I knock on the door of the stone.
- It's me, let me in.
(...)
- I don't have a door," says the stone
– W. Szymborska, "Conversation with a Stone.
The significance of stone in the culture of memory is indisputable and fascinating at the same time. In its separate, isolated existence, its isolation from reality, its persistence, as it were, "outside of time," stone is a special entity. Its essence, by virtue of its durability and longevity, is defined by its tireless participation and assistance in all, fundamentally impermanent, processes of nature and environmental change, subject to permanent and inexorable entropy, inevitable withering. Thus, it is possible that he is the depositary of an encoded, archetypal power, with almost mystical connotations, associated with the processes of "recording" and "recollection."
However, in the common perception, it figures only as an insignificant fragment of the environment, a lifeless conglomeration of various minerals, and only in the background does its function as a silent witness to the past fade into the background. Stone is such an ordinary element of the environment that we hardly pay attention to it. It becomes almost transparent, despite its compact nature. Upon closer encounter with this seemingly common form of matter, we quickly begin to realize how much we can read from it, what a vast amount of information it conceals. This knowledge is unfamiliar to geologists, for example.
From time immemorial, the world has viewed itself in stone. Stone clichés have recorded the manifestations of life's changing fortunes since time immemorial. Today they are the only available material evidence of its existence. Ammonite shells, corals, brachiopods and all the rest of the powerful arsenal of organisms from hundreds of millions of years ago, recorded in its permanent structure with unheard-of patience, immediately mark the scale of this visual meta-project of nature. Nature is the "photographer" and the stone is its tool - a kind of "camera" equivalent. The patience of this duo exceeds any imaginable human framework for recording a single object. The memory of the stone thus covers a vast span of entire eons and connects in its own way - like photography - the past and the present.
The power of stone treated as a form of visually autonomous artistic vision, along with its multidimensional symbolism, is also referred to in his project titled "The Stone. Negatives Jakub Byrczek. In it, the author makes an attempt to merge and at the same time find connections for two sets of photographs, separated by a significant caesura of time and seemingly incompatible with each other. The stone present in Negatives Byrczek, existing in various, let's call them, "allotropic varieties", becomes the substrate binding the whole. It does not surprise me, given the artist's long-standing, consistently maintained creative stance, that Jakub Byrczek consciously chose the form of a contemplative story, helping to close two radically different worlds. This is an interesting combination, because the form of transience, disappearance, and later - what we observe today - the germination of the "new" on the ruins of the "outdated" (historical approaches), is contrasted with a certain constancy, perversely understood as the immutability of a specific place in space (the creative contemporary part). For it is an important fact, and it should be mentioned in this context, that both sets of works that make up the whole statement, were created in the strictly defined area of the Old Steelworks, a district of Jaworzno, but in diametrically different times and circumstances.
The older collection, exhibited in the form of negative images and made back in the 1970s, presents (paradoxically, knowing the artist's creative path) documentary photographs, essentially made in the convention of reportage. On them we can see the Piłsudski heap located in Jaworzno, along with its immediate surroundings.
Above all, however, it shows the people whose fates were linked by this then eminently unfriendly and inhospitable place. But it's not the literal documentary registration that's the point here, although undoubtedly the photographs themselves have grown in significance years later and are an important, even priceless source of visual information about a place that no longer exists today, becoming (regardless of the original intention), part of Jaworzno's historical heritage. The author of the photographs from half a century ago himself says that he probably never wanted to depict something as if he were telling a story about it directly. The story, yes, had to come from a place that defined it and occupied the mind in some way. However, it was always processed - thanks to imagination - on the basis of a kind of map of associations. The artist constructed on this basis a certain mystery of the image closely correlated with the multifaceted possibilities of its decoding. In this sense, these are not reporter photographs sensu stricto.
This clearly emphasizes the formal aspect of the presentation - the exposure of the negative image is a conscious authorial nod in this direction, aiming at the realm of subtle understatement. Thanks to this approach, the reporter's form of report has been eliminated from the message, in one cut breaking with the "pushy" directness, although, I emphasize, it does not mean the illegibility of the message. Consequently, the picture is not so "blasted" directly towards the viewer - as Malgorzata Szumowska would say. Only the essence itself remains. Who knows, perhaps the dark, "distorting mirror" of the negative evokes in the Author's mind associations with the "dark side" of the past times, and the smoking piles of charcoal stone fit perfectly into the convention of inverted representations? In the eyes of the artist, the tonal inversion may also signify a symbolic act of negation, a disagreement with the realities of the time.
The contemporary part of the project, as it was implemented only a few years ago, is the work, or rather a kind of creative play with the matter of stone. In this regard, children were invited to join the project as part of Jakub Byrczek's eager educational activities. The youngest participants were just four years old. The children, playing with the "faces" of the stone tiles, undoubtedly explored for the first time this type of terra incognita. The keys to the labyrinth of the stone imaginarium are youthful carefreeness, sensitivity unparalleled in the adult world, and sincerity, free from encumbrances and routine. They become a real proxy for the goal: the artistic and at the same time educational value of the whole enterprise. The child is a human being With a smaller area of experience, but with more potential for curiosity - as Janusz Korczak claimed.
Thanks to these spontaneous, childish efforts, the stone was given a human face. It was anthropomorphized, at the same time taking over the function of a kind of link, uniting two events distant in time. A seemingly ordinary conglomeration of minerals suddenly becomes a Schwarzschild tunnel, leveling distance and time, opening access to thoughts from decades ago. Intuition tells us that Negatives, organically linked to the previously implemented series titled "The World's Best. Seeing the stone, is both a petrification of the author's experiences, impressions and emotions at the time Two and a half turns one way, confronted with the freedom and carefree nature of children "exploring" essentially the same stone contemporaneously, but in a completely different way. This is a specific reference to Proustian losing and finding time again. An important feature highlighting one of the significant advantages of this initiative is its technical implementation. This is because the children performed their works in techniques that generally do not tolerate haste. Thus, they contributed - through play - to a "tender" contact with the shaped material.
Thus, the photographs themselves were taken with pinhole cameras, which the children placed in those places where they thought the "head" and "eyes" of the stone were located. In other words, in the imaginary direction in which the stone "sees." The camera negatives were then developed and, in the next step, enlarged onto film. And only this film was contact-copied with the stone, with Vandyke's light-sensitive bronze solution previously applied to its surface - one of the oldest photographic special techniques. Thanks to the aforementioned procedures, carried out in Jaworznica's GEOsphere, and the children's efforts, the stone "prints", under the watchful eye of Jakub Byrczek, revealed images similar in aesthetics to the early works of Niépce or Talbot. Thus, they became a peculiar synonym for permanence (on a human scale), as well as a strong connection with the past of the Old Steelworks area. In this way, almost thirty stone, unique representations of the area after the former Piłsudski dump and now, after the incredible metamorphosis of this space - the full green English Park - were created.
Seeing "through, through time," scanning the view of permanently changing surroundings through the almost unchanging, unmoving face of the stone "looking" into space through children's eyes is - within the framework of the presented creative act - an indisputable fact. This is a somewhat perverse statement, but such a metaphor seems highly promising. Yi-Fu Tuan in an extremely engaging book Space and place, states:
The sense of time affects the sense of place. To the same extent that a child's time (...) differs from that of an adult, the experience of place also differs. An adult cannot know a place in the same way a child knows it, and not only because they have different (...) capacities of mind, but also because their sense of time has little in common.
Confronting these two cycles with each other, the fundamental question to be worked through could - perhaps - be based on the ontological status of the stone, revealed in the form of the equivalent of a time capsule. Mutual relations that have occurred, but are distant in time, joined by the thread of a stone umbilical cord, significantly shortening the distance to individual partial representations, would be a good leaven for thinking about the formation of intergenerational relations. Children participating several years ago in the project Seeing the stone after all, they could not literally experience the realities of life in the decade of the 1970s, when the "Pilsudski" heap was smoking in Jaworzno. Only the stone is a witness and at the same time a link between these two realities. Thus, it becomes a guardian of memories.
First ripped out of the earth from a muddy, smoking heap, sifted, collected and transported by tortured bodies, working under harsh conditions, in sludge, mud, in clouds of biting smoke. Then, years later, creatively, symbolically used by the children as a witness to the inevitable changes taking place. These transformations the stone "sees", "observes" and ultimately - thanks to the indefatigable childish imagination - records. The stone positives harness the struggle with time of Jaworzno's space.
The various forms of stone tiles: triangular, trapezoidal, polygonal, on which the images created thanks to children's hands via pinhole cameras were eventually formed, evoke direct associations with the hard grind of decades ago on the now non-existent post-mining heap, during the chipping of lumps of coal. Hard work in which, at that time, young people also participated. Thus, we can treat the contemporary part of the creative endeavor as a kind of intergenerational performance, understood as a symbolic act of solidarity with the children and youth of the Gierek era, their often coarse everyday life, and sometimes the lack of a real childhood, a time of fun and carefreeness.
So, in order to perceive the multi-generational vibrations, one must listen carefully to the stone, not just gaze at it. That is, to tune one's inner sensitivity to the frequency generated by the rich stone symbolism. After all, many meditation techniques of which Jakub Byrczek is also a promoter are largely about listening. To listen to a stone, to what it has to tell us, means as much as to listen to the heartbeat of the earth that gave birth to it. To listen to the vibrations of the network of human connections and dependencies.
It is also not excluded to consider this overall structure as a particular kind of manifestation of creative activity close to land art. The context and a kind of keystone here is a fragment or rather an element of the natural environment, i.e. a stone in the role of artistic material, treated almost as an invariant, and at the same time as a kind of screen on which the drama of life is permanently, unceasingly played out. On the other hand, the evolution of the depicted environment itself did not occur as a result of a creative act, but spontaneously, so to speak, where political and social changes after decades finally shaped the vicinity of the Old Steelworks, offering this space a solid portion of breath in the form of a beautiful park in place of the former heap, degrading the surrounding environment.
Worth considering is the question of how a long-term project can be combined Negatives With the creative persona of Jakub Byrczek that brought him to life? It seems that attentiveness, a value that cannot be overestimated, which J. Byrczek willingly shares with adepts of the art of photography at all levels of competence bears good fruit. It represents a deeply personal and at the same time open model of work, especially with children and young people. A model that does not impose, does not limit in the slightest degree the individual and at the same time unique view of reality, providing an important added value, where collective action does not contradict individual aspirations, trying to chart a private attitude to the world.
In this context, undoubtedly an important and characteristic binder of all Byrczek's activities are the meditative techniques he has been practicing for many years and transferred to the field of photography, which unite both mind and body. He smuggles this attitude, or rather combines it with the art of photography, resulting in a deepened sensitivity to all fluctuations of the environment, not often seen in other artists. Such an intention, thanks to the implementation of unhurried manual techniques requiring patience in many realizations, is a factor that further strengthens and energizes the message. Body and mind training and the art of photography at the author's Prefacts constitute an integral way of experiencing the world and, at the same time, a consistently built system of values, which, in fact, is the key to understanding the spectrum of this artist's endeavors in the field of pictorial arts. The indicated approach is most fully visualized in the idea and practice carried out by Jakub Byrczek Schools of vision.
***
I have no door, says stone - so attests our Nobel laureate in her poem Talking to the stone. This is a categorical statement, but is it really definitive? Admittedly, we cannot unveil the "inside" of the stone, look under its hard epidermis, we have not possessed the power to cross the doors of its palace. They are for us, for the outsider viewer - at least according to Kantian intuition - nonetheless bolted. However, we are constantly accompanied by the irresistible impression that we are able, in spite of the odds, to peek obliquely inside through a tentacle, unguarded and unnoticed by nature. And this task was brilliantly tackled by the participants in the present project, opening the stones' eyes. Carefree, youthful looking a bit from the side, into the stone "face", admittedly with a strong parallax effect, hindered, deformed, but how rewarding!
***
Jakub Byrczek - graduated from the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice in 1973, and received his diploma as an artist photographer from the ZPAF in 1982. In 1999 he received a doctorate in film arts and photography from the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theater in Lodz, where he received his habilitation in this discipline in 2005.
From 1997 to 2005, he served as president of the Silesian District of the ZPAF. In 1982, he began working as an academic teacher and researcher at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Since 1988, he programmed the Photography Gallery of the Silesian District of the ZPAF, and since 1993, events at the "Empty" Photography Gallery at the Upper Silesian Cultural Center in Katowice, which he currently continues at the "Empty cd." Gallery. in Jaworzno, and additionally at the Living Heritage Park of Photography and the School of Seeing, a photography education program he founded.
He is the author of more than a dozen solo exhibitions, including: Prefacts (1983), Two and a half turns one way (1987), Everything that is, has its place and light (1987), Mother's light (1999), Impermanence of photography (2001). In 1989-1998 he organized a series of international exhibitions entitled Contacts. In the 1980s he represented the trend of elementary photography.
In 1982 he was awarded the silver badge of Merit in the Development of the Katowice Province, in 1989 he received the Third Degree Award of the Rector of the University of Silesia for achievements in scientific and didactic work, and in 2004 he received the individual Second Degree Award of the Rector of the University of Silesia for scientific and artistic activity. In 2012, he received the ZPAF award for the dissemination and protection of cultural assets, and in particular for his activities for the Silesian district of the ZPAF.
By decision of the Governor of Silesia and by order of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, on 06.08.2020 Jakub Byrczek was awarded the Bronze Medal - "Meritorious for Culture Gloria Artis".
Text: Jerzy Orawski
Originally, this text appeared in the catalog accompanying the exhibition, the opening of which took place on 15. 12. 2021. Here it is presented in a slightly modified form.
