Beneath the Syzygy of Blisters

What body suffers “under the suppurating syzygy of blisters?” Aimé Césaire – poet, militant, and architect of the Negritude (“blackness”) movement – poses this question when faced with the subjugation of his Martinican homeland, an island “sprawled-flat” and pinned by the “geometric weight” of the distant French government and its colonial cartography. In his poetry, Césaire laments the trauma inflicted by the instruments of division and enclosure, the lines on a map which “measure” and “include [him] between latitude and longitude,” reducing his world to a “little ellipsoidal nothing.” Yet Césaire takes hold of the body of his homeland, tracing its lacerations and registering its pain, like an anti-cartographer crafting a “world map made for my own use, not tinted with the arbitrary colors of scholars, but with the geometry of my spilled blood… measured by the compass of suffering.” In his stanzas, a new, militant body is born, as these wounds come into alignment with those of others. Like a syzygy (the alignment of celestial bodies), the blisters on the hands of 20th century Martinican laborers join with the blisters on the feet of a refugee crossing the Polish-Belarusian border today, offering one rueful glimmer of hope living in “the age of the refugee, the displaced person” (in Edward Said’s words): while there may be a million blistered victims of the border, they share a common struggle… This poetics of the border and its transgression inform the joint exhibition of Warsaw-based painter Adam Kozicki and Prague-based sculptor Ruta Putramentaite, which interrogates the boundary line transversally: at one scale, it figures as a social and geopolitical frontier to be crossed, opposed, or evaded, and on another scale, it announces the planetary transgression of borders between bodies, objects, and relations. As Earth warms and its raw materials enter into frenzied circulation, we are struck by the rate at which the “social” and the “human” dissolve alongside other organic and inorganic forms. Yet at the same time, we are struck by the way in which such mobility is matched by even more rigorous immobilities, how just as interior frontiers disintegrate in viroid, transmutative exchange, exterior frontiers are ever more rigorously expanded, enforced, and weaponized. It’s blisters all the way down. Linking these two scales is the image of a swamp. Out from the friction of soil on chrome on plastic on flesh, heated and pressurized under the bubbling veneer of marshlands, swells a form shed of all instrumentality, value, recognizability. Putramentaite’s shapes speculate not only on a present shaded by extinction and collapse, but an ambiguous future in which there is no “wealth” nor an “immense collection of commodities” to actualize it: no borders between classes, hierarchies, species, geographies, materialities. Yet there is no assurance of utopia here, just a nagging suspicion that “we” may not be witness to this future at all. What we do witness in the present, depicted in Kozicki’s landscapes and figurations, is thus made all the more urgent: the stale, surveilled interior of a police detention center, a harsh, entrapping spotlight probing through the marsh, images of claustrophobia, paranoia, mobile immobility. Here the swamp reveals its contradictory nature: we encounter a zone of stasis and inertia teeming with perverse vitality, a possibility of shelter and certain danger, an inoperable terrain serving as a limit yet perforating the border winding through it. The swamp is an emblem of the types of zones that borders create: a logic of “expansion by expulsion” (as philosopher Thomas Nail writes) pulls refugees and migrants into a pattern of motion that holds them in states of suspension, pulling them in to extract labor, fines, or information only to cast them back out, tempting them to return only to track them deep into the territory and enclose them from within. Yet the swamp itself is also an emblem of James C. Scott’s “non-state spaces,” socio-geographical constructions that thwart the full control of the nation-state and act as a fortress against capture, coercion, capital. Sitting in this swamp, enmeshed in crawling vines, we are thus left with a singular view: billowing yellow skies peaking through darkening treetops, a political horizon barely perceptible through the underbrush, yet there if we will see it… What we see is that every form is unstable: human tissue, chicken bones, a plastic bottle, barbed wire. But this shared pull of entropy does not mean we should consider the human or social with any less urgency: rather, as we begin to perceive these forms in all their fragility and contingency, we can rid ourselves of the “eternal” truths, “traditional” values, and “historical” teleologies that serve so well to enforce xenophobic, racist, sexist, or otherwise oppressive divisions. What we see is what Césaire saw – lines on a map as mutable as the bones in a bog. Blisters and wounds like a new cartography, navigating us through the swamp, where all the “geometric weight” of the present state caves in on itself… Adam Kozicki (*1992) is a graduate of the Faculty of Graphics and the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His approach is close to the idea of (post)art, in which social involvement coalesces with creative activism, an ethos reflected in his aerographic motifs depicting alienation, exhaustion, estrangement: whether from first-person views of institutional trauma (at the hands of the state or the church), to scenes of swamp-like entrapment and decay, such images impel us primarily to ask, what can be done? His work has been exhibited in the solo shows You Will Never Walk Alone at the Exhibitions Bureau (PL, 2023) and I Wake Up in a Place Where No Human Being Can Live at 66p Subjective Institution of Culture (PL, 2023), and in group shows including Anxiety Comes at Dusk at Zachęta - National Gallery of Art (PL, 2022), You Know What Hurts You at BWA Gallery (PL, 2024), and Postbauhaus: Memories of the Future at PLATO (CZ, 2024). He is the winner of the Grand Prix ex aequo of the 46th edition of the Bielska Jesień Biennale (2023), Grand Prix ex aequo of the 14th edition of the Geppert competition (2023), the mBank "m jak malarstwo" award (UpComing, 2021), and 3rd prize in the 45th edition of the Bielska Jesień Biennale (2021). Ruta Putramentaite (*1989) comes from Lithuania but has become integral to the domestic art scene. She studied photography at Middlesex University in London and later at Prague's UMPRUM (the former sculpture studio of Edith Jeřábková and Dominik Lang). She creates sculptural, sound or video installations, often with a performative dimension. In doing so, she walks the line between personal and collective testimonies pertaining to environmental crisis and ecology of mind. Her sculptures often involve the waste of consumer culture - car parts, office chairs or other everyday objects - which she variously coats and transforms, as if to hasten the decay that inevitably awaits them.She has appeared solo at the Jelení Gallery (2022), as well as in numerous group exhibitions, such as Hay, Straw Dump at the Václav Špála Gallery (2023), Only Transitions and Translations at the Meetfactory (2023), and WOM*N-ROSE-SONG-BONE at the Display Gallery (2021).