Rafał Kołacki – a sound artist | Contemporary Lynx - print and online magazine on art & visual culture

Rafał Kołacki is an artist who creates sound installations based on field recordings, among other things. He holds a master’s degree in archeology and cultural anthropology, as well as a PhD in fine arts. His practice often draws on the roots of culture and spirituality. He is the author of the installation “Te słowa przestałem słyszeć” (“The Words I Stopped Hearing”), which will be presented later this year in Łódź, and the video installation “Błogosławiony, który idzie” (“Blessed Is the One Who Comes”), which will premiere this September.

Sara Dąbrowska: Although sound is your primary medium for expression, I want to discuss silence first. While drawing parallels between your practice and visual arts, I thought of the paintings by Kazimir Malevich. At the beginning of his artistic journey he had painted multiple elements and colourful shapes before he ultimately landed on the white square on the white background, which he called “the atom of art”. Is silence in your art a different type of thing?

Rafał Kołacki: Artists are often dealing with silence and noise – these are the two opposites or dualism. I suppose that amidst the general chaos which surrounds us, the artists find it easy to capture the extremes, such as silence and noise. They offer pretty straightforward material with which one might do something. For example, the futurists were fascinated with noise. Then came John Cage, who utilised it in his compositions, and yet was equally fascinated with silence. When it comes to my own practice, silence happens for very personal reasons, especially in the installation “The Words I Stopped Hearing”, which was created after my mother passed away. While creating this work and writing my dissertation, since this work is also a part of my PhD, I basically created this piece about the period of mourning, which I was going through, that is inextricably linked to silence. Mourning is also associated with a departure, ensuing silence, with the void.

S.D: I am wondering now if we are not actually discussing some completely abstract notion. Does silence even exist? How about the silent mourning you have mentioned?

R.K.: There is this research proving that even if we create the conditions for total silence in a decompression chamber, this silence is disrupted the moment a person enters this room. So science would suggest that there is no such thing as silence. The state of mourning also needs to be silent. After someone close to you dies, your mind might be filled with thoughts generating noise. One could wonder when does the silence actually fall and why. It is quite a paradox. Overall, we are revolving around the notion of silence and yet are unable to define it clearly. We can experience silence on a meadow, we can seek it out in a big city, we can conjure silence while painting these white squares or creating invisible sculptures. It is all deeply personal. Today, during our conversation, we ponder the question what silence actually is, but I guess we should ask ourselves what silence is to us today every single day. What am I feeling when I think about it? Is it silence or a void?

S.D: What would you say is the difference between silence and a void?

R.K: Silence is more of an auditory attribute, a manifestation of a sound landscape. Silence in music is defined precisely as the interval between the notes. And in life? Silence is more ambiguous. In life, we are dealing with a void. For me, a void is related to the visual. However, these definitions might be interchangeable. Anyway, my silence has arisen from specific needs and within a specific timeframe. I wanted to create a piece to honour my mother, mark this period of mourning in my life. I decided to process it publicly, so to speak.

S.D: Did you treat the creative process in terms of therapy?

R.K.: Most definitely. Perhaps I did not expect that finishing it would have some sort of healing effect on me. That was not the point. The point was to create a work of art that would be totally integral to my life at this time. That is the clou of that work. The thing is that if my child had been born at that moment, then I probably would have made a piece about the birth of my child. Looking back, I can recognise a significant therapeutic yet painful process. I was also doing my PhD, so I did write a theoretical dissertation. I was reading a lot about grief, the way people come to terms with loss, the phases, etc. I learned so much about myself back then, I entered into a dialogue with my own emotions. Personally, I found it easier to cope through art. This form of self-discovery was accompanied by acceptance. But I think that this installation might not be therapeutic just for me, others might also find this subject super relevant.

S.D: Did you have any moral qualms about sharing something as intimate as grieving with the whole world? Were you at all scared that someone would consider it too controversial?

R.K: No, it never occurred to me. I did not think that something so personal might be controversial. It seems to me that the world works in such a way that you should be able to express yourself whenever you want to without any hindrances. Politically engaged works tend to provoke greater controversy. At least I have more qualms about speaking about it. I know some people who engaged in social commentary were accused of opportunism or taking advantage of someone’s harm to promote their image or pander to the general public. Nonetheless, I find it incredibly important to address socially engaged topics. However, my art is basically devoid of any political commentary. I simply tackle the issues that are important to me at a given point in my life. And so, coining separate terms, such as “engaged art”, is something completely foreign to me. Recently, I have started working on this piece titled “Poza blaskiem księżyca” (“Beyond Moonlight”) that focuses on the issue of homelessness. And in my opinion, it is not political art. It is a sensitive art.

S.D: What does “sensitive art” stand for in your eyes?

R.K: I try to be like a sponge or, to put it simply, some sort of a gauge for measuring emotions and what is happening around me. Based on that, I explore the form. It seems to me that my works become more authentic this way, because they really exist. I think about them all the time even before they acquire a physical form. I try to observe the world and react as an artist to certain problems that strike a nerve in me. I want to express my opinion through art.

S.D: Is the form as important to you as the content?

R.K: You know, I am an artist that has worked a lot with sound, so before I started making audio installations, I performed on stage as a musician for almost twenty years. I view these installations as natural products of my development. My albums have always been conceptual, and so I took an interest in field recording. At some point I realised that playing shows and recording albums was not enough. I cared more about a conceptual approach to the form.

S.D: What about the visual aspect? I believe it plays a quintessential role in the installation “The Words I Stopped Hearing”.

R.K.: In fact, the visual aspect was rather overpowering in the case of this particular installation viewed live. This object is staggering. You enter a gallery and see the 8-metre “floating medusa” from tulle that is set into motion by a tiny fan while the lights go up and down, intermittently. It is a net curtain that might serve as a metaphor for a drape that you hang up to separate yourself from something, and create your own intimate space in this separation. In principle, the sound is fairly subtle in this piece. It is funny, actually, how a lot of people who came to the opening asked for the volume to be turned up because they did not hear the sound coming from the speakers. But that was not the point. The sound was recorded in my mother’s apartment – a ticking clock, buzzing fridge, delicate hum of construction works outside the window, calm soundscape.

S.D: Did you have any predetermined guidelines on how this installation should be viewed and listened to?

R.K.: No, I simply trust every person who comes to see it. I want everyone to have their own unique experience. Naturally, I can offer some assistance through, let’s say, the lightning design or the arrangement of fans which affect the tulle. All these elements were created fully intentionally so that the audience could encounter my vision at some level. However, I would like to point out an inscribed openness of this piece. Everyone can move however they want, enter this corridor of tulle and touch it. What’s interesting is the fact that I have completely overlooked the sense of smell, but I will make sure to create just the right scent during the upcoming presentation. Perhaps it will be the perfume that my mum used.

S.D: You also seem to focus on the broadly understood spirituality in your works. Is it also the case when it comes to this installation?

R.K.: Yes, this is something very significant to me personally. Considering my academic background in archeology and cultural anthropology, I have always been fascinated with the types of artistic creations that are deemed primitive and prehistoric. In my art and music, I allude to the ritualistic element of culture, and this element dominates. In my PhD dissertation, I wrote that the tulle corridors from “The Words I Stopped Hearing” are the metaphor of the cave entrance, which is a place of worship and ritual. You enter the cave through these passages, and these dark passages in between the layers of tulle were supposed to signify that. Surrounded by darkness, you could have imagined where you were going in order to see and discover something valuable for yourself.

Rafał Kołacki, photo by Marta Zając-Krysiak

S.D: A similar experience seems to be involved in the video installation “Blessed Is the One Who Comes” that will be presented for the first time this September.

R.K: This work deals with the cult that was operating a hundred years ago. I invited Julita Charytoniuk, a singer, to collaborate with me. She sang traditional songs, which are crucial to this work. These songs might represent absolutely primordial manifestations of art and spirituality, although at that time art as we understand it today did not even exist.

S.D: I would love to speak now about your other gig, namely education in the area of mindful listening. Could you please tell us something more about this activity? How do you teach that in the modern world teeming with noise and clamour?

R.K: I have been doing it for dozens of years. It is linked to my interest in field recording. I was intrigued by field recording in and of itself, as well as the theory of R. Murray Schafer, a musician and philosopher from Canada, who created this concept of acoustic ecology. It is a quasi-science that focuses on the sound, its preservation and conscious listening. Murray also published the book 100 Exercises in Listening and Sound-Making, which contains the activities that open up your mind to mindfulness. For instance, you take note of the first sound you hear after waking up. These types of seemingly simple things that allow you to pay more attention to something you might have been ignoring so far in your life.

S.D: Part of this concept are the sound walks, which you are organising. Is that right?

R.K: Yes, the walks are designed to make participants more attuned to sounds. We are walking around a specific area, initially often blindfolded to exclude the sense of sight and focus on listening. At times, we need to adopt such drastic measures because we live in a strictly visual culture. I always use an example of ads that are very loud, and yet they do not necessarily present any bold imagery. We are all surrounded by images and the cult of beauty. Sound tends to be dismissed, such is our nature, I guess. What we see will always dominate, even though we only see what is in front of us while hearing everything that happens around us. It is funny, when we are falling asleep, we do so with our eyes closed, not the ears – we hear all the time. Circling back to the primitive elements of culture, sound was just necessary to survive.

S.D: You are calling this concept acoustic ecology. What does it mean in practice?

R.K: It means nurturing one’s sensitivity towards sounds that are disappearing from our surroundings. Those Canadian researchers gather whole archives of sounds that are disappearing. An example could be the sound of a typewriter or a horse’s hooves on a pavement. It also means making sure that the sounds in our environment don’t get too loud – that the sounds at pedestrian crossings for the visually impaired do not blast too loudly, that people pay attention to it at the design stage. Apart from Schafer’s idea, there is also the technique of deep listening developed by Pauline Olivieros. It is especially interesting to those living in a culture with an abundance of stimuli. As part of the practice, a person immerses themselves in individual sounds based on meditation, breathing and movement exercises. My workshops draw on both of these ideas. Children like them a lot. On top of that, we also have an element of recording.

S.D: Sounds like a lot of fun. Can adults also join in?

R.K: Yeah, but you know how it is. In research in the field of sociology of culture, adults are the most difficult group to manage. Working with children and seniors is much easier because they have more time.

S.D: You have mentioned that we are living in a culture dominated by visuals and images. It would be hard to disagree with that. Does this mean that sound art has to claw its way forward?

R.K: Definitely. It is considered niche in the context of gallery presentation. The term “sound art” itself is also hard to define, even for the experts. They ask themselves if it is a separate area of artistic activity or just an element of a bigger whole. At times, I strike a compromise with my audience by collaborating with visual artists because I realise that it would make the pieces seem more accessible. This was the case with “Tonopolis”, my first field recording project. I worked with two visual artists simply to make it more appealing. While I was recording this album several years ago, the sheer field recording was something totally abstract. Now this has changed for the better. There are Facebook groups for people sharing this interest. In my opinion, the path is simply easier for the artists with an academic background who honed their craft as painters or sculptors or new media artists. It is worth noting that the progress observed at fine arts academies is much more evident than at music academies, which perpetuate the old-school way of teaching based on learning a single instrument and classical composers. On the other hand, the revolution and development at fine arts academies has been more impactful.

S.D: You are right. I have never looked at it from this perspective.

R.K: Generally, I believe that visual artists are the best musicians. I have not quite figured out why, but it seems to me that they are more familiar with the standards of contemporary art, more audacious when it comes to creating new things.

S.D: While we are on the subject of new things, I want to ask you about your approach to new technologies, especially artificial intelligence. Recording is supported by technology, but are you afraid of its integration into art?

R.K: I suppose, even if artificial intelligence influences artists or creates art on its own, the pieces originating from emotions and true instincts will most definitely stand out because they will be more authentic. I am not afraid at all. Art evoking the past or intuition will always be superior to that created artificially. Perhaps not right away, but time will tell that indeed it has more merit. It is just my own opinion. I can also appreciate the artworks utilising new technologies and its various applications. For the time being, it is not something for me, but never say never. I might dabble in new technology in the future.

S.D: We cannot wait to see what the future holds. In the meantime, can you please tell us what Rałał Kołacki listens to on a daily basis?

R.K: I can tell you what album I played this morning. It was a record by Cypress Hill. I listen to a lot of different things. I listen to a lot of cult classics, such as Brian Eno. I have just bought two albums by Kali Malone, a Swedish artist playing synthetic concerts on pipe organs. I also bought Ragnar Johanson’s album – it is more of an ethnomusicological study. It is the guy who recorded the native tribe of Papua New Guinea that plays specific kinds of flutes. I also listen to hardcore and politically engaged music, as well as field recordings. You know, I listen to everything we have just talked about.