy ground) is a closely bonded, permeable group learning about strength and tenderness from the stories of particles and songs of ancestresses. The project formed over 2023 during a series of residencies in Podlasie region and Białowieża forest, driven by curiosity towards our rural musical roots, personal ancestral lines, functioning of the primeval forest ecosystem and the political situation at the borderlands.

Our practice combines rural singing traditions of so-called Eastern Europe and somatics. We learn from previous generations how musicing serves to process reality with all its difficulties and beauty, within one’s own body and the body of the collectives. At the same time, we focus on corporeality and somatic experience as intimate archives. We investigate touching visions, erotic oscillation and resonance as spaces of re-working social orders and policing agents within us. 

Following Doerte Weig, we pose a question:

“Can we change the system, by changing the way we move and think-perceive with each other, by organizing and relating sensitively?”

At the same time, being in the capital of disco-polo, we have started to experiment with its repertoire. Disco polo is a popular music genre that emerged from the wedding music. With simple melodic lines and ribald lyrics, it exposes heavily patriarchal patterns that function as a permitted outlet for the suppressed sexuality in polish society. We started to observe this phenomena, trying to embrace what we are ashamed of. We appropriate this music aesthetic to play around our common subconsciousness, allow new meanings to emerge, challenge patriarchal conditioning, and speculate about new qualities of collective presence.

 CREDITS
Embodied by:
Dorota Michalak, Agnieszka Róz Rózynski, Ola Zielinska

SUPPORT
Municipal Gallery Aresnal - Bialystok

PERFORMED AT
DUBY SMALONE exhibition as part of the performative program by Kasia Hertz, Municipal Gallery Aresnal, Bialystok (PL), 1-13.08.2023


dorotmich@gmail.com