Fundacja Ziemniaki i was conceptualised and built by cultural workers and is therefore mainly made up of artists, designers, curators and writers. However, it welcomes all other professions, non-professions, humans and non-humans to collaborate.
The foundation recognises that art and design are not a salve to solve all social problems, nor is simply acting critically. We believe that creative expression can go part of the way there, laying the communicative and shared foundations for future collaborations and futures.
The foundation will honour the following principles:
Ziemniaki i will work collaboratively towards the depolarisation of people and ideas through the creative arts.Ziemniaki i will mediate, facilitate, support, educate, exhibit, discuss and propose with humour, instead of hubris.
Finally, Why Ziemniaki i?
Because these sadly austere times demand more levity. In English, Ziemniaki i translates as Potatoes and. For us, the absurd nature of holding a potato at the crux of critical thinking and acting is one of the main driving forces behind the name.
Within the framework of a distributed context, the potato becomes a transgressive object. Transgression has been described as ‘a fundamental operation with the prospect to re-shape society in the future.’*
The potato reaches both into our deep past and thinly stretched future. It has been described as being the equal of iron in its ‘historically revolutionary role’. This function continues as it will likely be key to our collective survival. Importantly, the relationship between human and potato is now one of trust, as it now has to trust us as much as we have trusted it. As temperatures rise we have to transport it to more temperate climes as its historic habitats are forsaken.
A relationship is developed as the reliance between the Ziemniak and us becomes mutual. This playful, totemic and transgressive tuber becomes ‘an open and intermedial form whose boundaries are allowed to remain porous to the non-artistic world’.
The Polish divide the world into people who eat potatoes and people who eat tomatoes. The Dutch are potato eaters.In Brazil there is the Batata Inglesa.
Its meaning shifts, yet its form is instantly recognisable.*
The Legacy of Transgressive Objects, Katja Müller-Helle (ed.)