Ephemeroptera*

Project for the exhibition 'Globallocal Village - Instytut Artycypacji 25' shown during Fringe Warszawa 24-28.09.2025

I.

Mikolaj Tomczak:

A year ago, at Walter Gropius' first building - the Granary in Jankowo Pomorskie - I hung several photographs printed on paper on the fence. They showed deteriorating building elements, disturbing organic forms, and strongly contrasting textures. I photographed what instilled a certain kind of fear in me, just like the dilapidated building of the famous architect, which in its current state evoked associations with legends of haunted houses. Looking at it, I imagined what had happened inside over the years since its construction. I wondered how many of these situations had escaped anyone's attention and whether awareness of these events could be valuable to a wider audience, even if only historically. I decided to leave the photographs hanging indefinitely. The dark, contrasting images on the fence in front of the building were a record of these reflections on the unknown, which, when confronted with the building, came to mind on their own, taking me into very disturbing regions of the imagination. A year later, when I arrived at the Granary building, I noticed that they were still hanging there. Two were missing, but the rest were hanging in the same places, except that they were faded and here and there small insects were living on them. I wondered what these photographs had seen during my absence? What events had they witnessed? Who had seen them, and what had happened to the two missing pictures?

II.

Ivan Hanzha:

At the same time, on the other side of the granary, my attention was drawn to a wall. Or rather, what was left of it - a layer of cement with dents where bricks once were.

According to the story, the bricks were corroded by fertilizers that had been stored in the basement of the granary for years and, under the influence of weather and time, gradually penetrated into every crack of the once large, solid building. Hidden there for a specific and rather obvious purpose, the fertilizer was meant to affect the contents of the barn, but when it came under the influence of other forces, it affected its appearance.
When trying to fill the granary today, we no longer need the fertilizer in the form it was there decades ago, but we still want to see the fruits inside.

As I stood there, staring at the ruined wall, I could clearly picture what it had looked like before. Not because my imagination was particularly overactive, but because the wall on the front side of the building wasn't in such poor condition, and from what I know about architecture, the back wall shouldn't have been much different from the front one.

I could endlessly speculate about which brick had fallen first and which crack in the wall had appeared first - gaps are good fertilizer for the imagination.

It reminds me of growing an avocado pit at home — inserting three toothpicks into it, immersing it halfway in water, and checking every day for a treasured crack.

A crack probably doesn't mean I'll have fresh avocados on your table every day in a couple of years, but at least for now, it serves as another confirmation of my existence.

***

The work engage in a dialogue about reproduction, memory, and space. The attempt to recreate the same conditions that prevailed in the Granary contrasts with the objects—photographs that directly experienced this space. Distance thus becomes a pretext for cultivating relationships between spaces that, despite being far apart, want to remain in interaction.

*Mayfly (latin Ephemeroptera, polish Jętki, german Eintagsfliege) - an insect characterized by the fact that after transformation into an imago it lives only one day.