Residence scholarship “Sharing Future” 2022

Organized by the International Elias Canetti Society (IECS)

with the kind support of the Danube Rectors’ Conference (DRC)

REPORT  

The chosen candidate to implement their project idea through this year’s “Sharing future”  scholarship in Ruse was Ziemowit Fincek.

Ziemowit Fincek is from Kalisz, Poland. This year, he was amongst the applicants for the 2022 call for  applications of the Sharing Future scholarship, which he ultimately received after his project idea  was selected and approved. He has been working for a month in Ruse on the exhibition “Written – Unwritten” as part of his larger project “Negentropy”.

Fincek only uses materials he finds in a given place, inspired by the concept of “negative entropy” by Erwin Schroedinger, as he believes those materials contain many stories, especially as they become “useless”. To do so, he needed to discover those hidden stories, needed to be mindful of places, views, smells, folklore, people he met and the history of Ruse. Only then, as he explained, he could start his work.

“Written – Unwritten” presents 6 pieces, four of them “inspired by the city of Ruse, traditional Bulgarian craftsmanship, the Danube River, the prehistoric history of the region, including the finds of mysterious talismans representing, in {his} opinion, some kind of image of a fertile mother nature”, as Fincek describes.

Fincek himself states: “The second part of the exhibition was inspired by the passage of time and various types of alphabets that have been used in human history to record events and thoughts. The mystery of the future, fate… Is our future already written and determined or is it a completely blank page? An additional element of the exhibition is the sound of the Danube, waves hitting the rocky coast, which I recorded, measuring time now, once when there were no people here, and in the future when people will no longer be here.”

On the 8th of October, Ziemowit Fincek’s exhibition was presented in Canetti House, acoustically accompanied by the hum of the Danube, the visitors having the possibility to discuss his works with him personally or being guided through “Written – Unwritten”.