Filmoteka Muzeum

The film draws from the story of nine miners from the Wujek coal mine in Katowice, who perished during the brutal suppression of the strike on 16 December 1981. The piece has a distinctive bipartite structure. The initial sequences adopt the form of a quasi-documentary, fragmentarily depicting the portrayed figures through memories and photographs. The somewhat chaotic snippets that fail to offer a bigger picture are fragments of individual stories. The main content of the work results from activities undertaken by Żebrowska on the memory of people and events.

Avunculus records a rite of passage to eternity, interpreted and depicted in a two-fold manner. Eternity as the afterworld: land of the dead, space with no time. It is a journey of souls into the depths of the earth, visualised on the basis of a compilation of various belief systems. In the second meaning, it is timelessness, universality, guaranteed by inscribing it in an archetypal tale. Magic thinking and the symbolic role of the travelled road is manifested by the “omnipotence” of numbers. The entire structure of the piece is organised by the digit 9, as a reference to divine perfection. Nine stages, nine stories. The path to the entrails of the earth leads through subsequent circles.

In the world devised here, we constantly experience a mutual permeation of spaces, passing imperceptibly from one reality to another. The ontological uncertainty about the place, the simultaneous presence of the divine and human spheres consistently generate an oneiric atmosphere. Seeking to lend a mythological dimension to a real event, Żebrowska asks about memory. The artist transfers the individual into the general sphere. Through cultural transgression Żebrowska translates the fate of individual figures into a universal tale.

Reincarnated as deities, the miners play the role of heroes in a mythical structure, they come to represent values. Just like heroes, they make a sacrifice for the sake of redressing balance, in this case they sacrifice their lives for future freedom. Inscribed in the cyclical process of death and revival, they shall last in a different, timeless order. Due to the excess of gathered attributes and references, among uncertainties we pay attention to the autotelic aspect of the ritual, which clearly fascinates the artist. What matters is not only what is talked about, but also how it is talked about.

(quoted from: Szymon Maliborski, Fundacja Wschód Sztuki)