Processuality

It was a lot of fun to look through the travel videos of the TERAZ POLIŻ artists. One of the videos – from a trip to Berlin – is like a souvenir from a girls’ trip. It’s a chaotic, spontaneous footage showing how many trajectories intersect in collective artistic work. When thinking about the archive, we focused on its anti-hegemonic formula – we didn’t want it to be a rigid/inflexible repository that captures projects in one form, but to present both artistic work and its documentation as a process. Processuality proves that the hard division between past, present and future is false, and draws attention to the intermingling of different temporalities within a framework of constant changes and unexpected connections.

A process-oriented perspective also reveals the relational nature of reality – for processes don’t take place in a vacuum, and they do not involve isolated individuals, but relationships between them. Relationality is also a concept that takes into account the work of time and consequently the question of situating processes and individuals in spatiotemporal circumstances. In the context of creative work, processuality comes against the regime of production, which is based on a pattern of different events and their consumption, followed by project settlement and submitting a report. Being open to the process means placing attention on the journey itself, not just the destination. This is not a smart-sounding aphorism, but a real creative and cognitive attitude that allows something good to be derived from apparent failures, wandering, uncertainty and ignorance.