New normality. Old habits

2020, exhibition at CCA Kronika, Bytom, Poland

Surprisingly enough, this is not a post-apocalyptic exhibition. Neither did we rise from the dead, nor did Anything (a UFO or the Saviour) come to solve the dispute over the last things.

The normality mentioned in the title, which came after the catastrophe caused by the flutter of bat wings in a soup served to an eccentric food lover, apart from the chaos brought an unexpected chance. The chance, called by Konrad Wojnowski the usefulness of the catastrophe, lies in the need to think about the end of the world we have known in order to stop despairing about the cracked crystal palace – this hated interior of overwhelming boredom. Spring has come, shaky, swollen and almost three months late, but it is difficult to believe the usual “it will be fine”. What is it going to be like? Certainly different, harder.

You, who enter this place, arm yourself with hope – this is a warning to the curious ones. This place means: where the old-fashioned faith in the continuous economic development and the end of history is no longer possible. There are angry brushes, barking in the rubble and moved by an invisible hand (but not the free market’s hand), there are shaking bushes although not the burning ones. Lecnim’s New Normality. Old Habits is permeated with the spirit of self-organisation, but no one there is interested in finding an alternative, they rather want to crack it quickly and effectively. This record of post-catastrophic tactics reflects a concept that is reminiscent of Michel de Certeau, a thinker we know mainly from the story of trampling lawns. This time, however, it is about a tangle of the economy of the gift, the aesthetics of tricks and the ethics of persistence; this time we are not going to trample lawns but trample the possible out of the so far unthinkable.

text: Aleksy Wójtowicz
curated by: Dawid Radziszewski