The space is steeped in our phantasms. We filter it with our own eyes, and thus create it ourselves. It can be disturbing and fraught with danger; or just the opposite, sunny and sublime. In Slavic folklore, people endowed houses with anthropomorphic features: a house-body. The house was believed to be leading its own existence, playing a humanlike role in family life. The boundaries defining the location of abandoned places spread outwards. They are the ghost of the previous space, a murky haze through which one gropes. These are spaces of absence, devoid even of themselves. Nature eventually devours these kinds of places.

A side effect of modern urban planning’s relentless drive for development is ever more abandoned areas left over. These sites begin the process of secondary overgrowth that Gilles Clément termed the ‘Third Landscape’. They become a matrix of the global landscape of the future, when there will be no more concentrations of primary vegetation, but only secondary ones designated a ‘Fourth Nature’.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, we decamped to the countryside, distancing ourselves from the media, mass information, restrictions. We led an isolated life in the embrace of the forest and our imaginations. The virus period supplied conceptions of the post-apocalyptic and the void it contains. We remained in the grip of anxiety and uncertainty. While hiking in the woods, we kept happening upon abandoned village huts. We documented them, searched for what information we could find. Little by little, we gleaned local legends, rumours, tragic tales. We wove them into a novel reality replete with haunted houses and ghosts trailing us. In this way we eluded the catastrophic vision of a deadly disease, escaping into multidimensionality and magic. Our world was every bit as disturbing, but in an enchanted and supernatural way. Within this alternate reality we pursued all kinds of magical activities that would disrupt a rational approach to the subject.

One such action was binding the places we found in order to seal their stories, their physical perimeters, and to metaphorically arrest their decay. Here was a reference to the folk magic of knots, whereby a thing bound is stopped, and that which looms is headed off.

In a virtual reality we preserved our vision of alienation, insecurity, and flight into the forsaken world of spirits. The Biodegradable Space project is conceived as a ‘game’ played using VR goggles. The player-participant moves to the rooms we documented in various villages in the east and south of Poland. It shifts from space to space. The observed spaces are marked by varying degrees of time’s passage and deterioration. 

An extensive part of the Biodegradable Space project are the photographs taken over the course of two years documenting our research.