Memories of Water, Memories of Air
As the climate crisis reshapes our environment and imagination, the Memories of Water, Memories of Air programme responds to the themes of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 by transforming ephemeral artistic practices into tools for collective reflection, care, and ecological resilience. This two-day immersive event, taking place at Venice’s iconic Palazzo Contarini Polignac, brings together six artists: Monika Błaszczak, felicita, Karolina Łebek, Paweł Sakowicz, Konrad Smoleński, and Rafał Zajko & Zoee, whose works explore the body as a site of memory, ritual, and transformation. Through movement, sound, video, and performance, they explore our elemental relationship with air and water.
Curated by Kasia Sobucka, the programme engages with themes of cultural erasure, displacement, ancestral healing, and corporeal presence — shaped by the shifting forces of nature. It is conceived as a living laboratory: a dynamic space where art intersect with environmental urgency. Through performances, installations, and interventions in both historic and public spaces, the festival invites audiences to reflect on the memory of natural purity — what has been lost, what may still be reclaimed. At its core lies a question: can ephemeral arts — a language of the body, movement, and sound — create spaces of remembrance and resilience in times of crisis and instability?
The works featured in the programme embody the longing for breathability, fluidity, and connection. Rooted in the folk traditions of Eastern Europe and shaped by voices often excluded from mainstream climate discourse, this project unfolds as both a lament and a call to action. Memories of Water, Memories of Air seeks to restore reverence for nature’s most essential elements — and for the fleeting, embodied experiences that bind us to one another and to the world around us.
Programme Highlights:
Konrad Smoleński, Waiting Room
A video installation screened from a drifting boat, revisiting the stories of missing Kurdish migrants. Originally part of a collaboration with the Kraina Foundation and Kurdish artist Shamal Husamalddin Hassan, this work transforms the Mediterranean into a space of remembrance and unresolved passage.
Monika Błaszczak, Clay
World premiere of a 35-minute solo dance performance inspired by the malleability of clay and the fragility of the human body. The work is a poetic response to crisis, kinship, and earthly transformation.
Paweł Sakowicz, Storm
A visceral solo performance navigating desire, self-perception, and bodily architecture. The dancer’s body becomes a reflective surface — an instrument shaped by memory, seduction, and repetition.
Karolina Łebek, sanare
An 18-minute moving image work accompanied by a poetic text. Drawing from personal and historical memory, the artist revisits a journey to a Lemko village in Poland, using the ritual of drinking mineral waters as a portal to healing, remembrance, and collective belonging.
Rafał Zajko & Zoee, Denim III
A new performative collaboration remixes Zajko’s earlier works (Denim, Interludium) with a live sound composition culminating in the Polish funeral song from Podlasie. Performed alongside a looped video, the piece confronts mourning, queerness, and ritual through embodied sound.
felicita
A hallucinatory live audio-visual performance channeling diasporic memory, Polish folk motifs, and surrealist pop experimentation. Presented in a new format for Venice, the piece blurs the lines between concert, ritual, and dream.
