Instytut Polski w Rzymie

27.06.2025 - 28.06.2025 Arte, Eventi

27-28 giugno 2025

Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venezia

In risposta a un mondo sempre più segnato dalla scomparsa e dallo spostamento, Memories of Water, Memories of Air ci invita a raccoglierci intorno a gesti effimeri come atti di resistenza e ricordo. Il programma è incentrato su pratiche artistiche che abbracciano la transitorietà come spazio di riflessione e rinnovamento.

MEMORIES OF WATER, MEMORIES OF AIR, evento immersivo di due giorni, a cura di Kasia Sobucka, si tiene nell’iconico Palazzo Contarini Polignac di Venezia e mette insieme artisti all’avanguardia – Monika Błaszczak, felicita, Karolina Łebek, Paweł Sakowicz, Konrad Smoleński e Rafał Zajko & Zoee – le cui opere esplorano il corpo e l’effimero come luoghi di memoria, rituale e trasformazione. Attraverso il movimento, il suono, il video e la performance, gli artisti esaminano le nostre connessioni elementari con l’acqua e l’aria, riflettendo su come la scomparsa di questi elementi essenziali li abbia portati ad assumere una dimensione quasi mitica nel mondo di oggi.

In response to a world increasingly shaped by disappearance and displacement, Memories of Water, Memories of Air invites us to gather around ephemeral gestures as acts of resistance and remembrance. The programme centres on artistic practices that embrace transience as a space for reflection and renewal.

This two-day immersive event held at Venice’s iconic Palazzo Contarini Polignac brings together pioneering artists – Monika Błaszczak, felicita, Karolina Łebek, Paweł Sakowicz, Konrad Smoleński, and Rafał Zajko & Zoee – whose works explore the body and ephemerality as sites of memory, ritual, and transformation. Through movement, sound, video, and performance, artists examine our elemental connections to water and air, reflecting on how the disappearance of these essential elements has led them to take on an almost mythical dimension in today’s world.

Curated by Kasia Sobucka, the programme engages with themes of cultural erasure, displacement, ancestral healing, corporeal presence and ecological resilience – shaped by the shifting dynamics of natural elements. It is conceived as a living laboratory: a dynamic space where art intersects with environmental urgency. Through performances, installations, and interventions in both historic and public spaces, the programme invites audiences to reflect on the idea of an unaltered environment – examining what has been lost, what may still be reclaimed. At its core lies a question: can ephemeral arts -a language of the body, movement, and sound – create spaces of remembrance and resilience in times of crisis and instability? By reflecting on the loss and threat to essential natural resources, the programme explores how temporary artistic experiences can foster collective memory, provide space for mourning, and illuminate our evolving relationship with the environment.

Rooted in Eastern European folk traditions and shaped by perspectives often marginalized in mainstream ecological discourse – including the water rituals of the Polish Łemko community – this project unfolds as both a lamentation and a call to action. It offers a space where the ephemeral and elemental converge, transforming movement, sound, and visual arts into vessels for documenting and transmitting ecological, embodied, and ancestral memory.

Programme Highlights:

Konrad Smoleński, Waiting Room

A video installation screened from a drifting boat, revisiting the stories of missing Kurdish migrants. Originally part of a collaboration with the Kraina Foundation and Kurdish artist Shamal Husamalddin Hassan, this work transforms the Mediterranean into a space of remembrance and unresolved passage.

Monika Błaszczak, Clay

World premiere of a 35-minute solo dance performance inspired by the malleability of clay and the fragility of the human body. The work is a poetic response to crisis, kinship, and earthly transformation.

Paweł Sakowicz, Storm

A visceral solo performance navigating desire, self-perception, and bodily architecture. The dancer’s body becomes a reflective surface – an instrument shaped by memory, seduction, and repetition.

Karolina Łebek, sanare

An 18-minute moving image work accompanied by a poetic text. Drawing from personal and historical memory, the artist revisits a journey to a Lemko village in Poland, using the ritual of drinking mineral waters as a portal to healing, remembrance, and collective belonging.

Rafał Zajko & Zoee, Denim III

A new performative collaboration remixes Zajko’s earlier works (Denim, Interludium) with a live sound composition culminating in the Polish funeral song from Podlasie. Performed alongside a looped video, the piece confronts mourning, queerness, and ritual through embodied sound.

felicita, kupalnocka/gry wodne

A hallucinatory live audio-visual performance channelling diasporic memory, Polish folk motifs, and surrealist pop experimentation. Presented in a new format for Venice, the piece – featuring guitar, electronics, bell, and water – blurs the lines between concert, ritual, and dream.

Dates:

27–28 June 2025

Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice

874 Dorsoduro, 30123 Venice

Tickets: Free entry (please RSVP by 27 June to confirm your attendance) RSVP HERE

Full programme and times to be announced in June.

Organisers:

Arts Territory – a not-for-profit arts organisation supporting radical artistic experimentation, cross-border collaboration, and ecological engagement.

Ditto Foundation – a not-for-profit arts organisation with a mission to support Polish artists abroad.