'Step Lightly; Take Care' considers the impact of human activity on the planet.
written by festival director Wladyslaw Kazmierczak
Step Lightly; Take Care / Stapaj lekko; dzialaj ostroznie This instruction, or rather wise message, how one can exist in the world, was explicitly articulated in the gallery space. The artist spilled 150 kilos of flour all over the space. Some of us, entering the whiteness, took our shoes off and had a direct contact with the warm and soft matter of flour. The artist began her performance in complete silence. She had small halogen lamps at her wrists and ankles, which emitted a strange cool light. She held in her hand some kind of a spherical object, which she tossed from one hand to the other. Moving very slowly, she gave the ball to a viewer, who was also supposed to toss the ball. Further instructions from the artist said that the performance would last as long as long as this little ball would be tossed up and passed over with the same instruction to a next person. The ball was the miniature globe.
After each of the viewers had entered the gallery, the artist meticulously covered his or her footprints with flour. This, however, was not completely feasible. There were too many footprints and they were too densely marked. Finally, the public could not stand the seriousness and gravity necessary for concentration. The participants began to create their own variety of the performance, spilling the flour onto themselves and sliding on the floor. At a certain moment the viewers’ emotions turned trivial, so one of them, Wojciech Kowalczyk, who was just holding “the miniature world” in his hand and sensed that the improper behaviour of the public was impossible to control any longer, dropped the ball on the floor, thus finishing the performance.
