Minimising Transformation Needs
Minimising Transformation Needs
Mateusz Hadaś, Marcin Pietrucin
Minimising the costs of transformation through the economical use of power transformers may sound purely technocratic. Yet behind this cold language lies much more than engineering savings. The exhibition by Mateusz Hadaś and Marcin Pietrucin brings to light what usually remains concealed: the material, cognitive, and perhaps also political cost of energy transformation, designed to remain as imperceptible to us as possible.
The video showing a burning transformer and distribution station, accompanied by a selection of children’s rhymes about electricity and energy, highlights the ambiguity of today’s technical imaginarium. The safe, educational narrative masks the simple fact that every infrastructure carries the potential for disaster. Paul Virilio wrote that technology always contains the seeds of its own failure. The invention of the transformer is also the invention of short circuits and fires. In this sense, disaster is not a side effect but a manifestation of the true logic of modernity.
The exhibition’s subsequent elements seem to follow this dialectical thread. Cables, rubber insulating walls, and electricity poles are, on the one hand, components of the background of energy infrastructure, sustaining a false sense of safety and optimisation for users; on the other hand, like objects from a point-and-click detective game, they appear absurd, stripped of their original functions. Transposed into an artistic context, their energy becomes that of default exhibition components – a partition wall, an art installation, and an audio-description player.
The exhibition’s most genuinely realistic point, however, is a specially designated functional area consisting of tables and a coffee machine. It is a place about which Paweł Kukiz could have sung: here, it is as it is. The artists offer viewers a moment of respite and, at the same time, an alternative yet essential mode of experiencing the exhibition: a brief surge of energy coupled with a short narrative about the presented work. Is this not what human encounters with art usually come down to?
Janek Owczarek
