The More You Travel, The Less You Know
Agnieszka Wolodzko is an artist, an author of texts about art, and an organizer of exhibitions. She co-operates with Wyspa Gallery, works at Laznia Contemporary Art Center, lectures at Gdansk Multimedia Academy. However it seems that first of all she is, is a globetrotter. She has a soul of a wanderer, which shows even when she stays at home or curates exhibitions for the Contemporary Art Center in Gdansk. Her art also has this turbulent, wandering character. The “Transasia” project reveals it in the fullest sense.
In the beginning of November 2000 she has returned from the 34-days long trip, that led her from Hong Kong across China and Siberia to Poland. It was different from all the previous ones, not only in 15.800 kilometers long route covered by Chinese and Russian sleeping-cars. From the very beginning the journey was planned as an artistic project.
“It was a kind of action in which I isolated a fragment (a month) from the rest of my life and placed it within the context of art.” – it read in a short description. – “I had a very rough outline: I wanted to go by train across China and Russia in the year 2000, the crucial year… The trip was an improvisation, this is why I didn’t organize anything in advance, didn’t make any reservations for train tickets or hotels. I let myself to fate. The project had two aspects: The first directed inwards, exploring a problem of travel as a personal experience. At this stage, it was a study of survival in hard conditions, carried out upon myself: enduring many days being locked with an accidental group of people in the uncomfortable conditions. The second directed outwards, aiming at an observation of Chinese and Russian societies in a period of breaking up from the previous values. I was curious if private lives of members of those societies had a chaotic structure, or were they orderly and accorded to what kind of value system.”
Accomplishing her project, Agnieszka entered a small circle of artists – travelers, who arouse my genuine admiration for an unusual mixture of courage and monumentalism, as well as envy caused by an unaffectedness with which they go to conquer the world. Wolodzko’s project has a material result in a form of 700 photos and an extremely interesting travelogue in a spoken form recorded on a CD-ROM and a web-site www.wolodzko.art.pl. All this brings the project closer to us but doesn’t fully demonstrate its physical, non-artistic sense. In a case of globetrotters art is only a supplement, a fragmentary recording of events. This is why I decided to present the “Transasia” project in a form of a conversation with the artist, during which a few words about art were spoken. It feels right.
Ryszard Ziarkiewicz: – Agnieszka, it seems to me that you spent half of your life travelling…
Agnieszka Wolodzko: – No, don’t exaggerate. I think that I didn’t travel a lot at all. However, quite a lot for someone who in her youth, as a student, was not able to travel because it was not possible to get a passport. Surely, during that period, my West-European contemporaries could have seen much more of the world. A generation of nowaday teenagers would have probably moved around a lot.
RZ: – In the beginning of November you came back from China and Siberia… Hong Kong was your destination.
AW: – Not quite. At first, two years ago I was dreaming about travelling by the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Vladivostock. However, all the time I couldn’t collect funds. In June last year, after arrival from Iceland, I immediately flew for a conference to Graz. There was Chinese participant from Singapore who, after having read my article published in Vienna, decided to invite me to Hong Kong. It seemed funny because I was just coming back from the neighbourhood of the polar circle and he was inviting me to the Tropic of Cancer. So I immediately agreed. It sounded like a joke. I decided to combine my journey to Hong Kong, with that across Asia. I flew to Beijing and from that moment I traveled only by trains: first from Beijing to Hong Kong, than back to Beijing by the roundabout way, making breaks in many cities to see more. I stayed in Beijing for a week. Then I went to Irkutsk via Manchuria, where I rented an apartment from a student of English philology, whom I got to know through the Internet. From Irkutsk, I traveled by the Trans-Siberian train to Moscow. From there I took train to Gdansk.
RZ: – What is a difference between you and an ordinary tourist?
AW: – I am not a tourist, I am a traveler. (A woman – traveler. On my Asian route I didn’t meet women travelling alone.) Tourists incline to repose so they organize everything to travel as efficiently as possible, and as little tiring as possible. Besides, they choose such means of transportation to reach a destination in the shortest time. My plan was different from the very beginning. After the first stage, I kept off planes. I decided to travel by trains. When you fly, you cover a distance so fast that you feel being taken out of context. It’s awful. Besides you don’t experience the space that you traverse. A fact that suddenly you find yourself on the another end of the world seems to be meaningless. You don’t know how many different landscapes you have left behind, how different people live along the route… In my project I was interested both in contacting people and in a personal experience of a journey understood as my voluntary seclusion with a random group of people. I was very curious how would someone react in such a situation, how able one could be in organizing oneself.
RZ: – So you have a wanderer’s call in your blood?
AW: – I don’t know… While travelling, I feel free. I have the impression that everything is possible.
RZ: – You traversed almost 16.000 kilometers by train. How the East looks like through a window of a train?
AW: – First of all I had an opportunity to see Asia in completely different way compared to the usual images from travel movies. When you travel that many thousands of kilometers, you get to see not only the most attractive places from tourist’s point of view, but also the gray ordinariness. I have to admit that I was shocked by the ugliness of China. There are many stereotypes about different countries. China, for me, first of all meant tea, rye fields, china, silk, red lanterns, pagodas… Instead, through the train window I saw chaos, dirt, an awful ecological devastation, and a primitive agriculture system. Such were my first impressions, a total shock. However, I presume now that a West-European coming by train to Gdansk or Warsaw experiences a similar trauma. Maybe the world seen from the train never looks very well. Of course, later I got off in different cities and I saw positive aspects. First of all there is an unusual dynamics of development in China, big progress: from nineteenth-century backwardness directly to the twenty first century. China is very much ecologically devastated. There are lots of problems with water, because, as I heard, they cut down almost all forests. Warm water is rationed in Chinese hotels and there are inscriptions everywhere exhorting to save it.
As about Russia, through the windows I saw a taiga, taiga and taiga once again. Still, in some aspects it was a step above immediately at the border with China. You can still feel a former wealth in Irkutsk. There were mines of gold, coal and other minerals in that area. After the revolution the city fell into poverty. During Stalin’s era the biggest Orthodox Church was blown up. Now they start to renovate old houses, but that takes time. The Russian asked me how Russia looks like in comparison with Poland. Looking at Irkutsk, I answered: “It was twenty years ago, when Poland looked like that.”
RZ: – Do you suggest that China is closer to global world than Russia?
AW: – China develops much faster. It’s amazing how much they build there, taking into consideration that people there work like centuries ago, doing everything with their hands. A spade and an axe are the only tools. Men sweating under straw hats carrying stones in buckets hung on both ends of rods and in this manner they build quite modern city! Meanwhile, there is a feeling of stagnation in Russia. People are very frustrated when they state that we started our reforms in the same time, but during last years they haven’t progressed a step. Of course, I don’t say this about Moscow, which is a beautiful, dynamic city.
RZ: – A train and accidental travel companions – these are a dominating experience of the “Transasia” project. One can have an impression from your travelogue that those experiences were traumatic…
AW: – The Chinese part of my journey was a rather autistic period because of a total impossibility of a communication. Sometimes I tried to “talk” with drawings but it didn’t help much. A fact that I am white created a distance from the very beginning and I was rather looked at as an animal in the ZOO. My fellow passengers liked very much to look at me writing. Probably most of them for the first time in their lives saw someone using the Latin alphabet, so I aroused a sensation. I could see on their faces that they were very astonished how one can write in such an absurd way, with horizontal zigzag lines. However, sometimes it happened that I met people who wanted to communicate with me. Once I traveled with a man who knew some of English and was very curious about Poland. He worked as an engineer producing machines for meat processing and he was never abroad. Now he sends me e-mails. On different occasion I met a very nice Chinese who wasn’t speaking a single word of English, but was enthusiastically trying to initiate a contact. He was especially keen on telling me a content of the book he was reading. Of course I didn’t understand a single word, but he was convinced that if he keep on repeating the same statement many times slowly, I would finally understand him. On another hand the Russians are very friendly. They immediately draw you into a social life, there is a caviar and champagne served. They have respect and jealousy in their relation to the Polish as well as a feeling of betrayal. Conversations in the Trans-Siberian train were strange. Only then I realized that they think that when turning ourselves to West we abandoned them and that we are creating a new wall between Western Europe and them. This invisible wall will stay on our eastern border after we join the EU. Before my departure from Poland my friends advised me to write a testament. Chinese were surprised that I wanted to travel alone to Russia and in Russia they considered me to be a hero because of my lonely travel across China. As a matter of fact I felt insecure when I came to Irkutsk and learnt that a week before amnesty was given and all the criminals from eastern prisons were translocating themselves by trains to the European part of Russia. Also, I traveled by the Trans-Siberian train with soldiers going to fight in Tchetchenia. A lot of things were going on in that train and I realized soon that everything could have happened there. But, even if some suffered, not a hair of my head was touched. Anyway, maybe my present description is not true, the entire journey I was in euphoria.
RZ: – It sounds as if you went there in exile. Our history and culture degrade the East to a sphere of a darkness and dread. Did your journey justify this presumption? Wasn’t there anything funny?
AW: – My first day in Beijing was a comedy of mistakes. It was hot and sultry. I was walking along streets of the old part of Beijing and was very thirsty. So I entered a small shop and bought a transparent liquid in a plastic bottle, thinking it was mineral water. On a street, I took a long pull and then I found out that it was rye vodka. On the same day I went to visit the Forbidden City. When I reached Tienanmen Square I drew up in a long line to buy a ticket. After having bought it, I discovered that it was a public toilet tickets line.
RZ: – What was a relationship of the Chinese and the Russian to a woman – traveler?
AW: – A relationship of the Chinese to travelling women is indifferent. There is even no habit of helping them to carry luggage, a total indifference. If you fall down trying to put your rucksack on a high rack, they just stare. I could see that Chinese women also don’t rely on men’s help. Each of them must be brave and help herself. Otherwise she will not survive. The relationship of the Chinese towards women is beyond my abilities of understanding. I give up and don’t try to grasp this. One should remember that still in the beginning of the twentieth century men had several wives and many concubines. Maybe it’s a way to understand their dissimilarity. However the Russian are very romantic and amorous. They sigh and turn up the whites of their eyes. They marry and divorce many times and again fall in love. The country is huge and I wanted to laugh when I heard stories about their women abandoned in many parts of the former Soviet Union.
RZ: – How do you see Poland upon your return? Has anything changed in your attitudes?
AW: – Upon my return I noticed how much has changed in Poland during past years and that we are a dynamic society, too. What about me? My friends say that nobody comes back from Asia the same as before… For sure I collected much under my crane.
introduction and interview by :
Ryszard Ziarkiewicz
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* A Chinese saying
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Agnieszka Wolodzko
Born in Gdañsk, 1961. In 1986 she graduated from the Department of Painting and Grafics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk.Curator: 1992-1997 at the Gallery Wyspa, Gdañsk, since 2000 based at £a¼nia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdañsk as a curator of the Social Sculpture program. Art. critic: since 1998 cooperates with “Magazyn Sztuki/Art. Magazine”, since 1999 – a correspondent of “Flash Art.” Art. teacher: since 1995 at the Multimedia Academy, Gdañsk She exhibits since 1987.
Contact:
e-mail: aw@wolodzko.art.pl
