Joanna Imielska

Archeology from My Drawer

In 2019 another theme immersed in my “timewriting” appeared, I called it “Archeology from My Drawer” where different times, spaces and memories meet. Old objects, important and unimportant bits and pieces inhabit the nooks and crannies of the house, wardrobes, shelves, drawers, lie quietly, hidden for my eyes, absent from my memory, waiting for the right time to reveal themselves. I settled among these “orphaned things” and established “cooperation with them.”¹ Do I invade the privacy of the former owners when I use their furniture, eat from their plates, brew tea in porcelain jugs, when I read letters, documents, books they left, touch souvenirs, look at photo albums where the photographed people are often revealed in an aura of intimacy? And although I could follow Katarzyna Kędzierska’s words: “things are just things. They can be beautiful, they can be useful, they can have the power to recall memories, but they are still just things. They will not love me or make friends with me,”² nevertheless I am rather inclined to admit that “things need humans, and vice versa. Humanity starts with things; animals do not have things, notes the French philosopher Michel Serres. . . . “So things – memory vehicles – inventoried and secured, go to their new owners or disintegrate here, on the spot – each one differently, depending on the matter out of which they were made.”³

After years the objects acquire special value. Even in the simplest and seemingly insignificant ones, there is hidden some astonishing beauty, crumbs of life, some part of the person who made or used them, a scent not belonging to the here and now, the colour of a yellowed sheet of paper, patina, rust... Each of us in their own way creates “a kind of individual museums and archives. Getting rid of them raises the fear of impoverishing our own Self.”⁴ The next disclosure of “Archeology from My Drawer” is contained in Zbigniew Herbert’s words that permanence of objects reminds us of our impermanence, and in the words of Wisława Szymborska: “The crown has outlasted the head / The hand has lost out to the glove / The right shoe has defeated the foot / . . . / The battle with my dress still rages on.”⁵

It is true that objects can outlive people, but these are people who make sense of them and therefore abandoned by people are deprived of this sense unless they are taken back and cared for again. Everything that surrounds us, everything we touch, every object “is from its beginnings in constant transformation, different in every split second, created anew, not similar to itself from a moment ago. As W.G. Sebald writes in The Rings of Saturn, ‘nothing is permanent. On every new form a shadow of destruction has already been cast.’”⁶

I want to get the out of the chaos of regained things these most important ones for me, to know their history, but also to give them new meanings, a new sense, an “infinite potential for change.”⁷ Through the latest works I want to create my own story about the people and places close to me, “to the existence of its former inhabitants I add my existence, on their traces I imprint my trace – I create the present for those who come after me. Each present time, whether current or future, according to the French archaeologist Laurent Olivier, ‘consists essentially of a palimpsest of all the existences of the past that have been recorded in matter.’”⁸

source: http://joannaimielska.com/project/2019-kartki-z-pamietnika/

– Joanna Imielska

Notes of Jan K., from the series Archeology from My Drawer

1. The Story Started, 2019, paper, 20 × 29 cm

2. Cyclicality, 2019, paper, 29 × 20 cm

3. Notebook 7, 2019, paper, 20 × 29 cm

4. Tic Tac Toe, 2020, paper, fine-tip pen, 20 × 29 cm

5. Unsent Letter, 2019, paper, tracing paper, 29 × 39 cm

6. Cinematheque, 2019, paper, 29 × 39 cm

7. Black Garden, 2020, paper, fine-tip pen, 29 × 39 cm

8. Open Book 2, 2019, paper, fine-tip pen, 39 × 49 cm

9. Cathodic Radiation, 2019, paper, 39 × 49 cm

10. Secrets 3, 2019, paper, 39 × 49 cm

Mending the Soul, from the series Archeology from My Drawer

11. A Few Words About the Book, 2020, paper, 39 × 49 cm

12. Pillow Whispers in Your Ear, 2020, paper, 39 × 49 cm

all works courtesy of the artist