The ecstatic nature of pure colours. Interview with Aga Jarząb and Maciek Bączyk, an artistic duo known as kinoMANUAL.

We are living in a culminating moment of scientific and technological transformations, in times of excessive exposure to social stimuli, when the viewers’ attention is an indicator of contemporary artists. When I think about the development of art across decades, kinoMANUAL comes to my mind. The audiovisual activities of Aga Jarząb and Maciek Bączyk engage the senses, soothe and provide refuge from the surrounding reality. It is a family artistic duo that creates films and objects referring to the rich tradition of motion pictures, kinetic art and experimental cinema. We met on the occasion of their most recent exhibition called the Winter Showroom at the Foto-Gen Gallery in Wrocław. Aga and Maciek told me about their works, the beginnings of their artistic career, and plans for the future. 

Julia Gorlewska: You have been creating art together for over a decade now. You first joint film was released in 2014, and your début exhibition was held a year later at the Lower Silesia Film Centre. To what extent have you managed to fulfil the original idea behind your collective? What stage were you at back then, and what stage are you currently in? How has the development of kinoMANUAL progressed over the years?

Aga Jarząb: The story is actually much longer, because our art collective is also a family collective. Our first cooperation involved the establishment of “Pańcia Organisation” where we worked with our animals. We have a lot of memories here.

Maciek Bączyk: Before talking to you, Facebook reminded us that exactly five years ago we were in Vaasa, in Finland. We were invited to go there by the Filmverkstaden collective which is a laboratory dedicated to working with 8mm and 16mm films and analogue photography, and which we belong to. 2019 was a very important year to us; it is when we started experimenting with the combination of digital and analogue projections. It was the first time we showcased a live performance from the Milky Medium series whose key part included the words our daughter had spoken in her sleep. We mixed screened animation using three slide projectors and three digital projectors. The result was a multi-channel projection inspired by the Milky Way and some of our daughter’s drawings. As for the sound layer, her voice, as the main narrator, is mixed with ambient electronic music. After that we started experimenting with Pocket Cinema. Then the pandemic caught us.

 JG: How did it affect your creative work? 

AJ: We had a lot of free time. We were performing online from our studio where we’ve been working since 2019. It was an interesting experience which surely contributed to our development. This extended space gave a boost to our capabilities.

MB: We worked from our house earlier, and obviously we had limited space to move around. Everything had to fit in on the table we are sitting at right now. It was too tight and a bit uncomfortable. At the time, we were making animation-based and abstract film projections: small drawings, photographic plates, direct filmmaking. Thanks to the studio, we managed to expand and develop all that. The film that documents the beginning of our adventure with Pocket Cinema is our live performance of 2020 which we prepared at home for the Centrala Gallery in Birmingham. We can say that our cooperation from five years ago evolved from Pocket Cinema into StillFrame Cinema we are dealing with at the moment. It is a concept which entails the production of films based on still frames displayed from multiple projectors. These still geometric images are modified with external shutters, prisms, colourful glass and other moving trinkets. The outcome is a much more complex and comprehensive projection. This is what we are doing at the moment, and this is what the exhibition at Foto-Gen is about. 

JG: Exactly. Let’s talk about your present exhibition, Winter Showroom, at the Foto-Gen Gallery in Wrocław. You’ve transformed the exhibition space into a warm and soothing place which shrouds the visitors, protecting them against the winter outside. How would you describe the exhibition? What did you want to achieve? Has the specific space and time in which your projections will be screened affected their vision? 

AJ: Working on exhibitions, we turn to mixed methods, with site-specific approach prevailing. The concept is created at the studio, where we decide on the initial installation plan, the layout, and the colour sets. We modify the final vision of each project based on the specific features of a given place. When the manager and curator at Foto-Gen, Paweł Bąkowski, proposed the exhibition, at first we had doubts about the way we could fill the space. It only has one central hall we could darken, and the others all filled with light. Ultimately, instead of fighting it, we decided to use its specificity and add something from us. 

JG: Is the orange dot on the window your design too? 

AJ: The dot is the brainchild of Hubert Kielan, exhibition designer who designed the interior of Foto-Gen based on our ideas. We wanted a warm and soft ball hanging over the exhibition and adding a unique touch to the aura of gloomy days. 

MB: As Aga mentioned, Foto-Gen is a specific space, but its open-work nature inspired us to adopt solutions we hadn’t used before. The orange dot manifests our creative work, and fits in very well with the title and theme of the exhibition, and there was no need for any additional projections. The gallery halls are inconsistent and demanding, at the same time producing the impression of a labyrinth or an eccentric’s house. If you play loud music there, it is dark and people will spread around a bit, the effect of an ambiguous and intriguing space is created. 

JG: You managed to achieve that effect on the opening night, didn’t you? 

MB: Exactly. The opening night took place in late January, and it was snowing, that is why the windows in the third hall were all misted over, so it was really magical. Now we are planning concerts, meetings, and animated film screenings. There’ll be a lot going on. 

AJ: We should mention that Foto-Gen is a photo gallery. Viewing our installations, it may be surprising that there are no photographs in its traditional sense. But to us, photography can assume various forms, and I think that looking at the Lady with a Seagull, for example, it is possible to notice this photographic context. 

JG: Your creative work means continuous experiments with image and sounds. Agnieszka is responsible for the visual aspect, and Maciej for the sounds. At what stage does your cooperation kick in? What do you create first? 

AJ: This division is only partly accurate. While it is true that I don’t deal with sound, we work on the visual layer together. We don’t have strict rules about what comes first. While building light compositions, we most often listen to specified music we later use in our projections. Sometimes the soundtrack is composed earlier, and we use it as the basis for our visualisations. In our portfolio we also have projections that have a very complex music and image mixture, such as, for example a film entitled letters.EHO. Here, the process by which sound turns into image and the other way around takes place several times. 

MB: The publication released on the basis of the exhibition at Foto-Gen was the reason why we started thinking about our division of work. Although it is not particularly significant to us, because we usually work very intuitively. I got to believe that I’m more inclined to so called “Time-based media”, forms in which time is the founding factor. It creates a certain story that has its beginning, main part, and ending. Agnieszka’s domain is the arrangement of images that we put into motion later. She has much more patience and experience in this sphere. Our cooperation recalls a music band a bit, where everyone plays on their instrument but they all strive to get a certain common form.

 JG: You create in a unique way. Your audiovisual work is hard to compare to any other art collective. I wonder where you get your inspiration from. Do you have any favourite artists? Are you inspired by any specific career path? 

AJ: There are a lot of artists we are inspired by, but they are not necessarily visual artists. We are happy working with musicians who will perform during the Winter Showroom at Foto-Gen: Piotr Kurek, Lotto, Pin Park. The exhibition was a pretext to create a visual response to their creative work. We are searching for solutions with a huge load of synthesis that we can use and obtain a special third quality. 

MB: Modernism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, everything that happened in 1920s and 1930s in avant-garde art, resonates in us in a peculiar way. It was a time of first experiments with films we often tell our students about. 

AJ: To us, the inspirations are more about sharing the admiration of similar forms and shapes than about directly using works by specific artists. The live performance in Kalisz on the occasion of Jan Tarasin’s 96th birthday and the 45th anniversary of the Art Gallery based there was an exception. We actually founded our work on selected paintings, but that was a tribute to the artist himself. Urban architecture and design also play a vital part in our creative work. In Elbląg, we took part in the Retroversions exhibition whose main theme was the unique architecture of the Old Town there. In Valencia, we worked with students on a StillFrame Cinema project whose main source of inspiration was derived from buildings in the EL Cabanyal district. The façades of every building there are covered with ceramic tiles with fantastic pattens. A well of inspiration. 

MB: In general, we can say that at a certain stage we can be inspired by virtually anything. Of course, we are closer to the space design of the 1960s, the ecstatic nature of pure colours, than to tribal and digital aesthetics. 

JG: Let’s talk about the performative side of your activities. You create light projects you are often a part of in a physical sense. What do you get from contacts with the audience? Why is it important to you? 

AJ: It’s a vital part of our activities, which is confirmed by the views of our audience. StillFrame Cinema can have various stagings: as an installation being a stand-alone projection, but also as a performative one. As for the latter, we are a part of the projections, modifying it as it progresses and being visible to the audience. Energy-wise, it recalls a concert a bit. We performed in Sokołowsko once as part of photographic workshops organised by Szkoła Karola photography school. One of the viewers said that he had been curious what would happen next and had stayed till the end. Abstraction itself was not appealing to him. 

MB: We need to stress that our projections are not always as soothing as the one at the exhibition in Foto-Gen. They are sometimes much more intense. The images might blink, the music is stronger, and the pace often changes. The boy Aga mentioned was not prepared for such audiovisual attack and felt uncomfortable. Our presence intrigued him enough to stay all the way through. Adriana Prodeus, whose interview was included in the publication accompanying the exhibition, came to a conclusion that it is our presence that is the founding element of kinoMANUAL. We are there either as live performers, where the viewers can see us in person, or as traces which are visible in our film projections. The fact that we use analogue technology in our work, not digital media, allows us to ensure the presence.

 JG: You regularly cooperate with music and film festivals, such as Punto Y Raya in Spain or the Polish Animated Film Festival O!Pla. Is there any specific place or event you would like to perform at? 

AJ: Yes, we’d like to perform in a larger gallery space. We’ve been thinking about it in the context of the installation called Lady with a Seagull we’ve showcased at Foto-Gen, which would look completely differently in a large dark space. We would be able to illuminate the image from various sides, and the entire projection could become much more complex and extensive than it is now. It is our most recent concept which would have a chance to come to life in appropriate conditions. 

MB: The structure of Lady with a Seagull includes a screen illuminated only with front projectors. We are tempted to create an installation where a paper screen hangs in the middle of a large, darkened room and projectors illuminate its front and back. I think that we would find our way around a White Cube space very well, because you can achieve an appropriate level of darkness there. We’d also like to perform outdoors more, and create something similar to Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Happening. Just imagine: calms, people on deckchairs, and us displaying visualisations on a screen set in water. Fabulous.