Queering Eastern European Folk

After spending a week researching Ethnographic Museum in Krakow  archive I went for a residency in University of Folk Art and Craft, located in Wola Sekowa – remote village South East of Poland.

During my residency time there were ceramic and ‘glass fusing’ workshops, which I took part in and other than that I was particularly focusing on  researching Eastern European embroidery techniques and testing them for a new textile work that I have been developing.

While working with the embroidery I was not only thinking how it could be potentially queered but also about communal and contemplative qualities of this technique.

I estimated that the work would take me many months to be completed and I was thinking how is it counter-productive in a way. So if you do something very slow, against the currents of constant acceleration, it becomes in itself a mode of resistance.

In May 2018, in support of a-n 2018 Bursary,  I visited Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, Poland archives. I been mostly interested in researching these materials that are regarding love (love letters and songs) and women rituals, I also focused on looking at textile works, masks and headwear.

Power structures surrounding folk recordings and archives became subject of many conversations. There is a certain, very important social class problematic to it. The traditional folk songs were at times not ‘poetic’ or ‘sophisticated’ enough (or too obscene) for the people who collected and archived them, so at times they censored or modified them. The collectors of the ethnography were mostly coming from the upper class, therefore they were appropriating this heritage in a very specific way. They were trying to change the songs as they were trying to make them more usable for upper-middle-class context.

During the Communist period there was an operation of adaptation of what was considered ‘low’ culture to ‘high’ places like palaces of culture, where the folk songs were performed for the party nomenclature and city audience.

Alongside to ‘Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke’ (2016) video – that I wrote about in the previous blog post – I also have been developing series of collages deconstructing and re-defying how women and love have been represented in Eastern European folk traditions.

Collage is a medium that allows us to visually re-think the flood of images out of which the past, the present and the future are constructed. A tool for dismantling, undoing and pulling things apart. A tool for combining the preexisting into something that could not be seen before. A tool for creating new perspectives, hidden representations and unheard narratives.

Let it be trough scissors and glue or cut, copy and paste.

In my work I have combined both analogue and digital. I used images found on the web, which I printed, cut apart and then constructed new images through photocopier and risograph. I also used books on folk and archived folk songs texts.

In 2016 I finalised production of ‘Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke’ video, which was the first work in which I looked into potentialities of Eastern European queer utopias, while investigating the relationship between history, ‘national values’ and power structures.

Through the work I revisited Eastern European folk traditions and whilst employing feminist and queer reading I questioned why queer love has never been preserved and celebrated in the folk history. I reclaimed these stories by subverting the narrative of ‘straight’ love songs to represent queer love stories instead.

My aim was to problematize how history is written and tradition is represented, often only to sustain the power structures that claim it ‘objective’. I intended to encourage the viewer to consider and experience history as a discourse made out of multiple, overlapping and contesting narratives rather than a single, fixed entity.