Cinema of the Road text by Stach Szablowski Kino drogi tekst Stach Szablowski

The beginning of one from among Anna Konik’s films belonging to the cycle of In the Middle of the Way reminds the first scene of quite another film entitled Down by Law by Jim Jarmusch. Both pictures open with a panorama of an American city filmed from the car’s window. There is a great metropolis, with low buildings, a horizontally composed landscape, with no points of reference, an America looking like a Baudrillard’s desert. Anna Konik is going through Cleveland, Ohio. Jarmusch has shot his Down by Law in New Orleans, but in Cleveland he was on another occasion – in that city is set one of the episodes of his film Stranger than Paradise. Still, this would be quite not bad alternative title for the Konik’s project, since in her films she shows people that live Differently (than in the Paradise). In any case, Cleveland or New Orleans, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin or Dobrodzien – no matter where we are, since we are always just In the Middle of the Way.

The analogy with Jarmusch is valid on the level of iconography. It is not accidental that the Konik’s project, which has been shown at galleries, is associated with cinema, and not with this or that work from the very rich tradition of video art. The artist offers a range of experiences, all of them being film-oriented: from a televised “penetrating reportage” in the first, Warsaw episode of the cycle of In the Middle of the Way, up to the inspired cinematographic work realised in 2005 in Cleveland.

The simplest thing would be to call In the middle of the way a series of documentary films. Each of them has got a subtitle – the name of the city where it was shot – Warsaw, Berlin, Moscow, Cleveland, and Dobrodzien. In each of these cities the artist selects a stranger, the Other. She is looking for them among people functioning, as it is nicely called, on the margins of society. Therefore Konik’s protagonists are people that live in the street. They could be called homeless, even if in reality some of them have their homes. Others could undoubtedly have them, if only they wanted or, to be more precise, if they were capable of having homes. We deal here with a wider meaning of homelessness, understood not as only a social category, but rather as a specific state of the spirit. Homelessness is here non-participation in the commonly accepted model of life, non-membership, alienation. In some cases it is the exclusion, in others – the desertion from the ranks of the so-called normal citizens. Each film is a story of Anna Konik’s meeting a stranger in a foreign city. At the same time each of these films is a penetration of the margins of existence – the protagonists of these films are the artist’s guides to such peripheral areas.

In Warsaw Konik meets Tadeusz. Men like him had once been called “eccentrics”. He is a cultural older man, a timid flaneur, a bit vagabond, a bit artist and art-lover (in one of the scenes Tadeusz and the author are visiting together the Kantor’s exhibition at the Zamek Ujazdowski Contemporary Art Gallery). Tadeusz is not a person easily distinguished from the crowd – he could be its participant, if he only lives in a bit different way. From a formal point of view he isn’t a homeless. He’s got a flat, however he almost cannot use it, since it’s difficult to enter there. His imperative of collecting objects, especially all kinds of printed matters, leaflets, books, journals and magazines led him to a catastrophe. Tadeusz’s collection filled his flat like a ghastly Merzbau – in result even the door almost cannot open, to say nothing of living there. For himself the occupant, who neither can nor wants to stop collecting and bringing various things home, has left only a little tunnel – but even this becomes almost overgrown. The protagonist lost control of his flat, so he wanders about the town; Anna Konik is faithfully accompanying him.
Herman, who lives in Berlin, it’s quite another story. This homeless middle-aged German seems to be the embodiment of the romantic myth of clochard. With his grey dreadlocks, the beard, dark glasses and youth dress he seems to be a denial of the tragedy of exclusion; he’s homeless in cool version. Herman is the opposite of Tadeusz and his obsession of collecting things. The German vagabond wanders about Berlin with a little rucksack – he has got nothing and he doesn’t want to have anything. He identifies homelessness with freedom, and maybe tomorrow will quit Berlin in favour of Salzburg or Lisbon. ( ... )

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