Postermaker

The artist’s cooperation with the Dramatyczny Theatre in Warsaw began with the creation of an embroidered visual identity project for the 43rd Warsaw Theatre Meetings [WTM]. The project included the creation of a poster and elements of visual identity used in online and offline communications. Drożyńska also embroidered the visual identity for the theatre’s 2023/2024 season and posters for the following plays: Heksy [Hexes], Nasze Czasy [Our Times], Antygona w Molenbeek [Antigone in Molenbeek], Skok wzwyż [High Jump], and Dzieci Saturna [Children of Saturn].

Agata Adamiecka-Sitek, a member of the Warsaw Theatre Meetings curatorial team, described the embroidered pennant-poster as follows:

“‘Less is enough’, I think to myself as I look at a pennant made by Drożyńska, serving as the poster for the 43rd Warsaw Theatre Meetings. The black lettering was embroidered by an imprecise, somewhat hasty hand, one that allowed itself a nonchalant gesture of scaling back, ready for other radical gestures. Since I first saw a billboard with Drożyńska’s work in a Warsaw underpass, the urban landscape has become even more heavily covered with a layer of her preening images-commodities. In Warsaw, we have entire buildings that, for years, have existed only as scaffolding for large-format advertisements, covering up the supposedly ongoing renovations. Entering the metro, we might feel like the characters in an episode of Black Mirror, perpetually forced to watch ads broadcast on the luminous walls of their underground cells-dorms. The world pours – through our eyes – right into our brains. Drożyńska repeats: “remember, we exist as bodies,” but this time there is simultaneously more strength and more fragility in her statement. The decade separating us from her “urban embroideries,” which the billboard I mentioned above was a part of, is an entire era. The tiny black flowers and black, uneven letters on the WTM’s pennant bear the unspoken weight of our times. The hands that embroidered them have the determination of a body recognizing the non-obvious nature of its existence. Again, I take a deeper breath, this time aware that this is a privilege, perhaps a temporary one. The WTM’s pennant-poster is both a child’s embroidery and an hourglass. On the streets of Warsaw, the spring is heavy with fumes, and we go to the theatre: an encounter between heavy bodies – a celebration of life.”