Brutality of Spring Anna Łuczak & Sophie Schmidt
In Poland every year in spring, school children gather together at the banks of frozen rivers to drown the Marzanna. I remember throwing stones at the doll to make her sink faster. We then walked home without looking back.
Salmon swim upstream to lay their eggs in their home river. They die and their decomposing bodies help fertilise the water.
Everyone helps the rogue in the Dicken’s novel as he lays dying in Miss Abbey’s first-floor bedroom. But as he grows warm – “Did that eyelid tremble? Did that nostril twitch?” – the doctor and the four men cool and “their faces and their hearts harden to him.”
These occasions recognise what for Deleuze is not reducible to experience, but which nevertheless can be confronted: a life. Not the lived, individual life, so full of things that need to be done, but a life, singular and impersonal, indefinite; a life with no moments, but only the in-between, a passage, a becoming, of events yet to come that have already happened. “Pure power and bliss” Deleuze writes. Just life, only life, a life.
In Brutality of Spring Anna Łuczak and Sophia Schmidt collaborate together in homage to a recently deceased mutual friend to produce a multimedia installation, a vanitas-type project, founded equally in the transience of domestic sphere and the fragility of the human body.
Curated by Magdalena Wisniowska (GiG Munich)