Opera

Opera is a genre associated with the notion of total artwork. To define it, Richard Wagner coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk – an all-embracing work of art which activates all our senses. The aim of Paulina Pankiewicz’s project is to create, together with a group of blind and visually impaired people, a composition which would be an acoustic equivalent of a landscape experienced by moving bodies. The artist’s idea evolved together with her own experience with sport – running. A moment came when Paulina Pankiewicz decided to share the experience with people for whom running remains beyond the boundaries of perception. Thinking about the landscape, the artist wanted to make the sensation of open space available to the blind through free movement within this space. The participants’ bodily experience of the landscape will be told to the audience by means of an audio work composed of breaths of the bodies taking part in the run. 

Initially, the participants and collaborators were to be runners from the Educational and Rehabilitation Centre for Blind Children in Laski near Warsaw. Unfortunately, the restrictions connected with epidemic safety forced the artist to change the original idea. Currently, the project includes adult people who responded to the open invitation to the project.  

Starring: Adam Marciniak, Maciek Kapczyński, Mariusz Zacheja, Marta Michnowska, Konrad Kopański, Monika Dubiel, Wojtek Figiel, Kamila Albin,Ryszard Sawa, Anna Łabudzka, Jakub Musiałowski

Paulina Pankiewicz was born in 1980 in Warsaw. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She received her diploma with the Rector’s award of merit in 2007 and carried on to graduate from the postgraduate programme in pedagogy at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts (2020). She is currently completing Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies at the University of the Arts in Poznań. She is involved in performative actions, drawing, illustration, video and site-specific projects. She collaborates with architects, musicians, athletes. She often engages in dialogue with spatial structures of the city, which she examines, observes and describes. She finds an equally strong inspiration in nature. These two themes recur in her work. She explores them in the context of space, time and movement.