Kamil Myszkowski - The world is a library

On January 21, 2022, the exhibition "Paper Landscapes," featuring photographs, installations and objects by Kamil Myszkowski, opened at the Sielecki Castle Art Center in Sosnowiec. The exhibition was on display until April 16, 2022.

The starting point for the exhibition "Paper Landscapes" is a series of photographs I have been implementing successively since 2018, in which I refer to classical landscape photography. However, this is not a "pure", found landscape, but a photographic creation - directed and built in nature. The theme of the set has become a book, and I try to show how it can complement reality. In this way, I compose seemingly ordinary views of nature, which, however, complement complex installations.

Kamil Myszkowski, Spiral

"Paper Landscapes" was born from visions that are the result of a fascination with the book-object. The library has always stimulated my imagination, excited me, and the figure of the obsessive bibliophile was the closest thing I had to an attitude. In previous years I have already realized works focusing on the book motif, it was, among others, the series "Inverted Library" from 2015, presented in the form of an exhibition at the Empty Gallery cd. in Jaworzno, or the installation "River" shown at the "Visions" Festival in Torun in 2017. The "Inverted Library" set referred to the concept of the anti-library, which was described in an essay delivered at the 25th anniversary of the Milan library by Umberto Eco.

Although I had already explored various library possibilities in the past, "Paper Landscapes" absorbed me completely. Through the interpenetration of photography, art installation with landscape and object like a book, I became a creator of new realities, at the intersection of media. The result was more than fifty photographs transporting the viewer to the world-library. 

The very motif of a book is not a random choice. In these inconspicuous objects are hidden numerous stories, books are also carriers of knowledge, they stimulate the imagination. The same is true of the photographs in the described series: each is a unique image, a small inner world - put together they form a whole universe.

In addition to the photographs, the exhibition at the Sielecki Castle Art Center in Sosnowiec also presents a series of installations in the gallery space, which provide a complementary setting. Thus, viewers can see the motif of a tree known from the photographs, whose hollow is supplemented with books, or a bookscape - a multimedia installation. The whole is complemented by four objects, which are the Equipment of the Indefatigable Librarian (Ex libris, Catalog cards, Handy bookcase, Catalogue of missing pages), a character I symbolically impersonate, building the narrative of the exhibition.

As part of the "Paper Landscapes" project, I explored the possibility of the creative process, but also the possibilities of the library. This led me to worlds previously unknown. I also refer to Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel" and the idea of the infinity of the library. I hope that the viewer will read into the images I have created, which are not so unreal after all. Or maybe everything is based on books? Or maybe the universe is a huge book with an infinite number of pages? Who knows what those rustling parallel worlds hide....

Kamil Myszkowski, The world is a library

***

From the text to the exhibition:

I take a book in my hand. I study its weight, its size, its thickness. I look at every spot on the spine, every tear on the cover. I open it, slowly leafing through the pages, checking for folds and page loss. I see library stamps, notations in the margins, underlining in the text. I firmly unfold the volume about halfway through, testing the stitching. It's solid, but the volume doesn't return to its closed form - the weight of the paper overwhelms it, or perhaps the content hidden on its surface? I can imagine each reader, each fingertip brushing the corner of the page, each smudge of the eye - by letter, by word, by task. So many emotions it aroused, so many worlds it allowed to discover, so many situations it accompanied... This intimate contact warmed the imagination. 

I lift my gaze from my reading, I am in a meadow where more books are growing. They rustle in the wind, ripe, ripe, sprinkled with dew. They emerge from the ground, from between the grasses and from under the trees. On them rests the entire landscape, they are the basis of everything. All around "the universe that others call a library" , and under my feet the library-world, an infinity of possibilities, an infinity of delights. Passing through the door hidden behind the bookcase I took a step into the unknown, but I could never have guessed that I would reach so far, that the library would open so many paths, that one of the books would be Atlas Impossible. 

I close my eyes, books are already everywhere. The pages slide out from between the rocks, the covers I see innate in the trunk of trees, the creek rustles, and the paper peaks scour the clouds. I move through this world inspired by every word I have read so far, delving into its structures like an explorer of unknown lands. I catalog the sights I've observed on fiche; in a small drawer I already have quite a few of them. I want to be able to recreate them and put them down somehow when I return, when I am far away from here.

Kamil Myszkowski, The world is a library

Kamil Myszkowski - artist photographer, creator of installations and videos, collector of photographs and old negatives, curator of photographic and historical exhibitions, animator of cultural life. Member of the Union of Polish Artists Photographers Silesian District. Member of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies. Doctoral student at the Institute of Cultural Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities of the Silesian University in Katowice. Scholarship holder of the Mayor of the City of Sosnowiec in the field of culture in 2020. He works on a daily basis in the Mechanical Documentation Department of the Silesian Museum in Katowice. Participates in the activities of Jaworzno's School of Vision and Group 999. Conducts photography workshops for various institutions.

From the editors: We asked the author what books he used for his stagings, while expressing the hope that they were tattered, worn-out copies, so destined for waste paper... Here's what he answered:

As for the books, they were actually all going to waste. They came from several libraries and were supposed to go to waste paper, but I gave them a second life. The project included a variety of items, from children's books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, fiction, detective fiction, film studies books, biographies. There are volumes in hard and soft bindings, falling apart and those in quite good condition. There are full-scale books, and there are miniature ones. Each one in this strange library was welcome. All the books that were used for the project are on display as building blocks for art installations in the gallery space.