To be porous / For lavender and nettle (2025)
performance, essay, 3d printed objects
fot. Patrik Borecky / Y: Celestial Gardens festival in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, 2025
I am who I am because of you.
To be porous / For lavender and nettle is a performative ritual in which - using my voice, music, sound design and a blend of theory and fiction writing - I invite listeners for the exploration of unnamable, forgotten and unlearned monstrous within. It's a ritual in the context of falling modernity, ritual as a decay and collective fermentation. The work conjures a porous body – leaking, absorbing, and becoming-with.Lavender and nettle – plants of care and resistance, softness and sting – become ritualistic companions and agents of transformation. Their invoked presence roots the performance in a multispecies logic of kinship, vulnerability, and mutual disturbance.
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.
fot. Patrik Borecky / Y: Celestial Gardens festival in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, 2025
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. Maciej Prochal / I felt it, it was like Evanescence C U at Sadka, Cracow, 2025
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