Making worlds instead of letting go | Collection Co–selection

Wojciech Bąkowski creates unique, unconventional animations. Digitally generated images are accompanied by disturbing sounds and low, trance-like voices reciting his plain-language texts and poems.

One example of such animation is Making worlds instead of letting go. The film is a riddle, an unexplained mystery. It vividly depicts the reality, as we know it, perhaps, from dreams. The artist – or his protagonist – is trapped in a digital world, where he suffers, making painful noises. Stirring anxiety, real images reach the created world, such as a bathroom door, with the light turned off in its upper part, and an illuminated ventilation screen and an enigmatic shadow in the bottom. There is no way out of this world; it can only be reached by the sounds of real life.

The film is a record of the creative process and the emotions that accompany it. Bąkowski translates his inner experiences into images, sounds, and digitally created spaces. It is an incoherent, troubled world dominated by feelings of loneliness that stokes the desire to escape – an escape, that might be death. And yet, the subject of the film, despite his fears, chooses to make new worlds instead of letting go.