Brutality of Spring

A person has died. Andrea Éva Győri is dead. These two statements are not the same, though they might seem very similar. When I say, E. is dead, I think of her and how she was, someone I never met but heard so much about: the tone of her voice, her laugh, her enthusiasm and strong personality. She is someone with a consciousness, a memory, a personal identity. But when I say, a person has died, I mean something different. The logic is different because it is impersonal. It has nothing to do with E. and yet everything to do with her. A person is singular – the one – yet not particular. I cannot say anything specific about a person. A person is dead is an indefinite statement, because a person is a life, and life is indefinite, singular, impersonal. How can I describe a life? Without talking about E. who lived? Deleuze was right, this requires an empiricism, an empirical kind of thinking, an almost scientific kind of rigour. I keep making lists: - There is the Marzanna, an effigy out of twigs and straw that Polish children drown in a nearby river as spring approaches. - There is the life cycle of the salmon, swimming upstream and spawning, then dying and their bodies fertilising the river. - Did you know that skeletal muscle stem cells continue living up to 17 days after all other cells have died? - That scene in Dicken’s novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” when the Rogue lays dying in Miss Abbey’s first-floor bedroom. While he barely breaths everyone tries to help, but as soon as his eyelid trembles, his nose twitches, the doctor and the four men grow distant and caution returns. Anna Łuczak and Sophie Schmidt made a series of porcelain plates together, as individual responses to E.’s passing. Anna made the plates and wrote the texts, Sophie painted images: - There is the day of E.’s diagnosis. The breast cancer. - There is the day at the crematorium. - And the time just after, laying on the floor. - There is salmon spawning, seeds germinating. The plates refer to the domestic language of the vanitas. We eat on them with fork and knife, we wash them and we put them away. The colourful ribbons belong to the “kapliczka,” the wayside shrine found on nearly every road in Poland, equally catholic and pagan. Sophie Schmidt’s wooden structures hold everything together ever so precariously, extensions of the body, with the body’s fragility, strength and breakability.