Monika Drozynska in conversation with Angelika Pitoń
Gazeta wyborcza daily edition 26.08.2022
The interview accompanied the exhibition
"Don't hold your tongue"
Shefter Gallery
Krakow 19.08-10.10. 2022
Women are not geese, they have their own language?
Monika Drozynska: How much violence in this statement! On the one hand, it's about belittling women, on the other - we are denying the subject to geese. And there is so much talk about moving away from such expressions as "dumb as a donkey," "but you're a ram," "you look like a pig." It's not those times anymore. I very much dislike references to such old sayings. They are terribly disciplinary, just like "anger harms beauty". At an elementary behavioral level, such a statement prevents development. And anger is an insanely necessary emotion. In Chinese medicine, it belongs to the energy of wood. When we set it in motion with emotion we create fire, the emotion of joy. Anger allows us to express our emotions, to make a point.
In your latest exhibition, "Hold Your Tongue," which you are returning to Krakow's art galleries after a three-year break, you serve up a bold polemic against folk wisdom and proverbs. You appeal to keep your tongue in front of, not behind, your teeth. You say that no longer silence, but speech is gold. That voice is a privilege.
- I believe that such wisdoms and proverbs are worth arguing with. And it is best to forget them at all.
And start with a clean slate?
- There is a saying that "a good life is a short memory and good health." It is accurate.
And, that is, what saying do you agree with this saying?
- (Laught). I just don't want my children to grow up around beliefs that are meant to discipline and subjugate people, that put everyone in one line and create a monolith without a voice that is not visible, cannot speak up for its rights and fight for its needs. Often at an elementary level. I will not speak about women in general, because I am not a gender scholar. I can speak about myself and my own experiences. And in my case it was that for one part of my life I couldn't speak. And for the other, I thought that I actually had nothing to say. I'm a bit like Philomela, the one from Ovid, who recovered her tongue with thread, writing on canvas. Because I do embroidery writing. I don't embroider doilies, I treat it as a writing technique. Embroidery is not original in art, but my theory of writing embroidery is original, no one has dealt with embroidery as a writing technique before. My embroidery falls somewhere between a handwritten personal note, an intimate record, and official, printed writing. A language that exercises power. I explore letters, languages, filtering the stories I learn through my own experiences, the perspective of a mother, a wife, a woman with credit.
I work like the fierce thief that Helene Cixous wrote about in "Laughing Jellyfish." - I fly to where something shines, where something pleases me. And I steal. A little from Freud, a little from Walter Benjamin, Chinese medicine, conventional psychology, a little Kabbalah, tarot, pop culture. I throw it all into my embroidery drum and spit it out in the form of work. Instead of "gender fluid," I cultivate a kind of "language fluid." I am an embroidery writer, I practice literature - only on canvas. I am also a scientist, and I have brought embroidery writing, or "langue fluid" into the sphere of science, and it is very important both for Polish culture and for Polish science.
Ryszard Kapuscinski described Herodotus and his ilk as "sponge beings" who are constantly absorbing, completing, searching. In the embroidery "Moon", which opens your exhibition at Krakow's Shefter Gallery, we see an experiment with the English word "woman", from which you try to erase "man". What for?
- This is not my idea, but only a record, a documentation of the activities of queer movements operating in the United States. Somewhat along the lines of replacing "his" with "her" storia. I enclosed these attempts at travesty, searching for new means of expression in a sphere. A bit like the movement of a machine in a totlottery, when the balls with numbers get mixed up - the words fluctuate, complement each other, change perspective, are in motion.
In 2020, I did a "five" paper on the five letters of the Ukrainian, Polish and Austrian alphabets. These are consecutive "ge", "o" with umlaut and ć. Each very characteristic of the nation using it. "Ge" is specific only to Ukrainian; erased from the alphabet after the creation of the Soviet Union, it became a symbol of Ukraine's independence from Russia. "O" with an umlaut is the sister of Fighting Poland - it was the inspiration for the formation of the Austrian resistance movement, and was written on walls. Even today, by the way, we can still see it, for example, in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. The politics of letters is fascinating. In a paper with this title that I did in April of this year, I juxtaposed these letters with the "j," the tailed yota from hell, which came into the Polish language during the Partitions. There was, by the way, a thick shitstorm of it at the time, reminiscent of some happening in Poland today. I also embroidered there an x - a representative of capitalism, the Western world or "z" - today's symbol of Russian occupation in Ukraine.
These procedures are evident in Polish, especially in the language of non-binary people. Do you embroider gender-neutral words, such as did*m?
- I don't know if that wouldn't be an appropriation on my part. And whether I'm even needed for that, because as you point out, such changes are already happening in Polish. Although maybe someday I will use it as part of my work, adding another interesting narrative to it?
At the exhibition we see many of your classic embroideries. However, it does not lack experiments. In your latest works, you no longer give us the message on a tray, but complicate the reading of the message; either by embroidering white letters on a white tablecloth, further fattening it, or by rolling the embroidery into a ball. Where does this coupling come from?
- I love these most recognizable embroideries, my silly, dumpy things! Thanks to them I cultivate my trait of distance from the world. In general, I believe that laughing together is the best spiritual experience we can have together. So I embroider these farts, relax while doing so, post them to my friends on Instagram, talk about them with my husband. I catch moments with them, such as the "I've never been to Kurdwanów" embroidery. I read this sentence once online, it was the headline of some text. And it touched me, because it's so Cracovian. We here are far away from everywhere, we live locally, in our square. From Market Square to Kazimierz? It's already an expedition. Likewise with the Airport-Auschwitz-Wieliczka embroidery, which documents an ad by one of the travel agencies. It's a commentary on Krakow's policy of touristomania.
I like the works to talk. It is important to me where they tell a story.
The form of my sculpture - a 4-meter tablecloth spread on a table in the center of Shefter Gallery was somehow forced by the place. It is a beautiful space, bourgeois, in the very center of Krakow. By laying it on the table, I am inviting a conversation, a dialogue. I've embroidered there various words I've invented over the years, such as "personhood," but also cases, elements of grammatical rules. The system. Paradoxically, it is he who makes us feel safe in the world. He is the one who makes it possible for us to be anti-systemic, subversive, to play with these rules. And naming the world anew. Similarly with the spheres - after all, I could hang the fabric in such a way that the viewer would have no problem reading it. But this time I don't put a period, I don't give a ready-made solution. They give space for their own readings, their own interpretations. Again - I invite you to meet. I have also included in the exhibition an installation composed of flags - works created over the past 10 years, which I embroidered together with various groups. I invited residents of Vilnius, with whom I talked about difficult Polish-Lithuanian relations; Polish women who converted to Islam and embroidered with me the lyrics of a song about love. My parents, who emigrated to the UK 17 years ago, embroidered their flag with me, which is where my interest in moving around the world came from.
We embroidered "Money" from a Floyd song, and talked about their lives in communist Poland, after 1989, at the turn of the millennium, and after joining the European Union. We recorded the meeting, by the way. I made the last flag in 2017, and now I decided to put them - and there were several - together, to renationalize them. I see a great danger in nationalism, and I am trying anew to answer the question of what a nation is and how nationality is arranged. This work is a symbol of the process that has happened recently in me, but also in the world. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay "Can subjugated others speak?" says that there is no way to translate someone's experience 1:1. That it will always be mediated by a number of factors that make up our individual perceptions of the world. I deliberately embroider in a way that is difficult to read, to show that it is impossible to completely understand and enter into someone else's experience.
You like to use language to mark the ongoing processes of migration and the resulting multiculturalism. On work "ĄĘŻĆĘŻĄŁ" you embroidered how the Ukrainian language has fluxed and become independent of Russia over the years. Today this work takes on a different context, after the war, in a city that is home to a growing number of Ukrainians, including refugees.
- This is a very important topic for me. I dedicated the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages from which I made metisarz to my dissertation, which I will soon defend at the Academy of Fine Arts. Metisarz is a word that was suggested to me by Dr. Ewa Majewska, which is a polonized adjective from the word metis - hybrid and comes from Chicana feminism. This linguistic mestizo, which I created by combining the letters of three languages, is such a mongrel, a hybrid, a symbol of east, center and west at the same time. Two years ago I started learning Ukrainian, and for me this intense presence of people from Ukraine in Poland and in Cracow is very important. So is the topic of migration, to which I have devoted a lot of work and have been researching for years.
In 2020, I did a "five" paper on the five letters of the Ukrainian, Polish and Austrian alphabets. These are consecutive "ge", "o" with umlaut and ć. Each very characteristic of the nation using it. "Ge" is specific only to Ukrainian; erased from the alphabet after the creation of the Soviet Union, it became a symbol of Ukraine's independence from Russia. "O" with an umlaut is the sister of Fighting Poland - it was the inspiration for the formation of the Austrian resistance movement, and was written on walls. Even today, by the way, we can still see it, for example, in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. The politics of letters is fascinating. In a paper with this title that I did in April of this year, I juxtaposed these letters with the "j," the tailed yota from hell, which came into the Polish language during the Partitions. There was, by the way, a thick shitstorm of it at the time, reminiscent of some happening in Poland today. I also embroidered there an x - a representative of capitalism, the Western world or "z" - today's symbol of Russian occupation in Ukraine.
You recently made your debut on TikTok, showing off your PKP embroidery. There you are fulfilling your activist role - you enter into a dialogue with the haters, who tag PKP Intercity en masse and accuse you of destroying property, call for a lifetime ban on railroads, accuse you of embroidering unsightly, not understanding the definition of art. Such a reception, after already embroidering in PKP for many years, probably surprised you?
- Not at all! I've been embroidering in PKP since 2016, and indeed - illegally. This is a form of vandalism, I agree. Though perhaps more easily removed than spilling a bucket of oil paint. I treat it as fun, my way of traveling. And why on TikTok? A friend told me that for this channel you need to have an idea. So I thought I'd put my embroidered headrests there, treat this TikTok like an archive. I've had people threaten me with lawyers, prosecutors before. But it's new to me that people write on my channel, about me, in the third person. "She probably thinks she's an artist," "You won't baffle her," "You can see she's old school." Or they advise me to learn embroidery, that you can for free, from the Internet. It amuses me a lot. And the hate? I was already threatened with lawyers, prosecutors before TikTok. Except that I'm waiting for the president of PKP! Maybe we can finally do something together, in cooperation? (laughs).
For the opening of the exhibition in Krakow you prepared a special edition of the screenprint "Latte capitalism". You are selling copies, declaring that you will donate one-third of this sum to the Feminist Fund.
- I once embroidered this slogan: "If I can, I'll help. If I can't, I won't help." And this is where the whole point comes in. I am a privileged person on many levels. Seen, heard. So I share my experience... Feminism and feminist movements have changed my life on many levels. With this checkout, as it were, I want to repay that debt, believing that maybe it will change other people's lives as well.