my first performance / performance

„In such spaces as the labyrinth, we cross over, we are really traveling, even if the destination is only symbolic, and this is in an entirely different register that is thinking about traveling or looking at a picture of a place we might wish to travel to.”

Inspired by the idea of a labyrinth, perfectly described in Wanderlust: A history of Walking, a book by Rebecca Solnit I carried out My first performance, at the beginning of 2019 in Opole, in the A4 Gallery of the Department of Art of the University of Opole. This act is a recreation and rescaling of my first memory, which, looking at it from the perspective of time, I recognised/identified as my first performance. In my memory, this event presents itself as follows: I am three years old and alone in the kitchen. There are plastic tomato-shaped saltshakers on the worktop, which both make a wonderful rattling sound. I turn them upside down. The salt falls on the floor, the rattling salt shaker rattles by my ear, and in a worn linoleum flooring I see an imaginary labyrinth. I walk on it, marking my route with salt. My great-grandmother walks into the kitchen, saying “God bless you”.  I moved this action from an intimate domestic space of a kitchen – the heart of the house
– to the space of the official art reception – a gallery. Recreated, slightly clumsy, and unconscious gestures of a little girl became consciously carried out performance art. The transformed memory was moved again by myself, this time from an outside-of-art reality to an email mailbox. The labyrinth I poured as a little girl and a grown woman, is the same labyrinth, a route to an unknown depth, which I continue to travel – a magical place in which time and space pass through each other. I mark my road with salt – a mineral of numerous usages and complex symbolism; salt which purifies and preserves.