Barbórka, mixed-media installation: objects, sound

Presented during: „Buona Fortuna” solo show, curated by: Kuba Gawkowski, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma, 2020. 

„Saint Barbara’s Day, commonly known as Barbórka, is a traditional, annual celebration of the miners’ labor, accompanied by parades, religious services and concerts of miners’ orchestras. Celebrated in Upper Silesia, the mining region where Lelonek was born and raised.

In the installation, the figure of Saint Barbara usually carried by the marching miners is replaced by different species of ruderal plants—the plants which are first to colonize disturbed lands of former mines and abandoned industrial areas. Bringing back life to dry, post-industrial grounds, those plants also carry symbolic, magical and medical use in folk tradition. The species have diverse purposes such as rituals of cleansing and abortion (Artemisia Vulgaris), a psychedelic drug (Datura stramonium), and to cure depression and hysteria (Tanacetum vulgare). The work connects cultural rituals to the deep history of coal formation, and to natural folk knowledge. It is a prototype for looking for a new model of the post-industrial culture, in which the extractivist perspective is replaced by the intimate connection with earth, and not its exploitation. Object constructed by Tomasz Partyka.

Sound installation consists of record from the march of the miners’ orchestra from the Bytom-Borek mine on Saint Barbara’s Day on December 4, 2019, composed by Bartosz Zaskórski. As the industrial Upper Silesia transforms, the mine was closed in January 2020, making the recorded sounds yet another archive. It is the last celebration of the mining tradition in the Bytom-Bobrek mine, in a society which is forced to rethink how to transform the culture based on destructive industry. ”  Kuba Gawkowski, text accompanying the exhibition „Buona Fortuna”

Special thanks for sound recording: Kuba Gawkowski, Małgorzata Borowska

photo by:Andrea Veneri

Photos by: Andrea Veneri