Agnieszka Polska -- Gardener´s Responsibility

The project 'Gardener's Responsibility', composed of the video 'The Garden' and two series of
photo – collages, highlights the problems of a disappearance as a conscious gesture and intentional
self-exclusion.
The video loosely refers to a figure of Paweł Freisler, polish artist active mostly in 60s and 70s, who
moved to Sweden in late 70s and is said to stop being active as an artist and start running a garden.
Freisler is known mostly for his 'art of story telling' – ephemeral practice which involved the telling of
stories about his performances and art objects, impossible to confirm. From this point of view, also
his escape from public life and from the participation in the art world can be another story dedicated
to create a legend; his 'mistic' garden can be considered as a new scene for the performance.
'The Garden' shows a hypothetical visit in his Swedish land, the visit that in fact didn't take place but
this is the only solution to preserve the myth.
The photographs were made as collages composed from the fragments of photos of biological rest
and portray sophisticated sculptures made of mud, straws and branches – the probable work of
melancholic gardener. The name of the series – 'Artons' – refers to the work of another polish artist
active in 60s – Włodzimierz Borowski, who created small organic objects called Artony. This
suggests that the project refers not only to Freisler's work but is an attempt to show the
mechanisms of remembering the past and creating the history as a collage of thoughts and
occurrences that are impossible to verify.

Text: Agnieszka Polska