The Biodegradable Space
2020 - 2022
We filter it with our own eyes, and thus create it ourselves.
a humanlike role in family life. The boundaries defining the location of abandoned places spread outwards. They are the ghost of the previous space, a murky haze through which one gropes. These are spaces of absence, devoid even of themselves. Nature eventually devours these kinds of places. A side effect of modern urban planning’s relentless drive for development is ever more abandoned areas left over. These sites begin the process of secondary overgrowth that Gilles Clément termed the ‘Third Landscape’. They become a matrix of the global landscape of the future, when there will be no more concentrations of primary vegetation, but only secondary ones designated a ‘Fourth Nature’.
With the outbreak of the pandemic, we decamped to the countryside, distancing ourselves from the media, mass information, restrictions. We led an isolated life in the embrace of the forest and our imaginations. The virus period supplied conceptions of the post-apocalyptic and the void it contains. We remained in the grip of anxiety and uncertainty.
We documented them, searched for what information we could find. Little by little, we gleaned local legends, rumours, tragic tales. We wove them into a novel reality replete with haunted houses and ghosts trailing us. In this way we eluded the catastrophic vision of a deadly disease, escaping into multidimensionality and magic. Our world was every bit as disturbing, but in an enchanted and supernatural way. Within this alternate reality we pursued all kinds of magical activities that would disrupt a rational approach to the subject.
We have retained our vision of alienation, uncertainty and escape into a lost spirit world in virtual reality. The Biodegradable Space project is conceived as a virtual reality game played with VR goggles. Its viewer is transported to the rooms we documented from various villages in eastern and southern Poland. The spaces the viewer views are marked by time and decay to varying degrees. By returning to the same places and documenting the progressive changes in them, we have managed to create a sense of multidimensionality.
They are memorials to histories silenced and isolated from the cities and the rest of society.