To be porous / For lavender and nettle (2025)

performance, essay

fot. Maciej Prochal / I felt it, it was like Evanescence C U at Sadka, Cracow, 2025
I don't know if I'm still a person or just a passage. My knees have stopped bending in accordance with gravity. The body has become a stronghold of tremors – an epicenter gathering foreign, vegetal thoughts around itself, filtered through algae that sift culture. The skin does not separate but invites. Something circulates within me that does not know names.

A ritual, even in its modern, sanitized form, holds the potential for resisting the commodification of experience. Rituals are techniques of presence that embed the subject in structures of meaning rather than just in events. In this sense, ritual does not so much summon the sacred as it weaves it – with what is fleeting, material, and constantly in motion. Here, ritual becomes a soft technology, capable of nesting experiences that transcend binary distinctions.

The absence of linear codes opens space for what is unclear and indeterminate – ontological states drifting somewhere between gesture and language. Thus understood, ritual is not a reconstruction but a fermentation. Candles, spaces, gestures – they do not merely indicate but co-create. They are not background elements but actors in a performative floodplain where theory and narrative merge into matter.

fot. Andrzej Frydrych / I felt it, it was like Evanescence C U at Sadka, Cracow, 2025

fot. Maciej Prochal / I felt it, it was like Evanescence C U at Sadka, Cracow, 2025
Originally performed at the opening of the exhibition I felt it, it was like Evanescence featuring works by Arek Dec and Ryo Koike at C U at Sadka as part of Cracow Art Week 2025.

Credits:
Curators: Arek Dec & Patrick Leftwich
Curatorial text: Patrick Leftwich
Mask & dress: Ludmila Lubanova
Trousers: Nina Sakowska

Ernest Borowski

© 2025 Ernest Borowski