ROAD OF FEELINGS

digital video (1920x1080), color, sound, 8’18”, 2022, Poland

Created by Zuza Banasińska

A teenage girl’s room. When she ingests a handful of pills, it starts to grow. Normally, as she works out, 1, 2, 3... 1, 2, 3... 1, 2, 3... her muscles can carry stones. Now, they are literally carried. The room walks with her as she touches the ground. In the rhythm of the workout, the walls open up and start chewing the world. Road of Feelings is a video animation created with the Unity 3D engine as part of the artistic collective Ellen Muscle’s LARP (Live Action Role Playing). The scenario was based on a queer-feminist narrative, set in a world where extreme muscle growth is encouraged, especially for teenage girls. Every girl has to take pills that enhance body musculature. Some teens begin to overdose, shortly discovering that the phenomenon enables them to produce hybridized connections. Those hybridizations happen through the muscles themselves. Teens start building and experiencing global networks between things and beings.

Zuza Banasińska (b. 1994) is an audio-visual artist making video-based environments. In her works, virtual and real elements are hybridized beyond distinction in an effort to move from representation towards affective mapping. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Universität der Künste in Berlin, and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2020, she won first prize in the Polish Experimental section at Short Waves in Poznań and On. Art in Wrocław. Her works have been shown at the U-Jazdowski CCA in Warsaw, Dům Umění Mesta Brna in Czech Republic and Blindside in Melbourne. She lives and works in Amsterdam.


 
 

Gemma Fantacci: Your background is quite eclectic. You worked as a literary translator, while your academic background is rooted in the plastic arts and graphic design. Then, you investigated History of Art and Philosophy. Furthermore, you studied under Hito Steyerl at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. How did all these different cultural contexts shape your own artistic trajectory? 

Zuza Banasińska: My biggest interest has always been analyzing and studying images. I thought I could do it only through writing, therefore I decided to study History of Art. What I enjoyed the most was immersing myself in an image and trying to notice all the little details that come together to create meaning. At that time indeed, I was working as a literary translator and all these practices seemed quite similar: what changed was the media. At some point during my studies of History of Art though, I felt that the structure of the curriculum was too rigid, and I thought that I could pursue my interests more freely at the Academy of Fine Arts. I never thought that I could actually become an artist, so I chose the graphics department, which seemed a bit more applied. However, as my studies progressed, with the encouragement of my professors, I found myself moving towards art making. Somehow, I naturally gravitated toward video. I had made films before, attending workshops as a teenager, even considering going to film school. But video art at that time reminded me more of the clips I would do as a kid on my Sony Ericsson for my mom’s birthdays. I felt somehow way more playful and more free and I began to experiment with the medium just by myself, with zero budget and no crew. In a sense though, my earliest works were very fundamental exercises with cinema – I was recording shadows and lights projected on surfaces. They were, in a sense, also exercises in seeing, which is what sparked my interest in images in the first place. I realized I could continue my research both through writing and through these “operations” on images. Looking for theoretical tools that could serve as guidance, I enrolled in Philosophy and later, as an avid reader of Hito Steyerl’s essays, I joined her class for an academic exchange. This experience made me question and solidify my interests and methods as an artist and pushed me to keep researching different mediums through which I could explore images further.

Gemma Fantacci: You often use Unity 3D, one of the most popular engines in game design, as a tool for exploring and shaping digital spaces. Additionally, the aesthetics of some of your works e.g., Road of Feelings, I didn’t go to Crimea and All I Got was this Alien Message is reminiscent of video game spaces. Can you describe your relationship to digital gaming? Did you or do you play? And why does gaming exert such a powerful influence within your oeuvre?

Zuza Banasińska: I discovered Unity during my time in UdK (Universität der Künste Berlin), in a course about virtual reality. At that time, I was developing I didn’t go to Crimea… and feeling stuck as to how to progress with the project. Unity opened a whole other level of material research, where I could visually map out my findings and walk around them, immersing myself deeper and deeper into the investigated images. Back then, I was playing quite a bit of games, my favorite then were Civilization V and David OReilly’s Everything. Although very different, they are both based upon the idea of world-making, of different actors, human and non-human, coming together to create a functioning digital ecosystem. As I was looking for ways to go through the surface of the flat image and access its internal world, I became interested in the different degrees and immersion strategies that games can provide. These two examples are not the apogee of photo realism, yet they seem to accommodate the player deep inside the world, either through game mechanics (Civilization) or affect (Everything). I started to explore how much I could scrutinize an image through very simple means, available at the tips of my fingers. In a sense, Unity made my dream of becoming a filmmaker come true – it allows me to construct elaborate film sets with fewer material limitations. Thanks to this tool, I can exercise the creative process of remembering through images, of (re)constructing possible worlds.

Gemma Fantacci: Road of Feelings is a dreamlike journey that begins in the bedroom of a teenage girl who, after overdosing muscle growth pills, wanders in an uncanny world populated by sculptures representing hybrid body parts, lush vegetation within martian-like deserts and environmental textures resembling both the texture of muscle fibers as well as human skin porosity. Can you describe the origins of this project? And what is the connection to LARPing?

Zuza Banasińska: The project was created as a result of a collective that I was part of at the time, called Ellen Muscle. Together, we imagined a speculative world dominated by big pharma, where the female ideal of beauty was extreme musculature. In their early teenage hood, girls would start taking pills for muscle growth, which resulted in a binary perception of self vs. world. But as they experimented, they found out that through overdosing these pills one could hybridize with their surroundings, the muscles becoming flesh of the other. We developed the world into a LARP scenario, where each of the collective members would embody a different character, most of them non-human and non-unitary. Mine was a teenage girl’s room and from my explorations of the idea of this character in relation to the story, I made Road of Feelings. I wanted to develop an environment where the connections between things create worlds in themselves, where each element is both embedded and out of place. I tried to reconstruct some vague memories of textures, colors, and shapes of my teenage hood and collect them together into this dreamy space. In a sense, I do see that time as flesh, as a discovery of becoming one’s body and especially of becoming-woman. I was interested in exploring what that meant, and what memories and associations could be triggered by a walkthrough in this digital world.

Gemma Fantacci: A striking aspect of Road of Feelings is the simultaneous presence and absence of the human body. The perspective you chose makes the viewing experience very immersive: it feels like a dreamlike trip in a world made of shimmering textures, while at the same time there are a few elements alluding to the body and corporeality, such as the sculptures of hands and feet, an anthropomorphic eye, the outline of the landscape that recalls the silhouette of a naked body lying on the side, the singular carnal like textures of the bedroom’s walls, and even the bedroom itself. Can you guide us through this territory made of bodily fragments?

Zuza Banasińska: As the script was based on intuitive relations between the self and the world, I allowed myself to work quite intuitively, treating the environment as a place of affective flows rather than fixed narratives. Of the utmost importance is sellof selas’ soundtrack, one of whom was part of our collective. I created the world according to their music, striving to reflect what I heard in the visual layer. I wanted sounds to give rise to shapes and textures, making them more porous and tangible. I was interested in how these technical images, in conjunction with sound, can trigger an embodied experience, inserting the body in, rather than on the image. I rarely include human characters in my 3D worlds because the tissue of the digital is so haunted by the human anyway. As such, it can serve as a perfect tool for rethinking what this human subject could possibly be. In Road of Feelings, I wanted it to become fragmented and hybridized with its environment, existing only through its relations. The lonely body parts that one can download from websites selling 3D models reminded me of dismembered statues, shedding their historical context of power and standing just as shapes, as part of a landscape. I was looking to create an intimate experience where one can project themselves into this environment made from elements that seem to be out of place. The walkthrough through the space is supposed to be almost a trip, starting and finishing in the room, reflecting how the perception of that same image differs upon coming back.

Gemma Fantacci: Road of Feelings brings together the notions of place, intimacy (hereby represented by the bedroom), and a navigable space. What is the relationship between the window frame that allows us to experience such a oneiric world – the result of an assemblage of discrete elements – and the environmental frame provided by Unity’s skybox?

Zuza Banasińska: In my practice, I am quite interested in the depth of facades and surfaces. What worlds can be imagined onto them and what worlds can be made out of them. As fact and fiction can no longer be contrasted and fantasy universes are well embedded into reality, I do believe that it is through images that one can produce reality, making new spaces where dominant patterns collapse. Of course, programs such as Unity are often based on such dominant vocabularies, dictated by the capacity of the software and the people that produce them. Despite being a tool for making worlds, Unity is based on rules of the world which created it. An example that recently struck me when building an alien environment was that most of the available terrain tools presuppose that there is a ground on which things grow upwards. Very simple yet very fundamental presupposition. In my videos, I try to make visible these limitations or conversely, to break them, misusing certain tools of the software in order to widen this frame of perception. The skybox is another such presupposition, denoting a certain finitude, literally a box. But just as we look at the sky and know that there is something behind it, similarly the frame, while a limiting boundary, can also be an opening tool. It indicates that something was cut, that the world continues and can be inferred through imagination, built up by the viewer, consciously or intuitively, as affects. 

Gemma Fantacci: Building digital and virtual worlds is in itself an act of translating and assembling elements of the physical world into a realm of possible relationships. It starts from the relationship between images and visual data and their combination, a process reflected in Donna Haraway’s dictum “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”. Based on your experience, what is the relationship between writing fiction and virtual design? How do these practices overlap and diverge?

Zuza Banasińska: In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin recounts Virginia Woolf’s idea of botulism as a replacement for heroism. This comes from the hero as a bottle, or a bottle as a hero, meaning a container of stories, relations and affects. In that sense, text-based fiction and virtual environments are both containers that can produce possible worlds. I think these practices overlap in multiple ways: both involve a process of zooming in and out, laying out the structure of the world and zooming in to see that structure reflected in the smallest elements. I believe that thinking of containers allows one to not prioritize certain characters and stories over others and for the creation of less hierarchical systems. However, just as fiction, digital worlds can also be hinged upon this idea of heroism and of a male character going through battles in order to achieve his dramatic arc. Many popular games function in this way. In that sense, I think it matters from what threads the world is weaved. Virtual design is quite a male dominated practice, with most programs designed by men and reflecting their perspective. Perhaps writing in that sense is freer, as it is not limited by the software. But it is still burdened by the history of literature, which is plentiful in heroism and many other isms. All world-making practices carry with them certain weights, but I do believe that still they can serve as helpful tools for producing new subjectivities, as long as these weights are recognized.

Gemma Fantacci: On a visual level, your works share similarities with the surrealist work of artists such as Gunther Gerzso, whose paintings are populated by hybrid human figures and body parts fused with the natural environment that create gateways to other worlds; at the same time, however, it also recalls Claire Hentscher’s process of spatial assemblage that investigates the real/virtual dichotomy. In fact, your iconography has been defined as “a visual vocabulary composed of a variety of elements” whose aim is to examine the mechanisms of control of the environment and the logic of systemic narratives. How does your worldmaking practice evolve into an extension of the human body and its inner environment as a means to explore dichotomies such as the relationship between artificial and natural, embodied and disembodied, universal and personal? 

Zuza Banasińska: I am interested in how these dichotomies are intertwined with each other, to the point of not being able to distinguish between them. Each of my works takes the form of a walkthrough through a space where solid distinctions don’t make sense and tight narratives collapse. I always strive to include a multiplicity of voices and stories. In my most recent work, The House that Shadows Built, I use the green screen both as a tool and symbol of this multiplicity. I see the chroma key screen as a point of connection between land, machine, body and the virtual. It exists both temporally and spatially, both flattened and expanded, and both interior and exterior, seeming to reintroduce a dynamism of space. Within the capitalist logic of the film studio, space and time are “fixed in post”, geared toward an essentialist universalism of a commodified narrative. Yet as things in themselves, their incessant rearrangement and openness helps space and narrative escape stabilization and fixing. In a sense what links me with Gunther Gerzso is this drive towards abstraction, not only visual, but structural. Vilém Flusser said that traditional images (like paintings) exist from concrete to the abstract, while technical images (including digital worlds) proceed from the abstract to the imaginable. My main interest, however, lies in the fact that these worlds collapse back on themselves, making a full circle into abstraction, waiting to be assembled anew. In The House that Shadows Built, I simultaneously develop the story of multiple landscapes that, as in Claire Hentscher’s work, live between reality and fiction: the biggest green screen on earth, mines turned into museums and places of military simulations. The journey through these landscapes is accompanied by a green screen character recounting the story of a woman who in the early days of Hollywood set up her own film studio. Through these unfixed narratives, I weave an abstract and tentacular protagonist, who becomes and collapses, just as the green screen.

Gemma Fantacci: In your texts, you mention the need to “enter” and “embody” images as they shape our understanding of reality as a whole. Images are no longer mimesis, an imitation of a reality: they are themselves real. How does this process relate to such works as I didn’t go to Crimea and All I Got was this Alien Message, the outcome of a process of translation and interconnection between records, photographs, drawings, and a diary that were originally discovered in an abandoned cottage in Belarus?

Zuza Banasińska: Images don’t exist alone in the world. They become something in relation to things, beings, and other images. In that sense, what I mean by entering images is entering a world of connections and entanglements. These entanglements can exist as sense-based experiences, but also as explorations of meaning. In this work, I was trying to piece together a speculative identity simultaneously on different scales. There is the personal story of Boris, the author of the photo album, who was stationed in Crimea in the 1980s in compulsory military service for the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Then, there is the national story of the USSR and its propaganda seeping into Boris’s way of expressing himself. Finally, there is the global story of describing our planet to potential extraterrestrials, as seen through messages sent to outer space from Crimean radars. In a sense, entering an image is entering a multiplicity of interpretations and scales. All of them constitute our reality yet only certain ones are cemented in history, shaping individual and collective identities. In this project and others, I am looking to create spaces where multiple stories converge and where identities are not fixed but in constant becoming. The translation between different media allows me to leave an open space where facts and fiction blur together. I am quite interested in making portraits of images that extend between the image itself, towards other modes of expression. In this example, inspecting drawings from the album, I found the depicted planetary radars, which led me to the discovery of morse code messages and songs played on a theremin that were sent into space. It’s a networked journey through different scales, worlds, and worldviews. 

Gemma Fantacci: The high degree of photo realism provided by Unity often blurs the ability to distinguish hyperreal digital environments from their physical counterparts. However, you use Unity as a technique of estrangement to create spaces for the production of alternative modes of perception, as if we could catch the raw visual data within digital worlds only through the juxtaposition of seemingly inconsistent, heterogeneous elements. Are tools designed to create fictional worlds the best way for us to understand the hyper-mediated reality in which we live? What’s your take?

Zuza Banasińska: Yes, because they create such a hyperreality. I think that through making worlds one can actually see the world in which one is embedded. By mapping out elements, I am able to inspect them closely, exactly to change my mode of perception, to be estranged from things that I considered obvious before. I believe that the distinctions between hyperreal and real are no longer useful, the Baudrillardian era of lamenting on the disappearance of things is long gone. The simulacra that permeate our lives present a great opportunity to keep piecing the world back together anew. Through making these worlds I keep recreating myself, rethinking my embeddedness in reality. I think that growing up in patriarchal Poland has pushed me to create spaces for myself where I can freely reinvent my identity. In a sense that’s what my videos are, rather than linear narratives, they are propositions of possible spaces.

Gemma Fantacci: Is there anything else you would like to add? What are you working on currently?

Zuza Banasińska: I am working on an audiovisual installation about the “Kontrewers” stone from Poland. It was discovered in the 1990s and its strange carvings, showing two humanoid figures have caused quite a stir. Archaeologists determined the stone must originate from the Neolithic and have had a ritualistic function. Ethnologists saw in the petroglyphs representations of Hopi Indian gods, never before found on the European continent. Ufologists claimed it is proof of alien visitations. Paranormal scientists saw in it a medium of communication with other dimensions. Religious community called it the “devilish stone”. The local government put it in front of the municipality building in a glass pyramid. Disturbing linear time scales and creating speculative rituals, I want to construct a space that serves as a point of connection for different material and social histories that converge in this geological object. Through building an audiovisual world that encapsulates scenes made in Unity as well as staged and documentary footage from the stone’s direct vicinity, the work will trace an ecosystem of its entanglements.

ROAD OF FEELINGS

digital video (1920x1080), color, sound, 8’18”, 2022, Poland

Made with Unity (Unity Technologies, 2005-)