The artist is currently in Oxford implementing his newest project in Headington Hill Park.
Tomasz Opania, Gemmation, 2019
project for Headington Hill Park
"Project co-financed by the City of Wrocław".
My answer to the motto of the Art in The Park 2019 exhibition at Headington Hill Park in Oxford, entitled Let's Grow - Ensemble Grandir, is a composition made of 18 tourist tents. Tents that are usually associated with holidays, idyll and rest. After all, a tent is a realization of carefree and adventures during the holidays or a trip outside the city. It is a temporary and voluntary exchange of a comfortable and safe life into a nomadic mode, the aim of which is to experience something more real. These primary, primitive experiences are indicated and expected in this context. However, what is attractive in this case is not really desirable if the tent becomes our home not by choice but by coercion.
In such cheap tents, now millions of refugees live, and these makeshift shelters are no longer the aforementioned equivalent (analogue), but testify to poverty and suffering without hope of change.
The structure that I am building refers to breeding (reproduction?, multiplication?) by gemmation (budding?), consisting of: "...the production of a fragment by the parent organism, which after separation from the parent itself develops into a genetically identical copy...", or reproduction via spores, citation: "...spores are usually produced in sporangia, where they ripen until they burst .... - usually by cracking their walls. Then they are usually spread in the terrestrial environment by the wind ... ". In this asexual way, for example, fungi and yeasts reproduce.
These quoted, purely encyclopedic definitions are part of the discourse on the European crisis associated with the huge wave of refugees. This is a commentary on a phobia that is fueled by environments that oppose the asylum and immigration policy in Europe, and which treats refugees as a plague threatening their well-being and safe life.
Objects from colored protective tents, reproducing, multiplying hybrids, which due to their construction are not fully functional, just as non-functional are temporary refugee settlements. These structures, however, can split up, spread in an unpredictable way and adapt. This is a work that on the one hand is supposed to play on prejudices, mass hysteria and fear of „these strangers", and on the other hand expose the lack of empathy and acceptance of the fact that people live around us in this way.
info: T. Opania
zamieściła AZG
