Anka Wandzel
Anna Pajęcka: Your residency was meant to be a break from caregiving, yet you found yourself working hard on relationships that need attention and care. Is it possible to escape the role of caregiver altogether?
Anka Wandzel: I don’t think so, no. Caregiving is one of the basic forms of how we coexist – especially for people socialised as women, though not only. In intense situations like residencies, it’s always there and it’s multi-layered, meaning it is something you do and something you’re also subject to. It’s a way of “settling” in the world.
So where did you find respite?
I did have some moments of real rest. Because I live quite close to the Ujazdowski Castle, I could put the children to bed, come to the Laboratory to do some work and still make it home in time to get a good night’s sleep. That was both revolutionary and emancipatory. We still vastly underestimate how chronic sleep deprivation affects parents’ mental and physical health and overall wellbeing – especially mothers. I was given a safe space and – for the first time since becoming a mother – my own desk and my own room for three months. When friends encouraged me to submit my application, I was absolutely terrified because, after all, “writers aren’t artists.” I wrote very clearly that the Common Field idea reflects my everyday practice – not just writing about relationships between nature, care, work and art, but also simple housework and emotional labour. The idea of a break from this daily work felt incredibly valuable and creatively important to me. By the way, I wasn’t the only mother invited to the project. One of the artists came to the final exhibition with a small child and her partner, who carried the baby in a sling so she could install her work. For me, that’s Common Field in practice: not slogans, but real forms of support brought into the institution.
What does community mean to you?
It’s a space of solidarity and empathy, of shared care and making room for one another. During my residency, workshops for mothers-artists were wrapping up at the Ujazdowski Castle. Children could crawl around on the floor while adults talked about their art. That’s genuinely necessary. When my son was born, I had nothing like that and I missed it deeply – it really affected my mental state. The idea of being able to exist in a cultural space, not only as a “drudge” but also as a mother – as someone who sets boundaries and says, “I’d love to, but I can’t come to the meeting because I have to pick up the kids,” and hearing the response, “of course, no problem, take care” – well it all felt ideal to me.
When the children were ill and I couldn’t work at the CCA, no one got upset. I’m incredibly grateful for that flexibility. It sometimes felt as if the residency programme operated on fairer terms than the institution does towards its own employees.
Where did the idea for the conversations with employees come from?
It came out of conversations with the residency team. At their invitation, I moved my everyday journalistic, writing and research practice – which is how I make a living – into the residency context. I carried out a series of interviews with CCA employees about their relationship with the surrounding natural environment. Thanks to this, I stopped feeling like a “parachutist”. There was a sense of reciprocity: I got to know the team better and navigated my stay differently. It also sparked reflection on the systemic possibilities and limitations of the cultural field.
Do you need community, or does it get in the way of your writing?
I write best in silence and solitude – that’s when I really regenerate, but I can’t function without community. I have two small children and I need support. I realised quite quickly that I needed a “family of choice,” which I’ve been building up for years now. In teams, I value transparency and mutual support. Unfortunately, in culture, “support” can sometimes be a cover for abuse: shifting responsibilities, exploitation and crossing boundaries. That’s why, even though I like community processes because they can unlock creativity, I try not to idealise them. Caring relationships are also power relationships, after all.
Can you expand on that?
Care is unequal by definition. When you care for someone, you gain influence while the other person remains dependent – even if the relationship is based on love. Because care is so often not recognised as work, economic or symbolic violence easily comes into play. We use someone else’s care – or our own – to strengthen our position or make our lives easier. In my book, Sztuka przetrwania [The Art of Survival], I refer to Oxfam research showing that if women were paid at least the minimum wage for unpaid, invisible domestic care work, they would contribute three times more to global GDP than the entire IT industry. Seen from this perspective, it’s hard not to notice how deeply inequality is built into care.
Care is necessary and can be empowering, but it shouldn’t be idealised. We also need to acknowledge its difficulties and traps. While writing Sztuka przetrwania, I consulted a chapter on borders with a friend who works for a large humanitarian organisation. She stressed how important it is to write about invisible, unpaid care in the humanitarian sector, but she also warned that these relationships can be dangerous for many of the people involved. She taught me not to infantilise those who receive care – not every story is moving; sometimes it’s violent and unfair. The more we value care, community and support, the more aware we need to be of their limits.
In a conversation with the GALAS collective – Vlad Gryn and Taras Gembik – we took a similarly critical look at the idea of hospitality. It’s also soft and seemingly very positive, but assumes an imbalance between host and guest. I’m glad that these conversations allow us to critically rethink concepts that are so often repeated.
And what was the institutional background of your residency?
We were working during a “thaw” after the “good change”. Some things were working, others weren’t. I had the sense that the pace was a bit too fast, with the overproduction of events resulting from the open call announced at the time overwhelming everyone. The people working at the institution were dramatically overworked and frustrated. As residents, we were given a lot of space, but the people who would normally support us on the institution’s side simply didn’t have the time – they were drowning in work related to the restructuring process. It made me understand that this kind of “common field” isn’t always possible within a public institution funded by the ministry. Because I’d already researched the art field before, this didn’t really surprise or hurt me. I could see how exhausted everyone was. At the same time, this context also had its upsides, at least for me. It encouraged exchanges of experience with other residents, not just those from Poland. In culture, people often feel they’re the only ones in a precarious situation, so it’s important to hear that this isn’t the case. We’re all in the same unstable boat.
I think mutual learning is already a huge value of creating spaces like this where people can meet.
Yes – even just as a way of asking questions: do we actually want to be part of this, what do we agree to, what feels comfortable, what can be changed, and how can we support each other? A residency isn’t only about networking; it’s also a place where you can learn how to set boundaries.
Creating remedial tools makes much more sense when we’re working together in the same field, rather than at conferences or debates.
In your essay summing up the residency, you partly argue with a sentence I once wrote – that there’s no real debate about ecological art institutions. This absence is systemic. Change would require rethinking what an institution is today, and what it should be, because the challenges we’re facing now are completely different.
I agree that we won’t get very far without systemic change. At the same time, I’m losing faith that this will happen any time soon, because the functioning of public institutions in Poland is still tied to the results of the last elections.
One crucial change would be to give more power to the people who actually work in a given place. Not because they’re meant to change the whole world on their own, on behalf of all of us and the ministry, but so that – if they want to – they can adapt the institution to their needs and to the realities they’re working in.
That’s exactly what happened during the Green Team meetings at the CCA. First of all, people felt relieved to realise they weren’t alone, that colleagues from other departments were thinking and acting in similar ways. That led to a lot of open discussions from which came many great ideas – such as introducing fines for damage done to the park by tenants during large-scale events. Thanks to years of experience, people already knew very well which solutions made sense. The creation of the Green Team made it possible to actually implement them and write them into a formal status that wouldn’t be so easy to undo later. I think it’s incredibly important for people working in an institution to have a real impact on shared reality, because they’re the ones who best understand what their specific galleries or museums actually need – especially when it comes to relationships with the immediate environment.
I saw this very clearly in my conversations with CCA employees. Everyone had memories and small rituals connected with the park, as well as strong positive emotions. However, in the 1990s, there was a lot of fear associated with the park, after the body of a raped woman was found there during a vernissage. For a long time, employees would walk their female colleagues to the bus stop after dark, because they were genuinely afraid for their safety. The environment we operate in has a huge impact on how comfortable we feel at work, on our creativity, on access to materials, and on whether we’re included in or excluded from the local community.
For me, the division of nature and culture into two separate ministries, two different “topics”, is simply absurd. We’re living in an era of climate change, meaning that sooner or later the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage will have to deal with environmental revitalisation and renaturalisation – whether it wants to or not. Otherwise, our cultural heritage will quite literally be flooded or burned. People working in institutions are already aware of this and often take responsibility for negotiating their relationship with the local environment. Even during what is known as the “good change” at the CCA, people from the administration were so furious that they were expected to put leaves into rubbish bags that they set up their own bottom-up “soilarium”. That, incidentally, has since become a large composting site used to maintain the park, and a home to hedgehogs. During the Green Team’s work, it also emerged that the security guard in the building where I slept during my residency is an ornithologist who previously worked at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was the one who – luckily for a fee – carried out an inventory of the park’s fauna.
How does this change the way we think about the institution?
Looking at things from an environmental perspective lets us see different kinds of potential within a team and helps break down hierarchical thinking. There’s a widespread assumption that technical or administrative staff are “uncreative”, while substantive staff are creative. In reality, the most valuable ecological and community-based initiatives very often come from the former.
The Castle already faces a specific problem: it lies on the migration route of Asian ladybirds, which treat the building like a huge warm rock and colonise the towers. More and more institutions will have to start dealing with difficult neighbours like this. And that’s before we even mention the mountains of waste left behind after every exhibition, or the money and resources burned through on successive projects, just to settle accounts with the ministry. The carbon footprint of cultural institutions is still enormous.
If we’re increasingly accepting that care – this double-edged sword – is key to our collective survival, then we also need to start caring for the environment on a completely different scale. Culture is becoming another space where this has to be imagined, mapped and put into practice.
Did you get a chance to do any actual digging during your residency? I’m asking because I know you are part of the MOST cooperative farm.
I only dug at our farm. Gardening is like caring: sometimes you feel like getting your hands dirty, but sometimes it’s better to leave things alone and let them live their own life.
