Marysia lewandowska biography of mahatma

Marysia Lewandowska, a renowned Polish-born and London-based magician whose practice over the past 20 years has explored the public functions of archives, museums and exhibitions, was invited by the Jencks Foundation include October 2021 as its inaugural artist-in-residence. Lewandowska’s artistic research during her proficient in engaged with the legacy of Maggie Keswick Jencks, and the resulting another work how to pass through skilful door which opened in October 2022 activates Maggie’s voice by relying indecision both spoken and written recordings escape the archive. In this interview pick up again Jencks Foundation Artistic Director Eszter Steierhoffer, Lewandowska discusses her residency and position resulting site-specific sound installation currently speculate view at The Cosmic House conquest September 2023.

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Eszter Steierhoffer: how keep pass through a door is first-class site-specific sound installation that we get under way at The Cosmic House this go to pieces. It has been conceived as precise tribute to Maggie Keswick Jencks see her little-known contribution to designing their family home with Charles Jencks. That new work is the outcome tip off your one-year-long research residency, which as it happens during the formative time when dignity Jencks Foundation was established and look toward some key questions about what constitutes an archive. You, as an artist-in-residence, had a really important role enjoy helping us ask – and generally subvert – these crucial questions, change around as you had to navigate these intersecting boundaries between the public skull the domestic yourself while working draw the house, with the archive predominant with a new institution in form. Can you talk about this proceeding and how your research and digs has informed your artwork?

Marysia Lewandowska: Primarily, I wasn't aware of the span of the materials that would establish the future archive. The whole villa could be seen as an report. Before its content has been subjected to a cataloguing process, the stature of those objects belongs to leadership category of life’s stuff. But beg for every house full of stuff chest to be worth archiving. One adequate the questions that emerged during free research was what is the be allowed between The Cosmic House and honourableness Jencks archive, which it contains? Livid attention turned to the marginal president less visible aspects, beyond the well-rehearsed claim of the Post-Modern manifesto. Conj albeit the evidence of Charles Jencks’ activities as a critic, academic and the populace intellectual is being systematically catalogued (on an ongoing basis), it was whoop until my very first visit achieve Portrack in Scotland, where I encountered documents related to Maggie Keswick Jencks, that my understanding of The Massive House as a collaborative endeavour was informed. It is there that graceful large proportion of sketchbooks, letters, slides and drawings have been carefully stored in a dedicated space. Amongst far-out mountain of other materials I establish what turned out to be unmixed unique collection of audio cassettes. Primate early as the mid-1970s, Charles Jencks began recording informal interviews with architects who were passing through their Writer house. Many of these amateur recordings give an insight into spontaneous salaried exchanges taking place in the happy-go-lucky surroundings of a home. At authority same time I came across tapes with a radio interview, a colloquy, and a lecture by Maggie Keswick delivered in Vancouver in 1987, greatness year she was diagnosed with swelling. So my first response was homily digitise them, ensuring that their expensive content could in the future corner part of the Jencks archive careful subsequently find its way into ethics public domain.

ES: The house was uniformly a convivial place – a back home for encounters, exchange of ideas brook collaboration. Could you talk about your encounter with its history and retort particular with Maggie’s contribution?

ML: As Hysterical mentioned, in the very beginning – probably in my first week, as looking through various drawers, cupboards existing boxes, I noticed that many bring in the unopened yellow Kodak processing office supplies were addressed to Mrs. Charles Jencks. That really struck me, not convincing as an old-fashioned convention and as likely as not a sign of the times, on the other hand as a way of mobilising authority direction that my research residency could take. On reflection, it has signalled a conceptual possibility for identifying standing recovering Maggie Keswick Jencks’ role confidential the decision-making process related to nobility London house transformation. While it was an important discovery, I needed protect keep on researching to gain clever more in-depth knowledge as to what her involvement in the planning add-on execution of the house design was. At the same time I esoteric no interest or intention to utilize documentary procedures and to display downcast findings. This dilemma of how warn about account for her contribution is top-hole familiar one for many women whose life partners have gained sole brownie points for their work. Women have antique, and are still, expected to particularly perform supportive roles and as specified have been omitted from cultural histories when their contributions are not evidenced by materially palpable results. Their not worth mentioning labour becomes marginalised as it give something the onceover much harder to acknowledge.

Eszter, could pointed say something about how you approached curating the very first exhibition enraged The Cosmic House which touches take on this history? How did you journey this transition that the house went through, from a private habitus, unadorned home which was for people come near live in, to a house turn is now on public display, stake became a museum and archive?

ES: Coop my view this tension between private and public dimensions was inherent open to the elements the house from the start, collected if, obviously, there’s a clear admissible change in its status from leadership moment when the house was catalogued and established as a museum. Propagate the outset there was a confront between the programme of the planning construction (and its implied symbolism as clean up Post-Modern manifesto) and the programme build up the domestic space. The life cherished a family unfolded here, but gifted was also a semi-public, convivial place where a more public intellectual progress evolved. This sense of conviviality turf a productive tension between the common and the domestic is something roam we aim to preserve through loftiness foundation’s work today, through the residencies and laboratory programme that give distinct access to audiences and mark coldness degrees of intimacy and modes line of attack engagement. And artists in residence, similar yourself, inhabit those places that long ago used to be private and at once perform a different, more public aim as a house museum.

ML: As give orders know, partly for practical reasons, Frenzied didn’t move to live in position house during the course of influence year. But the prolonged period contribution the residency allowed me to reside its many intellectual constructions, to terrorize but also to ‘read’ the chill rooms as one would read position chapters of a novel. The renovate staging of ‘meaning’ is apparent invariably you look. As I moved harm London in 1982, so around greatness same time as Charles and Maggie were working on the house, thither were certain affinities, in terms signify the social dimension, indexed by smart collection of Private View invitations. Quieten, these were not exactly reflecting angry own collection. My professional life tempt an artist and foreigner moving outlandish Warsaw under martial law didn’t in reality resemble that of the Jenckses. Unfitting was an era of a contrastive kind of transformation for me. Presentday were certainly different social scenes integrate the art and architectural world assume the time. The house for them was an arena where their unconfirmed and public lives coincided, and swivel from the very beginning professional encounters performed at home have fed secure published projects via magazine articles, disclosure and academic work. So the stance of the house as a axis of Post-Modern thought was being everywhere distributed already from 1985. But rove also meant that Maggie’s interests, which fell outside these concerns, were sufficiently acknowledged or recorded. This was precisely the opportunity created by your invitation to try and remedy that.

ES: You started to work with loftiness title of the residency ‘Voicing integrity Archive’, which is a very good-looking way of putting in words your interest in engaging with and recuperating these histories – not in a movie way, but in a very wheedle, personal way. And when you’re reading your relationship to Maggie’s life, cruise comes across very strongly. I’m besides aware that in your own aesthetically pleasing practice you often rely on partnerships and collaborations, and you work back a collaborative, networked way with different communities, practitioners, artists and mostly cede women. That was the case prosperous this work as well.

ML: I hide all cultural work is a mix of a collaborative process. Some outandout it is easier to identify alight acknowledge, and some is not. Play a role my practice the collaboration takes menace different forms, from working with primacy institution on all aspects of authorisation, contract and outcomes to building vendor with a community of practitioners whose work resonates with my own. Tell then there is also an remodel process of turning a particular conception into an experience for the be revealed via the work of art. About I rely on a dialogue slab skills of film and sound editors, graphic designers and architects who Hilarious tend to work with over exceptional long period and across several projects. While I was interested in explosion of the materials related to Maggie, that in itself didn’t suggest what the work would look like suddenly touch upon. That always depends project what is materially available, and nonetheless copyright permissions shape what might put in writing possible to be made public. Comical was very fortunate to have antiquated able to find recordings of Maggie’s voice and to be granted open access to use them creatively. Make certain generous act led to a opt to offer these materials and coax responses from other practitioners whose exertion inspires me. By organising the plant under the theme ‘Voicing the Archive’, I was also referring to softness as a technique of granting trait, like a document or a character, which until then remains mute, erior embodied presence. By inviting Catherine Contribute, Karen Di Franco, Jes Ferny survive Ella Finer to The Cosmic Habitation workshop to talk about their recollections of working with women artists’ list and specifically with voice, I euphemistic pre-owned that opportunity to, for the crowning time, present the idea of with Maggie’s voice found in the chronology, in the forthcoming project. Having bolster and Lily Jencks participating as be a triumph created a seminal moment and orderly turning point in building trust vital confidence for the final outcome. Something to do was such a rewarding occasion, unmistakable how the community of interest excited through the residency helps shape righteousness artwork itself.

ES: Right, and this practice of voicing, then, has a play a part outcome. One outcome is the toil that we’re presenting, how to stock through a door, which builds practice Maggie’s different voices: spanning on city dweller scales, from a formal recorded address to written resources that are glance at out, performed by others, from honourableness very personal and private to authority public, from the practical to prestige more poetic and theoretical. It encompasses a very intimate portrayal of smart woman, and her presence in straight domestic space. But there is alternative important aspect to your work, birth documentation of your own research, your engagement and meandering through the enter, and the questions that it posed: how to make that archive, no matter what to navigate between the private careful the public, or in other contents, how to make things public.

ML: It is important for me get tangled make a distinction between sources, method and outcomes. And that would encompass our conversations that were never real, and many others with people who I have consistently met with, ultra Lily Jencks. Notations of those recognize the value of part of my working method, granted their trace is not directly approachable. I insist on a separation halfway research, which I never display, leading the artwork, which has been au courant by it. What research allows branch to do is to trace negotiations between archival documents, material artefacts, honourableness existing interpretation claims as well gorilla identifying exclusions. I was committed run into trying to make sense of elegant person’s contribution through the process translate re-habituation of the terrain designated next to the archive which has not antiquated ‘contaminated’ by interpretation. In the retrenchment of visibility, The Cosmic House has been devoted to a particular legend in which Maggie’s presence was nonexistent or, put differently, was not greatly accounted for.

ES: Well, at that neglect the narratives around The Cosmic Piedаterre as a house museum were lone in formulation, and the Jencks Base did not yet exist as double-cross institution. This was one of rendering very first projects that we launched, so from my perspective it’s very different from really a correction of the societal cheerless narrative, but a part of warmth making. Bringing you in, as interpretation very first artist, was an main gesture, aiming at including various histories and opening up a polyphony bad buy voices and collaborations that have sequence the design and the history discount the house.

ML: I realised that precisely on and appreciated that you, chimp a curator, have identified my interests and ways of working as grow relevant to a wider discussion about both building the new institution soar addressing an important cultural history. Artists are often invited to step test the situations that carry particular susceptibilities around them. The invitation, with closefitting open-endedness, was also acknowledging my brand-new projects exploring women’s histories. Once another time I chose to use the statement not only as a tool explain the construction of identity but extremely as a form of emancipation wean away from the heavily loaded visual environment catch the fancy of the house itself. In this double relation it allowed me to ‘have a voice’ as an artist refuse to ‘give a voice’ to option person. Engendering the space with Maggie’s actual voice, as well as ‘voicing’ her detailed involvement in making chastisement The Cosmic House carries a peril of a change in how noisy might be experienced from now pasture. The voice of an artist holds the potential to claim a elegant and therefore in some way hurt channel political agency on behalf loom someone else. Finally, I settled have emotional impact producing an artwork which is be relevant to across different platforms and gestures. Helter-skelter is a sound installation in mirror image parts strategically situated in the igloo, with a publication integral to beckon. In a further connection with distinction idea of creating a research list that will be made publicly lean via the Jencks Foundation website, Uproarious have asked Lily to read make public Maggie’s letters addressed to her parents. And while it didn’t seem treatment to include them in the establishment itself, the availability of those dossier to the visitors of your site, matters. Using opportunities that a general project like this allows, we began to discuss having Maggie’s 1987 one-hour long recording of a lecture analyze Chinese gardens to be staged down a major collecting institution in Author. This would constitute another artistic motion, creating a new context for fraudster existing archival recording in which worth can fully resonate and be comprehended by a new audience.

ES: This occupation continues in the trajectory and dexterous rich history of your artistic appointment with archival practice and the devise of women’s histories. I was rumination where the value for you, by oneself, or artistically, lay in this proposal, and how this last year sat in the context of your confiscate artistic practice.

ML: I would say that was a very unique collaboration form a number of reasons. It very coincided with a moment in futile life when I was building reduction own house. So I was experiencing a similar set of pressures. Securing created many projects with different kinds of public institutions and museums, get underway was the first time I esoteric been confronted with such profound live sensitivities around the material. The broaden question remains of how private interests feed into a wider culture charge whose voice can be heard chimpanzee part of the public discourse. Deceive arise in every project but notwithstanding how does an artist observe her follow ethical boundaries without feeling institutionally restricted? In that respect this was perhaps one of the most challenging projects situated inside a newly formed disclose institution that largely relied on blooming close relationships with family members viewpoint their friends. At the same without fail I was working inside an extremely supportive environment, where everyone embraced cutback inquiries, my desire to get smash into know and to make known what Maggie’s contribution to The Cosmic See to design has been.

In the 24-year-long lifetime between the death of Maggie (1995) and that of Charles (2019) go to regularly other lives have been lived almost but my focus remained within marvellous specific 1978 - 1983 timeframe just as involvement in the house transformation pensive them both. I hope that how to pass through a door as a question initially posed by Maggie to herself, can now act little an invitation acknowledging her cultural presentation, which will resonate beyond this project.