Aisel Wicab on Re–Directing: East 2020 – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

I’m an artist who works in educational contexts, and to this seminar I brought all my curiosity and my desire to investigate the way in which digital pedagogies can be expanded through art, performance and persistent action: always picturing the bodies behind the screens, trying to empathise with their needs, pleasures and pains.

I intend to bring my tools to share with a group that wishes to work and think together, with all the willingness to experiment as a participant, but at the same time a compromise to gather and seek out a common shape to contain the ideas of those who were selected by the open call of the seminar, because they were the ones who created the contents and actually dictate the whole programme. I’m so happy with this experience, it was a month of sharing myself and opening up my body, my house and my private life to some people who started out as strangers but ended up being friends.

This seminar involved many forms of communication at the same time. The interesting and varied experiences there showed me that, when there is an intention to connect, distances are reduced. I wrote, played, laughed, cried, shared my past, my present and my wishes for the future. For me, to experiment with the possibilities of digital spaces as places of encounters and knowledge became more relevant than ever, because in the face of the pandemic and the social distancing we are obliged to follow, it becomes urgent to develop stronger paths of resistance to the distancing of bodies and the depersonalisation of human relationships.