Carpet

"The whole ceremony upholds the reputation of paradise as a place that supposedly bestows happiness and satisfaction on everyone".
None on the streets at Dzierżawna can be passed without getting one's shoes and trousers dirty, which is why I have unrolled a 300-metre long carpet to cover one of them. This is not a place I chose by myself. It was the project curator who suggested that it might be worth considering it for my work. When I visited the area, I realized that the most important thing - and in fact the only thing I could do, as everything else is already there, is to protect the residents' feet from mud. At the same time I compose a beautiful image by running a red line through the middle of the district. What I have done is temporary, impractical; it does not fulfill the expectations of socially involved art. The carpet in the street expresses a contrast between the private and the public, the permanent and the transient, clean and dirty, cosy and rough, wise and stupid, a fragment and the whole.
The tittle of the project has been borrowed from Mark Twain's short story Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, the main protagonist gets to heaven, which hadn't been destined for him, and so he is truly astonished. "Did you imagine the same heaven would suit all sorts of men?" somebody asks him, to which Stormfield answers "You see, happiness ain't a thing in itself – it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. That's all it is. There ain't a thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self – it's only so by contrast with the other thing. And so, as soon as the
novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have
to get something fresh. Well, there's plenty of pain and suffering in heaven - consequently
there's plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness."