A swift flies through monochrome snapshots, returning home among residential buildings. A ritual repeated every year, yet this time, it’s a ghost town – a desolate space for them to thrive in. Ada Napiórkowski’s animated short, Swifts (2024), is an immersive post-human tale, leading one through its world with a great sense of atmosphere and rhythm.
Poland-raised, Estonia-based, Ada Napiórkowski is an animation director with a background in graphic design and a profound appreciation for minimal form. With a bold drawing style, her practice delves into experimental deconstruction grounded in process. Swifts was one of the two projects developed during her MA studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts – the other being The Animation Pen, a collection of essays and a manifesto in one. “My visual language comes from within”, she stated in the latter. “Interpretation is optional, but not necessary”.
Lasnamäe, Tallinn’s so-called “sleeping district”, brought inspiration for the film. This is where “swifts are ruling the skies above the area”, Napiórkowski explains. “They utilise the cracks and crevices of post-Soviet blocks for nesting, adapting the decaying concrete to their advantage”. An image known across borders. A view steeped in nostalgia. Yet in Napiórkowski’s world, the birds don’t dance in sunlight. It might rather remind one of Grzegorz Hańderek’s Blokowisko (Housing Estate) (2015), a graphic installation combined with an audio essay – as grey and overwhelming yet with space for a nest of familiarity.
In this open-ended, meditative animation, there’s space between the spirits for anyone to seek home. The fact that Napiórkowski’s film has been featured at various festivals – including Annecy International Animation Film Festival – and received accolades (O!PLA, BEAST, and Supertoon Festivals) shouldn’t come as a surprise then.
With its theme – Odyssey: Beta Version, inviting its audience on a journey filled with a kaleidoscope of unexpected sensations and creative stories, this year’s Kinomural Festival was the right place for Napiórkowski’s film to be shown, too. Just like birds create their homes in the building’s walls, these Swifts emerged on Wrocław’s façades. The Contemporary Lynx editorial team awarded Ada Napiórkowski with an honourable mention at the Festival.
In the conversation with our magazine, she shares her artistic process of abstract explorations, the idea behind Swifts, and plans for the future.
Berenika Balcer: Finishing your studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, you dissected the intricacies of animation as a language, repositioning it as a “complex dialect capable of deep intellectual and artistic expression”. Animation to you, similarly to many of your colleagues, is central to voicing yourself. But how did animation come into your life? How does it allow you to explore both the narrative worlds and your inner world?
Ada Napiórkowski: I’m a Polish millennial, so I grew up glued to the TV screen watching Japanese animation. When Sailor Moon came on, every kid on my block would drop everything and run to watch – then we’d spend hours trying to draw the characters. For my generation, animation is nostalgia. It was our medium before video games took over, and we were lucky to witness the cultural mix that came with the transformation era, when both Western and Asian shows were fighting for our hearts.
As I got older, I think my interest in film developed quite naturally. Growing up in Łódź, there was always something cinema-related happening. It was also there that I first discovered Estonian animation – its absurdity felt so fresh and unlike anything I’d seen before. But for most of my adulthood, animation remained just a hobby as I chose a career in a different creative field. I decided to give it another shot when I was almost thirty.
B.B.: Your current work, however, is far from the figurative worlds of your childhood inspirations – the abstract explorations dominate your art. And Swifts proves exactly so with its minimal yet psychedelic aesthetic. Trippy even, but you also often talk about the importance of being playful. What emotions do you hope to evoke in your viewers when balancing on such an intersection?
A.N.: Somewhere along the way, I abandoned figurative representation in favour of abstraction. Play might not be the first thing that comes to mind when watching my film, but in fact, the process of making it was all about play. Animation is a balance of obsession and endurance. One second of footage can mean anywhere between three and twenty-four individual drawings. I’ve always loved the tactile quality of traditional animation, and I was willing to suffer for it. But eventually, play – or rather, pleasure – came to my rescue.
It’s something I learned from professional dancers: pleasure is a safety net. If something about the process doesn’t feel right, don’t do it, change it – so you don’t end up hurting yourself. Pleasure protects the mind and body from strain, keeping the work alive and connected to joy. I allowed myself to experiment a lot while working on Swifts, and I genuinely loved the process. And emotions… mystery is a big one for me.
“Animation is a balance of obsession and endurance.”
B.B.: Speaking of mystery. Swifts begins with the birds returning to a world without humans – only spirits inhabit the space. Swifts have long symbolised hope and return. Was that duality – absence and hope, spirit and life – something you consciously worked with? How did the idea of Swifts first take shape?
A.N.: There is a strange kind of hope I feel observing urban birds. Swifts seem to love nesting in the crumbling facades of post-Soviet panel blocks. They are migratory birds – some myths claim they travel between the realms of the living and the dead, carrying human souls on their wings. I love watching and listening to them in the summer months; they fill the space with so much life. Their yearly return always feels like a little miracle. In Swifts, I wanted to capture that sense of wonder.
B.B.: You mentioned dancers. Your work feels very tactile – like we can almost sense the materials breathing on screen. What role does physicality play in the way you animate?
A.N.: Physicality to me is a trace of presence, a touch.
When I moved to Estonia to study animation, I was desperate to create with my hands again – to feel the material world after so much time spent in the digital one. While many industrialised societies have lost their appreciation for craft by this point in history, Estonia feels like the opposite: the love for making is very real here. You can see it in how carefully folk crafts have been preserved and documented, and the important role craft continues to play in artistic education.
During my time at the Estonian Academy of Arts, I allowed myself to get lost exploring everything seemingly unrelated to animation – ceramics, textiles, printmaking, but also the local culture and history, which fascinated me.
B.B.: And that tactile awareness also seems connected to your references and inspirations. You’ve mentioned Amy Kravitz’s River Lethe as an influence — a visual poem where abstraction becomes almost spiritual. In that space, names like Tomasz Popakul also come to mind. Who do you feel resonates most with your sensibility, and what draws you to their way of thinking or seeing?
A.N.: I would definitely list Amy Kravitz as one of my main influences, next to Shen Jie and Lillian Schwartz. I had a chance to see Winter by Tomek Popakul and Kasumi Ozeki not long ago, and I’m not at all surprised it’s been winning awards at so many festivals.
And you are right – there’s something almost spiritual about animation. Perhaps it lies in the act of deconstructing and reconstructing reality, or in the conflict between reality and illusion. Whatever it is, it keeps me on my toes.
“Perhaps it lies in the act of deconstructing and reconstructing reality, or in the conflict between reality and illusion. Whatever it is, it keeps me on my toes.”
B.B.: You also noted that in your practice, you’re searching for a “flow” to what you’re doing – “a mental space where creative work feels pleasurable and effortless”. How do you access that space? Do you have a process or rituals that help you reach this state when animating?
A.N.: I don’t really have a set method for getting into that state, but I know some animators who dance before they start working to get into the flow. Dancing lets you feel movement and energy in your own body, and that physical awareness can translate into animation in a much more interesting way. Perhaps there’s a clue in that – shifting the focus from observing/synthesising an experience to simply living it. Keeping a sense of open-endedness in whatever you do. But I don’t have a clear answer yet.
B.B.: Animation festivals could be the place to search for some sort of flow, too. I know myself first-hand how welcoming these particular spaces are. With Swifts making its festival rounds – what do festivals and artistic communities give you at this point in your journey?
A.N.: What I find most important is their multicultural nature. Animation festivals bring together different perspectives, different lenses, different philosophies, and different ways of existing.
That feels so critical now more than ever, in a time when AI-generated content is beginning to shape the tastes of younger generations. No matter how we spin it, AI is a kind of monoculture – trained to reproduce whatever sells. Festivals, on the other hand, celebrate diversity: of voices and ways of seeing.
B.B.: So, after having your work showcased in Annecy – are there any other festivals or collaborations you dream of? Where do you see your own practice heading?
A.N.: I’m exploring more and more collaborations, especially in music and other creative industries. I’m still looking for my niche, and I’m not entirely sure where it’s all heading yet, but that’s part of the fun – I’m curious! I’ve met so many incredibly inspiring people through animation and film that I’ve learned to just trust the universe to shape my expectations as I go.
Swifts (Piiritajad)
2024
Director / Script / Art Design / Composite / Animation / Editor: Ada Napiórkowski
Music / Sound Design: Natalia Wójcik
Supervisor: Äggie Pak Yee Lee
Production: Estonian Academy of Arts
