ZJAWY - experimental projection and media project

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ZJAWY (з'явы; phantoms; šmėklos) is a media and perfomance project based on Zjawy (Forefathers' Eve) poem by Belarusian, Polish and Lithuanin poet Adam Mickiewicz and Belarusian Protests 2020-2021.

The project we made consists of theatre perfomance, experemental film installation and media company in social medias, based on everyday experiences of Belarusians during Belarusian Revolution.

Everyday life during historical events. Does it exist at all?
ZJAWY is our attempt to understand the events and emotions of Belarus 2020. Do you remember what your life was like then?
The foundation of Phenomena is the poem "Grandfather" by Adam Mickiewicz and other phenomena of Belarusian culture. And sometimes memes :)
A kind of memory cleansing ritual… through art, memories, humor and pain.

At the entrance, visitors are entering recollections of everyday life, as well as seeing different structures and patterns, parallel to the poem of Mickiewicz. This long projection, which lasts almost 20 minutes, mostly shows surfaces, grains, structures and movement within them, yet in its culmination, it returns to moments from everyday life. This projection starts a memory cleansing ritual which is ZJAWY.

In ZJAWY, we show, among other things, materials shared with us by other Belarusians, their personal emotions and experiences during the 2020 protests. The silence after these events inspired us to try to translate the pain into dance. The result was a real ritual of cleansing collective and individual memory through the beauty of sound and movement. Matter, light, body in space, sensory exploration of the world, constant movement, transformation of reality. Here's a link to an instagram where all those recollections are stored: https://www.instagram.com/zjawy2022/

Here's how the projection looked live, with people coming right through it:

The next part of the project was a dance perfomance made by Andrzej Molenda and Zuzanna Kasprzyk. Perfomance was based on a large white material, parallel both to theme of the poem and to some aspects of Belarusian protest. The prfomance lasted 40 minutes and gathered a large crowd of people from different countries and cultures: Belarusians, Lithuanins; Poles; Russians; Ukrainians and more. Some of the images from the perfomance are avaliable online, however, the entire perfomance was not shared.

Here are also some fragments / instagram reels with structures and materials, also usedin a projection.