music: Justyna Banaszczyk
narrator: Klara Bielawka

The work comprises two parts: part one is on the square in the centre of the district (point 4A on the map; installation), and part two is near a stone on uncultivated land (4B on the map; sound installation).

“We’ve been here, we are here, we will remain” is the motto of a statue that stood in Przeróbka for years – its present whereabouts and fate are unknown. During her study visit, Diana accidentally found an erratic boulder that fit the monument’s description.

The boulder is in a non-place: situated near the heart of Przeróbka, it occupies a wasteland between the railway lines and the prison. This non-place is inaccessible, marked with mighty pylons; its scars healed by vegetation. This is Przeróbka’s “back room”, a storeroom of the rejected. A place where the human can engage with the non-human. A shelter for plant exiles and marsh creatures. A zone where toxic substances enter into inadmissible alliances with sprouting seeds. A subregion of dysfunctional marriages between old fridges and broken TV sets.

The first part of Diana’s work is an installation in the centre of Przeróbka, where the artist placed fragments of this non-place in an urban flower pot. Here, in the heart of the neighbourhood, its periphery reminds us about everything that was cast away or pushed aside.

The second part of the project leads us there: to this universal storeroom, the kingdom of transformations and fermentation. We stand next to the found boulder and listen to herstories about interspecies pacts and alliances forming on the edge of our field of vision – among the rejected, toxic and unpredictable.

Diana Lelonek is a visual artist and graduate of the Faculty of Multimedia Communication of the Poznań University of Arts, where in 2019 she also completed Interdisciplinary PhD Studies in art. She works with photography, video art and found objects to create interdisciplinary works, often situated at the crossroads between art and science. Lelonek examines the relationship between humans and other species, using her works to criticise the overproduction and unlimited exploitation of the natural environment.

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