Volcano

The sculpture "Volcano" started with a small boat made in May 2021, and was assembled piece by piece over the course of eight months. Soft, swollen insides of cotton wool together with stitched velvet and woolen objects in the form of bones, eyes, tears and hearts fill the glossy plastic skin — the body of memories and testimonies. Earrings, a necklace with a curl of my hair, shells collected on the shores of the North Sea — small marks of everyday life, gifts of fragility. Clear edges, a large pedestal and a sculpture crowning the entire composition are a familiar image of the materialization of memory. Monuments on city streets perform a memorial function, they must tell a collective story, taking into account the interests of different parties. But is this true, or is each monument just a reflection of the contemporary political agenda? What can it really tell us with its own silent presence? Which monuments will our modernity leave behind? Right now one monument of genocide is being erased in order to lay the new layer on top. I grew up in the “cemetery” of historical memory; in the city of monuments, where their number is still increasing, marking either long-forgotten scars, or newly invented and acquired ones on the body of the city. This is all made for raising up soldiers. Being a child, I didn’t want to absorb this, but I wished to climb to the very top, in order to see the world from the height of the monument. As an adult, one can only feel their own insignificance and vulnerability under the weight of stone and bronze “greatness” of the myth. We need a memory commensurate with a person, soft and lively, without threats, open for communication. It should be possible to look into the mouth of this sleeping monumental volcano, to see this cross section of the soil made by the lives sacrificed to it, to look into its eyes without fear of becoming ashes. And then new flowers will grow in this soil.