Rafał Pierzyński is one of the performers currently inhabiting Scalable Skeletal Escalator every day the exhibition is open. Pierzyński makes performances in order to create sensual spaces for shared experiences and exchange.
Their work embodies the spaces in between and highlights interrelations to inspire sustainable, post-anthropocentric, inclusive orientations. Pierzyński reimagines ecology based on an expanded idea of touching and being in touch. Their artistic practice is an affirmation of more care-ful ways of living with each other and the environment. It shines a light on the abilities of the body and mind to connect, presenting them as powerful technologies for healing, growth, and reparation.
In these times of global confinement and collapse, Rafał Pierzynski's work takes on new dimensions. Based in Zürich, the performer and collage artist explores touching as a primordial modality of being in the world, a vector that transcends the separation between the body and the mind, technology and nature. It is essential to love and care, and to the deconstruction of representations of the body. For Pierzyński, touching is fundamental to our survival.
What is touching in crisis? Everything we know, we know from our skin. Dissolving, carefully downloading and uploading. We are by nature cyborgs and we are together.
Pierzynski studied (BA)Stage Dance and (BA)Movement Studies and Performance (Dance Education) at the Institute of Dance Arts in Linz. There they also gained their MA through practical research and a thesis entitled "Embodied Communication - attending to the modes of touch". Touching is the main topic of their research and projects. They have shared their practice as workshops, during SDC residency in Madrid and Casablanca, S.T.R.E.T.C.H. Festival in Berlin and at the university in Linz, amongst others. They have gained experience working for Cie. Off Verticality and Rose Breuss; Virgilio Sieni Company; Daniel Hellmann; Elena Giannotti and most recently Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Ania Nowak, Ewa Dziarnowska, Isabel Lewis and Alexandra Pirici.
Images, from top: «Touching: In time» photo by Urs Westermann; Katarzyna Szugajew; collage from untitled postcard series 2019