Anca Bucur
Anna Pajęcka: What questions and research intuitions did you bring with you to your residency in Warsaw – in particular in relation to your interests in post-socialist transformations, labour and ecology?
Anca Bucur: When I started my residency in Warsaw, I had planned to continue researching a topic I think needs more scrutiny than it currently gets within the art critique field, namely the relation between feminised bodies and nature. The ecofeminist framework is undoubtedly one we currently encounter with exceeding frequency when visiting exhibitions, reading art publications, or listening to curatorial testimonies. This frequency should mean that our gaze is confronted with a wide range of ecofeminist approaches, histories and directions. On the one hand, this may be the case, since exhibitions are spaces of bringing together various art practices, yet on the other hand, when looking more closely, we see that, from a theoretical and political standpoint, these curatorial frameworks are strikingly similar. The ecofeminist discourse that is prevalent in the majority of art institutions is very much constructed on an essentialist understanding of gender, as well on an essentialist understanding of nature, with both being shaped on a very capital-centric understanding. To be honest, it could hardly be otherwise, since the core cultural sphere is obedient to the present financialised capitalist system of production. The monopolistic and nationalistic aspects on which this system relies permeate our ways of doing and thinking about art and life in general. It shapes the way we talk about gender and nature, the way feminised labour is produced, and the way nature is transformed to meet human needs. The relation between the material base and the ideological superstructure is something that is firmly obliterated within the capitalist regime, with this obliteration becoming visible once we start employing a dialectical historical lens to look at the things and discourses surrounding us. Once we start employing this Marxist feminist lens to analyse the dominant ecofeminism framework, we notice that the process of essentialisation this framework puts forward is always class driven. And it is built on an ethno-racist apprehension even when reclaiming inclusivity, as liberal feminism does.
Which Polish contexts – stories, places, or encounters – proved most significant for you during the residency?
Retrospectively, I think that what really had a significant impact on me was the city itself and a few visits outside it. It was the first time I spent more than a few days in a former socialist state, other than Romania, of course. On my daily walks I was impressed by the skilfully sculptured reliefs on apartment and official buildings – miners, teachers, engineers, peasants, architects and teachers – all these figures still standing tall as a reminder of a time when their needs and their well-being guided the future. Looking at them from the present times, these sculptural reliefs are important for at least two reasons. Firstly, they remind us that socialism flattened the division between manual and intellectual work as much as possible – given the historical conditions of the aftermath of the second world war, while also building up its political and socioeconomic scope around the worker as a collective emancipated subject. Secondly, these sculptural reliefs remind us of a correspondence between the aesthetic consciousness and the social consciousness that has been evicted from our way of understanding artistic labour. The social consciousness has been resumed to a sort of civic spirit, asserting itself at the proper time and always in line with what the capitalist market ideology deems to be radicalism and allows to be claimed in the cultural sphere. For example, whenever we hear talk about the artist as a cultural worker, the emphasis is placed on the lack of social acknowledgment of their work within the large capitalist socioeconomic scheme, regardless of the split that capitalism has brought between the social and the economic spheres. There is no talk about how an artist who is not a member of the working-class could find solidarity with the dispossessed and pauperised labour forces. One of the bourgeois historical heritages still going strongly nowadays is the confinement of art labour to the reach and hands of a small number of gifted individuals whose works are rendered as exceptional and monetised within the framework of exhibitions. This bourgeois conception of the art practice has been challenged during state socialism. Part of the socialist project was to socialise art labour and to open it to both workers and peasants, not only through an endeavour of having them portrayed in public spaces, but by transforming them into proper creators of artworks. So, in our artistic endeavour of contributing to a future socialist alternative to capitalism, we may find inspiration in the past socialist project that tried to collectivise the creative faculty, and so liberate it from the girdle of the free market and from the coffers of the bourgeoisie.
How would you describe the institutional framework of the residency, developed in collaboration between the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, ARC Bucharest and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute? Did this model offer a genuine space for political and research autonomy, or did it also introduce specific constraints?
For me it worked fine, I had time for reading and writing, which is a class privilege. And Julia and Olga were always ready to help whenever I needed it. I really appreciate their support during my stay at the Ujazdowski Castle.
As part of your residency, you delivered a lecture on the essentialist-ecofeminist turn in visual arts. How does your critique of essentialism inform the artistic strategies you employ when working with land, bodies, plants and other more-than-human agents in projects developed in Warsaw?
One of the arguments I tried to bring forward in my lecture is that essentialist ecofeminism is in no way challenging or destabilising the historical capitalist relation between feminised bodies and nature. On the contrary, it reenforces the same relation, picking up from where the industrial revolution left off or, more precisely, from where the industrial revolution started. The division of labour based on the sexualised division of gender is strongly reiterated today in the context of capital accumulation through militarisation. The ReArm Europe Plan/ Readiness 2030 is built not only on a strong NATO devised anti-communist agenda, but also on securing an essentialist understanding of gender and nature. The understanding of women and nature as bodies that are prone to infinite replenishment and regeneration is something that supports the enforcement of a war economy. The essentialist ideology is congruent to the financialised market ideology. This is something that is not acknowledged in all feminist spaces and discourses. Especially in the liberal and conservative ones, who either openly advocate for militarisation, or admit its necessity as a guarantee of protection against a fabricated enemy. No matter how we put it, both these stances are siding with capital, rather than with the working masses and with the lands that are being plundered in the pursuit of profit through the project of militarisation. So, yes, I think that coupling the critique of essentialism with the critique of the political economy of capital – as much as we can, given how complex and broad this task is – can help us better understand the importance of our artistic activity, the political methodologies we employ in our artworks, as well as the limitations that activating only in the art field can bring.
Your practice often interlaces archival research, text and sound. Which local archives, institutions, conversations, or informal sources did you engage with in Warsaw? Could you indicate one particularly important discovery or encounter and explain its relevance?
It would have been quite helpful if I had the chance to meet more people who are not only involved in cultural work, but also in grass roots organisation. A cherished memory is meeting artists Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti, and our conversations about India and Romania and their similarities in terms of both past and present times; the monetisation of decoloniality within the institutional art system; the rewriting of the past within the former socialist bloc, etc. Another memory that I carry with me is the visit to the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, which helped me understand more about the historical differences between Central and Eastern Europe and the lineage of their development.
A recurring thread in your work is exposing the romanticisation of rural life and the erasure of women’s labour. Have you seen similar dynamics in Polish public discourse and artistic production as in Romania? If so, which aspects were most striking to you?
I suppose you are asking me this question in relation to my work A labor of love, where I look into the history of the agricultural collectivisation project during socialist Romania. My focus in this project is to investigate the ways collectivisation influenced the material conditions of the peasants, especially women, and the demystification of their relationship with the land. Agricultural cooperatives were forms of nationalised and collective rural organisations that established forms of waged labour for peasants, which by the 1970s consisted of many female workers. The collectivisation produced significant changes in the dynamics of the traditional nuclear family and contributed to the crystallisation of a new collective social subject – the woman peasant worker. The socialist rural economy held at its centre the construction of this new agrarian subject who, liberated from the feudal yoke, could find new ways of emancipation. Nowadays, this subject is being replaced by the entrepreneur farmer who bears and promotes elitist conservative traditional traits and values. I am not the right person to tell you whether there is a pervasive romanticisation of rural life in the Polish public discourse, since I am not a Polish speaker, but I suppose there is, since neoliberal nationalism is strong in state governance. But what I did notice during my three months in Warsaw was an aestheticisation of rural life in exhibition contexts, in the sense that you could see an aspiration towards bringing back a cosmology specific to premodernity. This aspiration may appear anti-capitalistic, but it is exactly under this pretext of recuperating forgotten crafts and reclaiming a certain technologically untainted organisation of life that ethnonationalism thrives on. We all know that the current stage of capitalism treasures ethnonationalism as one of its most robust pillars.
You are actively involved in frACTalia and the Ecaterina Arbore Cooperative, both rooted in collective forms of knowledge production and political engagement. Were you able to incorporate collective methodologies – shared writing, research, or making art – within the framework of this residency? How did CCA respond to such approaches?
My work within the residency was to historically contextualise the emergence of the ecofeminist discourse within the western art system, the resurfacing of this discourse into a similar form in today’s art contexts, and the ideological elements that prompt its popularity. Ideas are not produced individually and they do not emerge in an abstract realm. On the contrary, they are the result of a collective process. This is also true for writing or making art – both activities are determined by material conditions, happen in a sociopolitical framework and from within a certain ideological positionality. For that matter, my work emerged from within the knowledge produced inside the collectives I am part of and as a result of the thinkers I read and felt in consonance with, from the artworks I saw, from the people I met and exchanged ideas with and so on. Could this be regarded as a collective methodology? I think it can, as long as we acknowledge its political framing.
You have described art as a tool for producing knowledge. What forms of knowledge have emerged from your residency in Warsaw, and whom do you consider their primary addressees: art institutions, social movements, specific working communities, or a broader transnational public?
The way I envisioned my lecture, it was addressed mainly to those who are active in the cultural field, to students and people who work in art institutions and are interested in the way cultural discourse may be complicit in the subjugation of the mind, and hence of the body, by the capitalist system of production.
How do you envision continuing the threads you started during the residency?
I intend to transform the lecture into a brochure, to complete the text in some ways, and to publish it in Romanian. Within the semi-peripheries we live and work, there is a strong need for local knowledge production, especially in the cultural field. For some, this may sound a bit nationalistic, but it actually comes from an opposition to the hegemonic knowledge production and to the western epistemologies that prove so seductive, especially in a very anti-communist cultural field like the Romanian one.
