Agnieszka Strzeżek / Sonia Jaszczyńska

As part of the WOK residency, we are undertaking process-oriented activities, aiming to use time and space to reflect on the future of the collective, its actions, values and structure. We want to explore how we can facilitate and improve our activities. We ask ourselves: do we want to continue as an informal collective or should we form an association? We want to map the artistic environment and find out what collaborations we can tap into both in Poland and abroad. We would like to get a better understanding of the legal and economic constraints we face and how to solve them. At present, we are experiencing a sense of chaos, overwhelm and isolation. We need time and reflection to reorient, reclaim and construct ourselves through art. During the residency we will use a method that is familiar to us from our publishing, zines and community work. We will start with conversations and from these we will create visual notes and sketches that will take the form of a residency journal.

Since 2022 we have collaborated on the interface of art, curatorial activities, publishing, art education and research work. Together we founded a publishing collective called Stopka, where we publish thematic zines according to a seasonal calendar of events. Kenaya Huanca-Villan, Basia Strzeżek and Karo Wyka are also members of the collective. We draw, write, organise open calls, edit texts, typeset, print and sew, and create themed promotional events for our publications. At the end of 2023 and beginning of this year, we successfully organised a pilot programme of home residencies, supported by tutoring, for mothers creators. The programme was funded by the Warsaw Observatory of Culture.

We participated in the residency as a tandem. We run two projects together, namely the “Okazjonalne Wydawnictwo Stopka” publishing project (a collective dedicated to publications, art prints and design) and “Matki twórczynie” (a support group for parents who are artists and care for their children). The starting point of our process was a tangled knot involving these two initiatives, which have different themes and values. Above all, we wanted to find out how to work together in a better and more sustainable way. It can be challenging to find this balance in non-profit activities that are realised out of passion; free time sometimes becomes work time, filled with organisational efforts or looking for grants and other ways to secure funding. One of the main challenges was identifying what we wanted to keep as part of our collective projects and what we wanted to take away and incorporate into our individual practices. For us, the theme of the residency became the unfolding of collective activist-artist work.

When defining our roles in working together, we considered different strategies. At first, we thought we would achieve clarity by sorting out the structure, namely by adopting the organisational form of an association. We made an appointment with Łukasz Jaskuła, an accountant who works for NGOs, and asked him to consult the bylaws we had written. Later, we planned to establish the goals of our shared work in a series of meetings with Anna Szapert from Future Simple. However, we had to abandon this idea due to pressing circumstances—having to tackle work and childcare simultaneously.

We have therefore adopted a different strategy for further activities during the residency; we will try to identify and define our place in the art world, write texts about our work and try to map the places and people who would like to work with us. We met with curator Tomasz Pawłowski-Jarmołajew, who reviewed our portfolio. We later edited it ourselves and translated it into English. We also met with Alicja Rogalska, an artist who works with communities. She gave us a lot of great advice on continuing to work with the group as part of the “Matki twórczynie” project. We also started a collaboration with the curatorial and art collective “Przyszła Niedoszła”, the culmination of which will be our exhibition next year. We also met the curator, Joanna Warsza.

As part of the “Okazjonalne Wydawnictwo Stopka” project, we found a solution to the temporary crisis that arose during our stay due to the lack of a risograph machine. So far, we have focused on risograph publishing, but this situation motivated us to broaden our business profile. “Stopka became a graphic services project and began to offer a full range of publications for artists and cultural institutions.

Thanks to this change, we have already been invited to our first collaboration, which opens up new opportunities and confirms the potential of our chosen path.

The work we did during the residency was an outstanding achievement. We realised our situation and the relationship between the collective and the individual. We analysed our needs and strengthened individual voices. We began to accept ourselves not only as organisers of a process but also as creators. We strengthened our relationship and affirmed that working together was very important. Rather than spontaneously adopting the perspective of individual projects, we began to think more long-term and choose more relevant methods to work with. It also became essential to let go and reject specific ideas.

At the beginning of the residency, we defined an outline of the process, but this evolved and was adapted due to changing circumstances that affected our creative work. The support we received from WOK allowed us to try out different collaboration models.