Karolina Rybačiauskaitė

In your hands you have my research journal.

It is just a few curves of thought drawn while thinking about ‘how

matter matters’ in the current practices of contemporary art. At the
same time, it is an attempt to ‘create a problem’1 and an invitation
to think it over. I must say that the process of creating a problem
was not necessarily always very pleasant, since it sometimes also
meant slowing down. It could involve being ‘not professional
enough’, refusing to follow pre-existing codes, making mistakes,
and rethinking it all over again, or simply not rushing towards
a clear set of answers.

Perhaps this is how I understand thinking: it is being curious about

something and sensing the angles of possible answers everywhere
around you. The different forms of writing in this journal embody
these explorations.
Last winter in January when spending some time in Prague and
browsing the books in the local bookshop, I encountered a study2
written on the exhibition “Les Immatériaux,” curated by Jean-François
Lyotard in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It was
a book that I bought without much thinking, although at that moment
I was fully absorbed by a very different sort of thought – the problem of
knowledge making in the feminist new materialist philosophy. When
I opened this book again, a few months ago, I realized that both of these
two divergent lines of thought are prominent in doing and thinking
about contemporary art practices today. On the one hand, an artwork
is still perceived as being a ‘network,’ or an ‘interface,’ and echoes the
tradition which Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler in 1968 called
a ‘dematerialization of the art object,’ associated with the appearance
of ultra-conceptual art in America. But on the other hand, many artists
who are involved in contemporary art practices recently have started
to describe their work as a ‘craft.’ Lippard’s once noticed de-emphasis
on material aspects of artwork, such as its uniqueness and decorative
attractiveness, came back in a reversed way.3
One of the knots between theory and practice which I encountered in
my research was the notion of an artwork as being a ‘gathering.’ For
me, this way of perceiving things comes from Science and technology
studies (STS) and Bruno Latour, when he tries to shift the perception
of things as socio-technological assemblages from mere matters of fact
to the matters of concern. He has released a sense of gathering from
Martin Heidegger’s hierarchy of objects, so it would not be reserved
only for ‘Things’.5 When we perceive an artwork, for instance, as an
‘interface,’ it invites us for a sort of interaction, but if we think about
an artwork as a ‘gathering,’ does it imply a way of practicing care?
What kind of gathering entails a sense of care? What happens, for
instance, to the aura of an artwork which is not displaced as a whole
from its ‘original place’, but it is to be collected from various places?
Is a sense of magic6, in a similar way as a sense of care, coming from
a willingness to give a transformative power to the other? These are
the questions I was carrying with me as I started to write…

As I spent more time with these various hand-made pieces, I began

to wonder how far the ways of making them are interrelated with
new materialist understandings of matter, its on-going relationality
and responsivity which on a higher scale also imply ethical and
ecopolitical accountability. At the same time, it was my way of
experimenting with theory. I wanted to know how much current
practices of contemporary art resonate and enrich these speculative
materialist proposals. For this reason, while working on Isabelle
Stengers’ ecology of practices for my PhD in Philosophy, I started to
engage in the discussions with artists and curators on how ‘matter
matters’ within their own practices, what complex relational patterns
it creates and what kind of care it asks for.4

Written notes are from the text by Isabelle Stengers.

See the 6th endnote.
 things.8 Some of these things resist being so easily turned into the
matters of fact, and if we would take into account their long and
complex histories, they might be rather perceived as the matters of
concern. “Things that gather cannot be thrown at you like objects,”9
What if I say that the magic of artwork might be coming back to as Latour beautifully puts it. In that sense, most artworks are the
exhibition spaces…? By magic I mean its ability to reactivate the things that gather and are being gathered.
senses, at least for a moment, to become much more curious and
receptive. What if we think about an artwork as a guest or maybe
even as a friend coming to us from some distant place? Imagine
a situation of greeting each other on the threshold. Could we then
be a bit more hospitable or attentive?

The impulse to think about an artwork as a ‘gathering’ collected

from various places, and the medium of the exhibition as a way to
share and meet the gathered came to me from a variety of sources.
One of them is Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of
Fiction (1986) which has been recently republished as a separate book
and has become the invitation7 to gather around this text, making
its concerns become a part of our concerns. In her essay Le Guin
turns the attention to the ancient human technology of carrying and
making the carriers. We pick up something that seems to be useful,
edible, or just beautiful, and then we make various containers to carry
it, keep it safe, look at it or share it. As she lists, it includes smaller
bags like a ‘bit of rolled bark’ or a ‘net of hair,’ but also larger kind of
bags like homes and museums. For her it is important to note that we
are not obliged to write our novels as if they would necessarily have
the edgy shape of a stick. They might also have the shape of
a bag and be perceived as much more complex creatures.

When I think about the shape of an artwork or the shape of an

exhibition as an artwork, it seems to me that it is not fair to reduce
them to being just one object-ready-mades. Bruno Latour once
ironically noticed that the philosophers in their arguments tend to use
very simple carriers for pouring liquids such as pots, mugs, and jugs,
or they occasionally use some plain rocks which you can easily throw
and catch, but the process of thinking could take much more diverse
paths if they would challenge themselves with more complicated
I believe that the demand for noticing the complexity of the ‘things
that gather’ comes not only from writers or philosophers, but also
from artists themselves. In their exhibition “Unsayings,”10 the artists
Monica Mays and Maria Nolla, whose practices I have been following
lately, were bringing their worldly protagonists to the new unfamiliar
place and were trying to treat them with care. In doing so, they
acknowledged that it matters how we gather, carry, and hold the
materials we engage with, and proposed their own methodologies of
caring. I used the word ‘try,’ because the process of caring is a careful
activity. If acting towards a thing as a matter of concern asks you to
be aware of a variety of possible attachments that it brings along,
perceiving a thing as a matter of care may ask even a bit more. As
writing about the differences between these two approaches, Maria
Puig de la Bellacasa noted that caring involves a stronger notion of
commitment, being in a more affective state and willing to do it as
a ‘material doing,’ as an ‘ethically and politically charged practice.’11
Yet it is a careful activity, because it’s not something definitive; as she
describes it: “Caring is more about a transformative ethos than an
ethical application. We need to ask ‘how to care’ in each situation.”12
Carrying may become caring when the carriers become lively again.
It is a transformative ethos both ways, since the lively being shares
its energy, but it is not necessarily reciprocal. In the situation of
creating the artworks for the exhibition “Unsayings,” Nolla has been
reactivating her materials by carefully designing and employing
the techniques of touching them. The remnant parts of garlic buds,
which constituted one of the artworks, have been collected and
presented without substantially changing their light bodies, but the
most parts of the other artworks have been in contact with artist’s
hands or different materials for a longer time. For instance, the
bodies of the hand-made duvets have been covered by the layers of
the soap fat which was slowly massaged onto them several times.
Even as presented in the exhibition space, they were in the process
of changing their substance and this way resisting being easily
objectified. Nothing hung up there in isolation, rather many things
seemed to be holding each other, as the roles of holding and being
held may often interchange.
In Mays’ share, the carriers have been reactivated by creating
the techniques of remembering their stories. In the exhibition
“Unsayings,” she presented her research on pre-patriarchal European
mythologies, taking the vernacular stories of Lithuanian pagan
artifacts as its case. For her it was equally important to spend enough
time with these artifacts, feel the curves of the stories they have been
surrounded with. She followed the process of telling them: how
they have been remembered by others and changed over re-telling’s
throughout generations, but also walked around the forested area of
Lithuania in which they have been possibly circulating. Later on, she
developed the printing technique to embody these encounters and
made several prints of carefully collected plants which were wrapped
and then cooked onto protein-based fabrics. By weaving it together
with the parts of other found things, Mays created the homely
sculptures to spend time with.
The homes are the spaces, where all kinds of ‘gatherings’ may find
their place and all various stories can be told. There is something
really inexplicable about the liveliness of the stories which are told
at home and to someone who may become closer to you; yet in
my encounter with the or
their pagan stories sounded like far-distant murmurings. When
I meet the artwork on the threshold of the exhibition space, I need to
remind myself that most likely, it is just a part of a longer and often
much more complicated history of practice.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds.
Mineapolis, London: Minnesota University Press, 2017.
 KR: In your practice you experiment with different textile printing techniques.
Could you tell me what intrigues you about this process?
The technical, aesthetic aspects of it?
Or maybe something else?

After writing the previous essay and analyzing some current practices
of gathering, I started to ask myself if embodying or practicing someone’s
else history does not mean simply taking it over? Where is the line between
creating and situating someone (or something)? Do you have to pay
attention to personal histories of materials? Or maybe it’s just enough
to be really welcoming and have something to share while creating this new
life for your material? I was bringing these questions as coming to the studio
to have a conversation with the artist Fatine-Violette Sabiri.13 She gathers
various materials, but also trusts and accepts them. She gives power to
materials to find out different things about herself.
F-VS:
What I found fascinating about her approach is this easiness and exactness
Yes, I think it is the aesthetics of it, and perhaps the process itself. My favorite
with which she is working and thinking about her process, without trying
procedure is discharge printing. It’s a chemical process that removes color, where
to sound more sophisticated, or just anyhow better. It reminded me Maria
you mix a solution that you can paint with or print with… But what happens with
Puig de la Bellacasa’s notice that there is a common basis and only a thin
that paste is that when you paint with it, it’s like, a transparent solution, so you can’t
line between the notion of ‘doing something with care’ and that of ‘being
see what you’re doing. After you use it and it dries, you have to steam your fabric,
accurate.’14 And yet here it means not a desire to be just, but perhaps
like in a pot or rolled up in a vertical steamer, and you can’t see it for 45 minutes, so
a willingness to be accepted as one’s self.
it’s completely out of your control. And then, when you open the steamer and take
your fabric out, you see your result. So you kind of have to have intuition and trust
yourself… There is something about it that is very beautiful and empowering.

It’s exactly like photography for me, but in a way that is completely bizarre. For
instance, when you’re in the darkroom, you can’t see what’s happening, and then
at some point there is a part of the process that is out of your control… and then
whatever comes out, you just have to accept. It’s like the result of your intuition,
or just something that you did… There is something about it that is really rewarding.
It’s also like resilience and adaptation, because sometimes it comes out in a way that
you were not expecting, but with fabric you can work in layers, so if it comes out in
a certain way that you don’t like, you are like “Hmm, I have to adapt to this now.”
So then you have to negotiate that adaptation, maybe by putting another color or
adding another layer.

For instance, in the last two years I was working on a series of towels. I was using
found towels. Initially I used the one I was born in, kept by my mum.
KR: Wow! That sounds incredible. Tell me more about it! KR: … and besides that towel, what sort of towels you have been using?

F-VS:
Yes, I used it, because… We were going to the pool together and doing aqua fitness
classes. One day I brought this towel in which I was born in and my mum, she was
like: “I’m ashamed, you’re making me feel embarrassed…” Because this towel is old
and has holes in it. It’s all disgusting and falling apart. So she was like: “Why do you
still use this? It’s not even drying you.” I was like: “Okay, I won’t bring it again,”
because I embarrassed her. It’s true that it doesn’t even dry me anymore, but I’m
not going to throw it out, it’s the towel I was born in.
F-VS:
So I decided to paint on it with different dyes and chemical processes. It was a self- I started going to second-hand shops and became a towel expert. I was looking for
portrait, using all these various methods. And after that I was like: “Okay, this is really different sizes of towels, or towels that had some kind of embroidery in them already,
cool,” because the material of terrycloth is such an interesting material, and because or some kind of a texture. I was looking at towel thicknesses and tried to understand
when you put on it a drop of something, it is made to absorb it, so it’s just like the how one particular towel would react or if it would be good to paint on. So I started
craziest thing that is, again, out of your control, but you can still use your intuition. to collect the used towels of strangers (laughs).
 KR: (laughs) … and how did you feel about that?
Since in the beginning you were using something that is very close to you
– the towel in which you were born. Did having the towels of strangers change your
relationship with them? Towels are also very intimate things.

Maman et moi
2019
20.5 x 37 inches
Various print and dye processes
on found cotton towel, metal chain
F-VS:
Yes, I know, they are very close to the body. Well, in the end it became a really
autobiographical project about my family and history, so I didn’t think about them
as belonging to strangers. I perceived them more like objects that were used and that
I was caring for, in this weird way (laughs). I was caring for them in this way and
there was something extremely funny about this to me… Like, about banal everyday
Khalas
Autoportrait 2020
objects that are being carefully treated. And then I was just realizing how humour
2018 15.5 x 26 inches is such a necessary element of caring, maintaining… I don’t know how to explain it.
28 x 62 inches Various print and dye processes
Various print and dye processes Humour is so often overlooked, but for me, I see it as a way of coping… maybe as
on found cotton towel
on personal cotton towel, metal chain a way to adapt. The value of humour, and the care that humour requires… In wanting
to make someone laugh, there is an element of care for the other, but there is also
something about your own openness, about wanting to be accepted, maybe?

I was also just thinking about these used towels, and how they were starting
a completely different life for themselves. They would never be used again in the
way that they were before. They were becoming something else and then maybe
adapting to this other situation.

Since the used towels absorb things way quicker, because they were already
Sweetmeat (Guest Towel) washed several times, they’re a bit thinner, the fibers were affected by the body oils
2020 of someone else or something, so they each have their own thing going on… and
21.5 x 41 inches
Various print and dye processes I had to adapt each towel, because they were all so different – different thicknesses,
on found cotton towel different blends of cotton and polyester.
KR: I love so much the easiness with which you’re talking about the process of giving
a new life to these used towels. And at the same time, you’re not ignoring
the fact that they had their previous lives.

As I was thinking about artistic ways of embodying, and also ways of using the collected
objects from the second-hand shops, I started to ask myself if that sort of embodiment doesn’t
mean simply taking over the other? Especially, when you don’t have your
personal history with the object you’re using?

As we’ve been talking about this before… maybe some piece of wood would be better left alone
or used otherwise. Since your own towel became a part of your self-portrait,
what did you have in mind while working with the towels of others?

F-VS:
Yes, I didn’t do portraits. Every towel I picked up… It was more about what technique
I want to try, or what order of layering I want to try doing… to see how it’s going
to react. It’s almost like they were all tests, but at the same time they were not tests,
because I had to accept them. They were all explorations for me.

My rule was that I couldn’t… and that was like the hardest part of it which caused
me much anxiety … that I couldn’t start over. If the towel looked like shit, if I did
something that was horrible, I couldn’t just be like: “Okay, I’m not going to use this
one.” I had to learn to love it. I had to go through with it and work until I got to
something that I recognized in myself… I needed to do something I have complete
empathy for… and it was horribly hard. Because sometimes I was ashamed. And it
was also like an exercise in dealing with shame, because sometimes I took the towel
from the steamer and I couldn’t believe I did this. I was like: “This is embarrassing.”
I was dealing with shame. It’s really strange. Because it’s just the way something
looks.
KR: Could you tell me more also about the process of collecting things for your project KR: … and what about these frames of your photographs
here at Petrohradská which you called “Chocolaterie” (eng. Chocolate factory)? which at the same time seem to be like sculptural elements?

F-VS:
So I went to the flea market and collected some objects, and then I started to construct
these small universes where the scale might be unclear. Perhaps I wanted to come
closer to these tiny objects and make them more meaningful than we think they are, or
that they even are. I think that maybe what I wanted to do was to create situations of
curiosity, but I don’t even know myself what the real situations of these images are.

I guess that the whole idea pertains to the feeling of being voluntarily trapped in
this chocolate factory [an. the space of Petrohradská kolektiv used to be a chocolate factory].
There is an absence of stimuli, because of the context and situation, and the outside
world being all quiet and closed. And I’m just trying to stimulate myself and create
these interrogations. This feeling of being in this chocolate factory and making things
in here, and having one month here to make things happen, and not meeting many
people and just having to use things around me.

And then also like, a couple of things happened before I left Montreal. My aunt, my
mum’s sister, came to her house. We started to talk about their dad, my grandfather
whom I didn’t know, and they told me about him evading the draft, and how he went
to hide in the woods with his brother, taking just a knife and a piece of halva. They
went for like two weeks with only a piece of halva and a knife. I thought that it was
just such a funny story. Because it’s like, a familial myth, you don’t know if it’s totally
true, or even possible, but that’s the story.
So I guess that I’m also just formally thinking about the different kinds of sweets and
desserts that I encountered here. And I’m just thinking why not. I’m here, this is my
context. Sweets have a formal value, a history, and there’s also the history of sugar.
Sugar also has an interesting history in Morocco, because Morocco was under
a French protectorate for a while. When Moroccan people started to be in charge
of their own companies, the first institution which was completely returned to
Moroccans, owned by Moroccans, was the sugar industry. The first thing that was
decolonized was the sugar industry! It is very funny to me… I just think about that
a lot. I have also this one towel on which I printed “Les confiseries FiViS”
(eng. Fatine’s Confectionery).
F-VS:
I was looking at these photos and something in them was just screaming for
materiality. So I was thinking how I can make frames that would become something
that I could play around with more and experiment more. In the beginning I thought
“I’m just going to do all frames from clay”. But after making the first ones I kind of
didn’t like them. It’s too simple. The quickness and the ease with which I thought of
that, it told me that it’s not good… I like them now when they’re integrated into the
rest, now they work.
I collected these pieces of scrap wood which I used for making the other frames…
I’m always trying to find a way to write things or include letters. I don’t know why,
but I’m obsessed with calligraphy. I think it’s the most graceful thing in the world
– nice handwriting. It’s the most satisfying thing you can think of.
KR: Why? KR: Oh, I didn’t see it that way, but now I see it!
It’s very beautiful to me that you’re using the wall
as your paper, as something in which you’re writing.

Because usually the walls of exhibition spaces are perceived

as some sort of planes on which you’re hanging or attaching the objects,
so they’re to be left in isolation, also separated from their previous environment.

So you’re bringing here this different understanding of using it, and also of writing,
and how the use of a white wall in the exhibition space can be actually
not something reductive, but a very honest way of sharing.

F-VS:
Yes, great! It’s true, it’s like a blank page.

I guess it’s also a quest for poetry or romance.

F-VS: KR: Romance in the chocolate factory.

Because it’s everything: it’s like a discourse, or a dialog, or a confession – for me,
because I keep a diary, so it’s like confession… and lavishness. You can just go on with
swirls and twirls… and it’s just, there is no limit because it’s very expressive. And
formal, because when you do it, it feels good, and when you look at it, it looks good.
And it’s just like such a beautiful form of expression, because you’re doing it in all
ways. You’re expressing yourself physically, visually and with your words. F-VS:
Exactly.
So I’m just like always thinking of letters and of cursive somehow. I had these two
leather strings and wanted to integrate them, because I thought that the mounted
photographs and the wood around them… that it was all too flat and obedient.
I needed to have more funniness or more physicality. Not just like static straight lines,
frames… so I thought that the lightness of the strings could soften this raw wood with
a curve and… it just happened to look like cursive handwriting.
ENDNOTES
1 I take this expression from philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret. In the book
Women Who Make A Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf (2014), they define the
effort of creating a problem, for instance, as ‘thinking against the consensus,’ or as ‘not
accepting it as it is formulated but daring to add new dimensions to it,’ so that its answer
would not be given in advance.
2 Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of
Exhibition. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019.
3 The bursting interest in traditional knowledges and practices is present both in terms of
paying attention to the history and development of craft arts and by integrating various
ancient techniques in the current practices of contemporary art. Some of the recent major
exhibitions devoted for the history of materials and methods of crafts include “Making
Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019” in Whitney Museum and “Taking a Thread for a Walk”
in MoMA in New York. In Lithuania for this reason we have the “Verpėjos” residency
recently opened in Marcinkonys village where artists, writers and researchers may work
together with local communities, and learn techniques such as birch tar making, wool
spinning, straw garden making and others. However, for many artists it is not only
a formal endeavour. For instance, the artist Elin Már Øyen Vister (NO) through weaving
various Norwegian, Sámi, and Lithuanian sound compositions and making vessels as
offerings or ‘objects of gratitude’ reminds us about very old material connections
between the Baltic region and Fennoscandia.
4 I began this on-going project at Rupert’s residency in Vilnius, Lithuania (April-June 2020),
where together with Rupert’s curators Tautvydas Urbelis and Kotryna Markevičiūtė we
had a series of readings in which we were discussing the different ways of approaching
and constituting matter on the institutional scale. I’m also very grateful for having a chance
to continue these invaluable conversations in the residency at Petrohradská kolektiv where
I could meet Tereza Stejskalová, the initiator of the “Code of Feminist (Art) Institution,” and
Anna Remešová, the person behind one of its continuations – the movement “Umění pro
klima” (eng. Art for climate). There was this beautiful recurrent motive in our conversations
with both curators and artists about caring as a process of searching for the ways of coping
or simply trying to cope and sustain your practice: while gathering, laughing, and ‘making
a fuss’ together.
5 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From the Matters of Fact to the
Matters of Concern,” in: Critical Inquiry 30, 2004, p. 233.
6 I’m using ‘magic’ instead of Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura,’ as having in mind Stengers’
definition of magic, which seems to be a more accurate word for perceiving what’s
happening in the process of approaching an artwork. As she describes it, magic means both
“a craft of assemblages and their particular transformative efficacy.” See, “Reclaiming
Animism,” in e-flux journal #36, 2012. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/
reclaiming-animism/
7 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota Books, 2019. Having a shape
of a sack, “a hollowed-out container to hold things that bear meanings and enable
relationships,” as Donna Haraway describes in her introduction to the book (p. 11), it has
recently become a motive for gathering to many artists and writers in Prague, Warsaw,
Vienna and elsewhere. The initial call to gather around it came from the editors Sarah Shin
and Ben Vickers who organized its collective reading at HKW in Berlin. I am indebted to
Monica Mays for bringing my attention to it.
8 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From the Matters of Fact to the
Matters of Concern,” in: Critical Inquiry 30, 2004, p. 234.
9 Bruno Latour, 2004, p. 237.
10 The exhibition “Unsayings” by Monica Mays and Maria Nolla was open from 13 August
to 10 September 2020 at Industra Art Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic.
11 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected
Things,” in: Social Studies of Science 41(1), 2011, pp. 89-90.
12 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 100.
13 Fatine-Violette Sabiri (Morocco/Canada) was also a resident at Petrohradská kolektiv
when we met and had this conversation (20 October 2020).
14 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds.
Mineapolis, London: Minnesota University Press, 2017, p. 91.
This publication was created as a part of the artists
in residence program hosted by artist-run initiative
Petrohradska kolektiv. Petrohradská kolektiv Residency
Project is supported in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture
Czech Republic, the State Fund of Culture of the Czech
Republic and the City District of Prague 10.

petrohradskakolektiv.com
WHEN CARRYING BECOMES CARING
Karolina Rybačiauskaitė

Texts & Notes by

Karolina Rybačiauskaitė

Photos by
Fatine-Violette Sabiri

Graphic design
Martin Czeller

Proofreading
Kate Walton

Risoprint & Binding

KudlaWerkstatt

Published by
Petrohradská kolektiv, Prague, 2020

ISBN 978-80-270-8953-6
© Karolina Rybačiauskaitė. All rights reserved.