Eene.meene
For the fifth time Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź undertook the cooperation with the Strzemiński Academy of Art, creating the opportunity for the students to work together with artists and curators as part of an artistic and educational project. The 2020 edition hosted Igor Krenz as the students’ mentor, whose experimental film practice had become a starting point for young artists to respond to the restrictions induced by the coronavirus pandemic. The result of this creative experience, which also explored some of the digital limitations of modern technologies, was an interactive website that invited recipients to act.
The idea of the workshop was to prepare a joint exhibition project. The original project, however, had to be reviewed due to the pandemic. That is why the project supervisors and its participants reached out to Łódź neo-avant-garde traditions and the idea of a ‘composite’ film as an alternative form of presenting a work of a group of artists. The content of the films was additionally determined by the type of ‘chain’ rule, in which each of the participants chose the work of one artist but must have also referred to the work chosen by their neighbour. Here, the inter-textual clues became a method for building relationships between particular works and a way to shape the narration.
According to the participants, the course of the 2020 workshops could be described as ‘systematically relinquishing control’. Choosing a favourable formula for creating a variety of coincidental situations, communication collisions occurring along the way between the participants, and then making a decision about the conscious pursuit of the state of randomness were all actions through which the project more and more closely started resembling a counting-out rhyme until it finally ‘deserved’ to be called 'eene.meene'.
‘Eene.meene’ may have functioned as a linear film or could be totally coincidental. There were two generators coexisting within it. In the first of them, individual video episodes could be combined, collided with each other, transposed and connections between them, different to those originally planned, could be simulated. Thanks to the second generator, each visitor was nominated to create their own episode, following the same rules as those adopted by all sixteen workshop participants.
workshop participants: Magdalena Berbeka, Ida Derczyńska, Dawid Furkot, Zuzanna Gołaś, Witek Gretzyngier, Tomasz Jeziorski, Łukasz Kwiliński, Patrycja Maciaszek, Justyna Maluty, Jagna Nawrocka, Anna Pacholik, Alek Sarna, Kuba Stępień, Michał Szufla, Aleksandra Wygnańska i Veronika Zakharchuk
project supervisors: Igor Krenz, Daniel Muzyczuk (ms), Łukasz Ogórek (ASP)
visuals and site design: Witek Gretzyngier
