Hi,
It’s Zofia here.
I’m an artist connected to contemporary dance, dreamwork and experimental music. I graduated from the MFA in Performing Arts program at Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavik (2019) and I’m currently based in Poland.
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Experiences often reveal their impacts long after they occur. And sometimes it’s possible to trace them back to their origins. I enjoy doing this occasionally, though I acknowledge that some impacts may remain unknown or unconnected. There are always more layers to an experience than we can fully grasp, with some aspects felt rather than articulated in words.
Years ago, a vivid nightmare left a lasting impression on me, sparking my ongoing artistic practice. This dream resonated deeply, making me wonder how dreams affect our bodies, both asleep and awake. What if we could say that the dreams don’t stop, but rather we just dream differently during our waking hours? Where does a dream live in us while we are awake? My work explores this continuous engagement with dreams and their bodily manifestations.
Within my work, I consider dreams to be happening all the time. And in these dreams there lives knowledge about the worlds around me that I am encountering, as well as insight into my relationship to these worlds. I’ve developed ways to listen to and amplify these sleeping and waking dreams through my body. For me, dreams live through us during our waking hours in twinges, twitches, stutters and shivers – images appear and disappear – sensations emerge and submerge.
My work is about learning to look and listen more deeply to that which is there but often missed because it resonates too softly, quietly, slowly, creakingly, or deeply. My work and research up until now has been about finding ways through performing arts to gather and amplify these subtleties, twinges and tremors, micro gestures, tiny noises, silences and stillness that appear in my body. This practice extends to observing my environment, which also dreams and vibrates with subtle energies.
As a listener, gatherer, and amplifier, I start with the body, capturing moments driven by curiosity. I archive both waking and sleeping experiences, revisiting and improvising with them to amplify their presence. I create space and time for these moments to be observed with heightened attention, shaping them to be seen and listened to more intensely. I focus on tiny movements, micro-sounds, and fleeting images, amplifying what attracts my attention. This process involves adjusting volume and perspective, creating a dialogue between what I am observing and how that which I am observing can be amplified in ways that give it more space to be observed.
When I present these processes as art works, the question is how to extend these modes of listening, looking and feeling to the spectator. How can the conditions through which I share my work, induce a particular state of spectatorship where the audience are invited to listen and watch as I do during my process. The work is in the end all about other modes of giving space to things and through doing so being with oneself and one’s environments in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be available.
