- Profily umělců
- 5. Únor 2012
- 00:14:00
- PL
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Events v "Polsko|Poland"
Kvalita přehrávaného videa je zvolena podle rychlosti vašeho připojení.
Malířka, performerka, kulturní manažerka a kustodka současného umění Malik Cecylia vystudovala malbu na Akademii výtvarných umění v Krakově a poté absolvovala post-graduální studium pro kustody na Jagellonské univerzitě. Inspiraci nachází ve svém nejbližším okolí. Její tvorba je anarchistická a protikapitalistická. Vytvořila uměleckou instituci Farma umění, která funguje jako společná platforma pro aktivity umělců a kustodů. Za projekt 365 Stromů obdržela titul “Kulturystka roku 2010”, který uděluje Rozhlasové komunitní centrum Program 3 Polskiego Radia. Také získala cenu čtenářů časopisu Gazeta Wyborcza v soutěži Kulturalne Odloty.
It surely must be my family.
It was more important than the Academy for me, because my parents were sculptors, my father also a violinist at the Krakow Opera.
"Normal" things happened rarely in our home.
I have five artist sisters to collaborate with, most of our projects are common initiatives.
This gives us a lot of potential and I feel that in my work I relate more and more
to games we used to play as children to the way we lived as little girls.
The theme of nature that appears in my work
is coming simply from our education. My dad, is also a mountain guide and
until the moment when we went to school we were in the mountains all the time.
Our parents taught us to appreciate beauty by watching the beauty of nature.
Wondering through less known green areas in Cracow,
through forests, valleys and riverbeds was our daily bread.
Playing instruments with my family - rather than going to music school - is the reason why I improvise on the violin now.
I do it because I played with my father when I was a kid.
Our approach is one of constant playing, in fact, I see art as a professional way to continue playing and an attempt to turn play into work.
In fact, all my project have as theme my immediate surroundings, something that very close to myself.
something that very close to myself. I have small children myself, a family, so I haven't travelled on grants after my studies and have instead tried to find everything in my vicinity.
Here is the story with my neighbor:
I went to the grocery store, bought beer and cigarettes, then ventured into the kingdom of mr. Jan, my homeless neighbor.
I entered his garden and I saw him sitting by the fire, on an old office chair.
I told him I am an artist, not an officer of the city police, and we started collaborating:
I was borrowing mr Jan's interesting junk and painted them,
while mr. Jan was looking for new junk for me.
In the early hours I would be seen dragging some appliance into my studio.
When I had many paintings, I decided to make an exhibition opening in my neighbor's yard.
So, at ten o'clock, we made a real vernissage: we lit a fire, we drank wine together, there was a speech.
Two days prior to that, mr. Jan had received a nice red couch,
so all was just great.
And the central exhibit was a my painting of mr. Jan holding a white lilly.
Then, a few days later, something very unusual happened:
I saw mr. Jan dressed in clean clothes for the first time, so I didn't even recognize him at first.
He must have gone to some public bath and he even got a hairdo,
and then I saw he cleaned his yard and hung some small paintings over the door of his hut.
Later mr. Jan's son appeared and took him.
We didn't really know where he lived after that, nor did I know what his fate was in the next months,
but exactly one year later, his friends and the people in the local store told me that mr. Jan has died.
At that point the project went into its second form: I used the same junk I had painted to build an installation,
used by my younger sister Teresa who is a professional drummer to give a concert
featuring experimental sixties music.
We invited other homeless people from my street
and we put posters advertising the concert in mr. Jan's memory at the convenience store,
which is the neigborhood's hub for cultural life and information exchange, so many locals knew about the event.
An important part of this project was making this man at home on our street.
The Trees Project is in fact my diary.
At first, I didn't even consider this project to be an artistic one.
I took the decision to make the same thing every day and to steadily stick to this decision.
It was a form of private rebellion - a very personal project. In it, I am myself, 100%.
What inspired me was my favorite book, Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, whose hero - Cosimo, the tree-climbing baron
revolts against his father and his family, and climbs in the trees, swearing that his feet are never going to touch the ground again.
Next, the whole book is the story of his steadfastness and his ability to stick to his crazy decision.
When I read it, I knew this man knows what he writes about.
Not only was tree-climbing technique extremely well described,
but the tree descriptions were unusually sensual.
Pages and pages on the velvety fig leaves, on the harshness and roughness of oak bark and its contrast with the silky skin of beech trees.
Since I have spent so much time in nature and among trees I knew this to be the exact truth:
That brittle larch trees are climbed differently than the flexible willow trees, or birches, that can be climbed despite the fact that they are so thin.
In Cracow there is Zakrzowek. This is a wonderful turquoise lake, surrounded by green meadows and a forest.
I feel personally related to this place, I love to walk there and simply believe it to be a fantastic place for Cracow,
where one can feel like on holidays, so close to the Rynek Square and the Wawel Castle.
So, in principle it's a treasure of Cracow and when I heard that the Mayor's Office wants to designate these terrains as a construction site for a developer to build a large apartment complex,
I felt that this is so short-sighted and absurd, that it simply made me shiver.
So I told Justyna Koeke about this whole situation and she loved the idea of fighting the developer and
this sacrosanct character of private property, so we started thinking how we can approach this topic.
Our first step was to get to know the groups that were already fighting for Zakrzowek, both on a legal ground and in by arguing its cause.
There was, firstly, the Green Zakrzowek Society, but also other organizations and we decided to support them in the media.
We climbed on the Grunwald Battle Monument, sat near the King's figure dressed with Modraszek (Lycaenidae) butterfly wings
(it's important to say the Grunwald battle was a victorious one)
and the photo was to be shown at a rally against building up Zakrzowek, which was a part of the Modraszek Kolektyw project.
We wanted to have this image of a victory projected in front of City Hall,
with the victorious king sitting alongside butterfly-mammas Justyna Koeke and Cecylia Malik - the Modraszek Power Duo,
'cause we thought this will be powerful and awesome.
This is the tallest statue in Cracow
After all, for me, Modraszek Kolektyw meant visual thinking.
The strength of this project was a very simple, beautiful image.
I imagined a hill, filled with blue-winged people and wanted this image to come alive.
So here I needed to convince three to five hundred people to put blue wings on and come there.
Modraszek Kolektyw took on the character of a revolution or popular movement, the city saw wing preparation workshops, the preparation of our "armies",
the well-organized bicycle group Critical Mass movement joined us,
then we had this large rally, attended by lots of people, it was very spectacular and became a solid argument for saying that this is not the work of a couple of people, but the voice of Cracow's inhabitants.
But the best moment came two days later, when the Gazeta Wyborcza published an article saying that
the Portugese developer Gerium gives up its planned construction,
because the new building code proposed by the city makes profitable building impossible.
So they themselves admitted that they have no interest in building small housing.
For now, this construction is therefore halted. Of course, future events depend on the City Hall, not on us,
but we demonstrated that one can make a change without money and without institutions.
Firstly - not many people know how many rivers we have in Cracow.
Each of these rivers flow into the Vistula and each of them has its different wild valley.
I am floating on these rivers with a small boat made by my husband Piotrek; it's made of plastic bottles and plain plywood.
The inspiration for this vessel were the piles of PET bottles floating on Cracow's rivers - sort's
like a boat made of whatever one could find in the rivers.
My guide for this project is Kazimierz Walasz, a well known naturalist and researcher from Cracow
and one of Poland's best ornithologists
and canoing down Cracow's river's was his dream too.
So we both rowed an old Soviet inflatable, made a few rides during the vacations, we have three rivers left on our list,
and so I get to know these waters well enough to navigate them myself and produce films and photographs.
This is for me a new way to research my city, a place known to me,
in a completely different way, through a new, unknown urban dimension.
For example, the Pradnik river: It flows under large avenues, like 29 Listopada,
Opolska, Mogilska, Aleje Pokoju - but it's invisible, because on the bridges there are opaque screens,
so, although it flows right through the centre of Cracow, it's completely unknown.
Its estuary is in the Dabie neighborhood, isolated by such dense vegetation that one can hardly reach it, making it a river that is accessible only through its own water.
To see it, you need to navigate it.
This is highly unusual - sometimes one can take photos or films that look like they are shot in the Amazon.
It amuses me to have albums of photos that look like they are showing forests or national parks, and to know all this is in the city.
Only the sounds remind one of the urban environment, planes, trams, the sounds of busy streets.
One of the interesting moments are the passages through tunnels, floating in a small boat, somewhat metaphysically,
towards a light, while hearing all the lories and the traffic above but being extracted in a different dimension.
Along those rivers we have the wildest nature one gets inside a city. Many animals live there.
In Cracow we have whole packs of beavers, the Wilga river is rich in crayfish,
one can see the occasional steer, many herons, cormorants.
We sometimes don't even know that animals have gotten used to the city, they can find food, have learned to live here,
and nest along these riverbeds.
This whole space is not ours, does not belong to humans, it's run by different laws.
When entering it, I have a wonderful adventure just fifteen minutes from home.
It was more important than the Academy for me, because my parents were sculptors, my father also a violinist at the Krakow Opera.
"Normal" things happened rarely in our home.
I have five artist sisters to collaborate with, most of our projects are common initiatives.
This gives us a lot of potential and I feel that in my work I relate more and more
to games we used to play as children to the way we lived as little girls.
The theme of nature that appears in my work
is coming simply from our education. My dad, is also a mountain guide and
until the moment when we went to school we were in the mountains all the time.
Our parents taught us to appreciate beauty by watching the beauty of nature.
Wondering through less known green areas in Cracow,
through forests, valleys and riverbeds was our daily bread.
Playing instruments with my family - rather than going to music school - is the reason why I improvise on the violin now.
I do it because I played with my father when I was a kid.
Our approach is one of constant playing, in fact, I see art as a professional way to continue playing and an attempt to turn play into work.
In fact, all my project have as theme my immediate surroundings, something that very close to myself.
something that very close to myself. I have small children myself, a family, so I haven't travelled on grants after my studies and have instead tried to find everything in my vicinity.
Here is the story with my neighbor:
I went to the grocery store, bought beer and cigarettes, then ventured into the kingdom of mr. Jan, my homeless neighbor.
I entered his garden and I saw him sitting by the fire, on an old office chair.
I told him I am an artist, not an officer of the city police, and we started collaborating:
I was borrowing mr Jan's interesting junk and painted them,
while mr. Jan was looking for new junk for me.
In the early hours I would be seen dragging some appliance into my studio.
When I had many paintings, I decided to make an exhibition opening in my neighbor's yard.
So, at ten o'clock, we made a real vernissage: we lit a fire, we drank wine together, there was a speech.
Two days prior to that, mr. Jan had received a nice red couch,
so all was just great.
And the central exhibit was a my painting of mr. Jan holding a white lilly.
Then, a few days later, something very unusual happened:
I saw mr. Jan dressed in clean clothes for the first time, so I didn't even recognize him at first.
He must have gone to some public bath and he even got a hairdo,
and then I saw he cleaned his yard and hung some small paintings over the door of his hut.
Later mr. Jan's son appeared and took him.
We didn't really know where he lived after that, nor did I know what his fate was in the next months,
but exactly one year later, his friends and the people in the local store told me that mr. Jan has died.
At that point the project went into its second form: I used the same junk I had painted to build an installation,
used by my younger sister Teresa who is a professional drummer to give a concert
featuring experimental sixties music.
We invited other homeless people from my street
and we put posters advertising the concert in mr. Jan's memory at the convenience store,
which is the neigborhood's hub for cultural life and information exchange, so many locals knew about the event.
An important part of this project was making this man at home on our street.
The Trees Project is in fact my diary.
At first, I didn't even consider this project to be an artistic one.
I took the decision to make the same thing every day and to steadily stick to this decision.
It was a form of private rebellion - a very personal project. In it, I am myself, 100%.
What inspired me was my favorite book, Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, whose hero - Cosimo, the tree-climbing baron
revolts against his father and his family, and climbs in the trees, swearing that his feet are never going to touch the ground again.
Next, the whole book is the story of his steadfastness and his ability to stick to his crazy decision.
When I read it, I knew this man knows what he writes about.
Not only was tree-climbing technique extremely well described,
but the tree descriptions were unusually sensual.
Pages and pages on the velvety fig leaves, on the harshness and roughness of oak bark and its contrast with the silky skin of beech trees.
Since I have spent so much time in nature and among trees I knew this to be the exact truth:
That brittle larch trees are climbed differently than the flexible willow trees, or birches, that can be climbed despite the fact that they are so thin.
In Cracow there is Zakrzowek. This is a wonderful turquoise lake, surrounded by green meadows and a forest.
I feel personally related to this place, I love to walk there and simply believe it to be a fantastic place for Cracow,
where one can feel like on holidays, so close to the Rynek Square and the Wawel Castle.
So, in principle it's a treasure of Cracow and when I heard that the Mayor's Office wants to designate these terrains as a construction site for a developer to build a large apartment complex,
I felt that this is so short-sighted and absurd, that it simply made me shiver.
So I told Justyna Koeke about this whole situation and she loved the idea of fighting the developer and
this sacrosanct character of private property, so we started thinking how we can approach this topic.
Our first step was to get to know the groups that were already fighting for Zakrzowek, both on a legal ground and in by arguing its cause.
There was, firstly, the Green Zakrzowek Society, but also other organizations and we decided to support them in the media.
We climbed on the Grunwald Battle Monument, sat near the King's figure dressed with Modraszek (Lycaenidae) butterfly wings
(it's important to say the Grunwald battle was a victorious one)
and the photo was to be shown at a rally against building up Zakrzowek, which was a part of the Modraszek Kolektyw project.
We wanted to have this image of a victory projected in front of City Hall,
with the victorious king sitting alongside butterfly-mammas Justyna Koeke and Cecylia Malik - the Modraszek Power Duo,
'cause we thought this will be powerful and awesome.
This is the tallest statue in Cracow
After all, for me, Modraszek Kolektyw meant visual thinking.
The strength of this project was a very simple, beautiful image.
I imagined a hill, filled with blue-winged people and wanted this image to come alive.
So here I needed to convince three to five hundred people to put blue wings on and come there.
Modraszek Kolektyw took on the character of a revolution or popular movement, the city saw wing preparation workshops, the preparation of our "armies",
the well-organized bicycle group Critical Mass movement joined us,
then we had this large rally, attended by lots of people, it was very spectacular and became a solid argument for saying that this is not the work of a couple of people, but the voice of Cracow's inhabitants.
But the best moment came two days later, when the Gazeta Wyborcza published an article saying that
the Portugese developer Gerium gives up its planned construction,
because the new building code proposed by the city makes profitable building impossible.
So they themselves admitted that they have no interest in building small housing.
For now, this construction is therefore halted. Of course, future events depend on the City Hall, not on us,
but we demonstrated that one can make a change without money and without institutions.
Firstly - not many people know how many rivers we have in Cracow.
Each of these rivers flow into the Vistula and each of them has its different wild valley.
I am floating on these rivers with a small boat made by my husband Piotrek; it's made of plastic bottles and plain plywood.
The inspiration for this vessel were the piles of PET bottles floating on Cracow's rivers - sort's
like a boat made of whatever one could find in the rivers.
My guide for this project is Kazimierz Walasz, a well known naturalist and researcher from Cracow
and one of Poland's best ornithologists
and canoing down Cracow's river's was his dream too.
So we both rowed an old Soviet inflatable, made a few rides during the vacations, we have three rivers left on our list,
and so I get to know these waters well enough to navigate them myself and produce films and photographs.
This is for me a new way to research my city, a place known to me,
in a completely different way, through a new, unknown urban dimension.
For example, the Pradnik river: It flows under large avenues, like 29 Listopada,
Opolska, Mogilska, Aleje Pokoju - but it's invisible, because on the bridges there are opaque screens,
so, although it flows right through the centre of Cracow, it's completely unknown.
Its estuary is in the Dabie neighborhood, isolated by such dense vegetation that one can hardly reach it, making it a river that is accessible only through its own water.
To see it, you need to navigate it.
This is highly unusual - sometimes one can take photos or films that look like they are shot in the Amazon.
It amuses me to have albums of photos that look like they are showing forests or national parks, and to know all this is in the city.
Only the sounds remind one of the urban environment, planes, trams, the sounds of busy streets.
One of the interesting moments are the passages through tunnels, floating in a small boat, somewhat metaphysically,
towards a light, while hearing all the lories and the traffic above but being extracted in a different dimension.
Along those rivers we have the wildest nature one gets inside a city. Many animals live there.
In Cracow we have whole packs of beavers, the Wilga river is rich in crayfish,
one can see the occasional steer, many herons, cormorants.
We sometimes don't even know that animals have gotten used to the city, they can find food, have learned to live here,
and nest along these riverbeds.
This whole space is not ours, does not belong to humans, it's run by different laws.
When entering it, I have a wonderful adventure just fifteen minutes from home.
Very nice.