November 2019
We meet in the hospitable BWA Studio Wrocław. We begin open interviews with those wishing to co-operate with Joanna Rajkowska within the framework of the next edition of the Master’s Studio. There are over two hundred applicants for the project, some of them online. Joanna is not sure if she can handle it. Are we even physically capable of interviewing so many people? We split the lot into two batches. Natalia and Asia (our Studio hosts) suggest we should allocate a few minutes per person. A bit like in an exam. We begin. Right from the start, Joanna forgets any time discipline. She chats for as long as it takes her to get the idea. We meet fantastic artists. Almost everyone is ready, mature, sometimes arriving with support. It is an amazing review of attitudes and propositions, almost each of them promising a potential exhibition. It is nice, but we are aware of the fact that we have to make a choice according to criteria concealed behind a certain unexpressed presumption. Something nags Joanna. She does not like overcalculated projects. Having just returned from London, she tells me how suspicious she is of artists loaded with terminology, well-prepared, hidden safely behind what is right and important. The discriminant “east” appears.
***
A few weeks later, Joanna sends me a list of people from which not a single name can be deleted.
