Catherine: What was the research process like? You mentioned that this project flowed out of an earlier activity.
Malgorzata: The discovery of obvious deficiencies is that you just don't see them for a long time. With Ola we went on study trips, we were in Verona, for example, and pointed out various elements to each other, in the Castelvecchio museum we came across fabrics painted on the walls. We have to admit that all the conversations end with the house in Shumina, of which Ola was the curator, and we did inventory and research work there. This house reveals to us previously unseen layers in the architecture. As part of our conversations about this house, we heard from Sophie and Oskar Hansen's son about a quilt for the house. It was 2018. We made a note of it, but at the time it hadn't yet formed into a refrain. Later, in the course of our travels, Ola and I realized that it got our attention too often. We started going through the archives regularly. Alice and I went together to the house in Shumin and for the first time we pulled out of the closet the curtains that had been sewn by the Hansens for this architecture. The first time we checked how things faded, that is, how the hard architecture reflected in the soft layer, we wore a quilt for the ceiling - this is a bolster that reduced the interior volume to be heated in winter. When we won the competition, we entered into a dialogue with the Central Textile Museum in Lodz, where we spoke with textile historians, and the Linen Museum in Zyrardow.
Alicia: The visit to the Central Textile Museum was crucial, because we were able to see and touch different types of fabrics, and this was followed by visits to weaving workshops and conversations with weavers about how to weave, the type of yarns.
Malgorzata: This was also the moment when Cepelia disintegrated and contacts with artisans were severed.
Alicia: The search for weavers was not easy. We worked with several places, in Opoczno, Bobowa and a fantastic weaver from Lviv, Ms. Zenovia Shulga. As part of our collaboration with the weavers, we reached for ancient techniques, such as creating a lyznik. This fabric can be found on our sofa. It is a Hutsul lyznik made in the traditional way using the power of water from the stream for felting, with combing to give it fluffiness, and the woolen yarns were dyed with vegetable dyes. It's a slow process, following the rhythm of nature, which is central to this exhibition.
Margaret: At some point we intuitively understood that warm colors could be used in winter and cool colors in summer to visually cool or warm, synesthetically. Previously, we had associations of blues in winter and oranges in summer, and it made sense to use them in reverse in fabrics.
Alicja Bielawska, drawings for "Clothed House," pencil, crayon, paper, 2020-2021
© Alicja Bielawska
Alicja: It is also known, for example, that the color blue repels insects and was often used not only in curtains, but also in painting the frames of village houses.
Malgorzata: And you created the palette itself based on your visual analysis.
Alicja: The color palette resulted from a year-long observation and photographic documentation of the landscape of Podlasie, the place where my parents live. It was an observation of both light and nature, the variability that is visible in the vegetation, but also reflected in the river, the floodplains.
Margaret: In the end, a calendar of twelve seasons was created, which is also a color code for the objects in the exhibition. As for the kitchen of the exhibition's creation, we worked on a one-to-10 mock-up in the acute pandemic period. We highly recommend it. When we walked through the mock-up with our phone, the curator, who was physically elsewhere, could feel that she was walking through a miniature of the exhibition. Now we are also building such a mock-up for each subsequent installment of the exhibition. Our project is growing and will travel. In the fall it will be shown as part of the Triennale of Architecture in Lisbon.
Alexandra: Working on the exhibition during the pandemic made the theme proposed before the outbreak even more relevant. We were all staying at home, and to the viewers who came to the exhibition, this concept was much closer. We quieted down, slowed down and the space of the house suddenly became more relevant and noticeable.
Malgorzata: We're happy to see the creation of fabric samplers for touching in Krakow. We see that it's not just about an audience with other needs, but a hunger to interact with the materiality of things.
Alicja: I would also add that the objects in the exhibition are not one-to-one mock-ups, reconstructions of furniture or architectural fragments, but simplified forms that suggest rather than speak directly. They are poetic variations on historical references.
Margaret: The restoration of elements from the past must be reinterpreted into contemporary language to be attractive.
A flytrap separates the interior of a house from its surroundings during hot weather; it protects against insects and provides privacy by allowing constant air circulation
Photo: Zofia Rydet, Sociological Record 1978-1990 (Chochołów), 1982 © 2068/12/31 Zofia Augustyńska-Martyniak, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 EN)
Catherine: The project was created for the London Design Biennale. There it was confronted with the international tradition. What comparisons, reflections, comments emerged?
Alexandra: These were pandemic conditions and everything happened largely at a distance. First of all, the theme itself was universal. We referred to Polish examples, we had Polish historical references, although Poland was also conventional, because we used examples from the territories of today's Lithuania, Ukraine or former German territories, which are Polish today. However, the topic itself is not limited to our region.
Malgorzata: The formula of the exhibition seems even exotic compared to others, which operate mainly with new media. In London, most of the exhibitions had darkened rooms with attractive digital projections. Our exhibition, which has a descriptive section limited to the bare minimum and no didactic jam either, may not have looked like an exhibition to viewers, but like a clad interior. The works were designed with the character of these rooms in mind. Somerset House is a palatial interior of unusual Anglo-Saxon proportions - very narrow and very tall, with very slender windows and doors. We, uniquely for this biennale, wanted to let daylight into them, and we did the same in Krakow. The analogy of this exhibition is attractive to the public.
Aleksandra: It seems to me that in Krakow the audience feels that a different thought and a different pace of visiting is needed for this exhibition. The exhibition can be read on different levels - one can stop at the aesthetic level, read harder into the typology of fabrics, recall the fabrics used by ancestors, expand their repertoire with their own examples. Another level is contemplation - it was important for us that fabrics make people sensitive to changes in the environment, if only the variation of light during the day. The exhibition looks different at different times.
Simone:The next iteration of the exhibition, the clothing of a new place, was inspiring for us as well. During the preparation, we looked at photos of the terraces of modernist villas together and noticed that the fabrics were often there, too. Now we dream of designing an awning, for example, for the next installment. To show that a lot of fabrics were about creating microclimates outside the building as well, and this can come back to architecture.
Catherine: Thank you for the interview.
talked to: Katarzyna Jagodzińska
Illustrations provided courtesy of the exhibition organizers. All fabrics were designed by Alicja Bielawska.
* The chronobiological architecture reinforces the feeling of being part of cyclical phenomena, the rhythm of the day, the sequence of light and dark, seasons and weather - with all its consequences. For: Anna Ptak, "Amplifying Nature. The Planetary Imagination of Architecture in the Anthropocene Era," Warsaw 2018.
