Joanna Cybichowska-Głuszek

They Shot a Wolf
mixed technique, 2020

On the Edge of the Road

On a margin of a news story there appears an information about the death of a bear cub, killed by accidental tourists: Zenek creates a piece about the event, small, modest, precise. His piece remains in a house in the forest, hung on a wall next to a stove.

On a back wall of the house, on the side of the river, tiny stones are pushed into the binder of joints in a stone underpinning, with a specific function of conducting lightnings to the ground. There is an attentive conversation, we are touching the small black stones together, there is simplicity, appreciation of the minor fact. On the edge of the road, there is a place where stacks of objects have been transported, remnants of a former life of people, a material trace of their presence: “experiencing being here... that's what matters,” Zenek would say. There was silence, quiet, an intense smell of old objects enhanced with the temperature of a sultry day, an awareness of death.

Moments in memory are like artefacts, experiences recorded in the body in a sudden suspension, in immediacy, in drawing attention. Remaining as momentary insights into Zenek and his work's presence, they have led me to the making of the piece which have become a continuation of his seeing, perceiving things on the margins of the main stream, pushed back into oblivion, and at once alive, digested on its bottom, only to resurface anew. Once again unaware, they emerge from the dark, transformed, they manifest themselves in a concrete form, in events, phenomena, objects as palpable reality, as a mirror image of a table – a bridge on the river assumes a material shape in one of Zenek's works.

It is September 2019, on the edge of the woods lies a dead wolf: the event becomes the subject of the work I dedicate to Zenek.