Artist Statement
Jokingly, I could start with a statement that my intellectual trajectory brought me to a place where films are being made, from a place where films were being made up. Being still a resident in the world of theory, I became a tenant in the world of practice. When people ask me how I deal with becoming a maker, though, I can do nothing but frown. "Making" derives from the old English word "macian", meaning: to form, construct, do, prepare, arrange, cause, behave, fare, transform. Therefore, I might say with no hesitation that throughout my professional and academic career, I've been doing nothing but "making". I was making inquiries, constructing argumentations, preparing lectures, speeches and questions, transforming insights into projects, articles and events, rearranging facts and beliefs.
As far as I remember I was never particularly respectful of the disciplinary divisions - poems seemed to me almost the same kind of puzzles as equations. Being torn apart between humanities and science, duties of the cultural manager and art critic or finally between artistic practice and academic research, I succumbed to my inner impulse of disciplinary suspicion. As liberating as it might sound, this choice meant that I had to get used to being in a constant state of anxiety and uneasiness. Deprived of a safety net provided by well-established methodologies, I had to rely on my own insights and interdisciplinary set of tools that needed reworking with every new object and topic of interest. Nonetheless, it opened up enormous possibilities of working around those objects and matched my natural inclinations towards analysis (as opposed to synthesis).
As a cinephile I was always driven by the images perceived and sounds heard from the screen. However, this very peculiar state of immersion experienced at the movies is not limited to the films and is by no means passive. There's a certain kind of production inscribed in our perception, that lets us render words, construct stories, defy meanings and argue on the margins of the books read, films watched or food tasted. A process of digesting content, commonly associated merely with a mindless consumption, is actually our primary tool for constructing meanings, forming memories and reactions. Percepts filtered at this stage are those which afterwards become available to language, which itself, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, should have constituted the limits of our worlds. My deep interest lies in exposing those affects, percepts and hesitant thoughts that often remain subconscious, right on the tip of our tongues (components of the tacit knowledge). This activity translates into exposing remarks scribbled on the margins, pointing to the elusive details that are hard to utter or combining words, images and sounds in order to create neologisms for the things previously anonymous. I see my work, regardless of the field and institutional context, as aimed at setting up the conditions of possibility for those new insights to emerge.
This stirs my interest in the essay, understood not as a genre, but particular mode of intellectual/artistic production, positioned between theoretical rigidness and creative flexibility. On one hand I am drawn to its unique exhibitory freedom, which is providing ways of using aesthetic and poetic qualities of arts in analytical inquiries. On the other hand, I am attracted to the idea of research performed in a manner of Max Bense’s essayist who: “Is a combiner, a tireless producer of configurations around a specific object (…)” for whom: “Configuration is an epistemological arrangement which cannot be achieved through axiomatic deduction, but only through Ars Combinatoria in which imagination replaces knowledge."
Stanisław Liguziński
