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We soothe, we tune, we listen
Festival Narracje #16, Gdansk
2025

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Agata Jaroslawiec’s sound sculpture is dedicated to nursing work. Within capitalist hierarchies of value, this labour is often invisible and systematically overlooked, despite frequently requiring significant emotional investment. In Poland, according to 2020 data, the vast majority of nurses – as many as 97.5 per cent – are women.

In Jarosławiec’s work, nurses’ stories intertwine to form a polyphonic narrative in which the private merges with the public, and the everyday practice of care becomes part of women’s collective history. In the context of an ‘economy of exhaustion’ – a system that demands not only physical labour but also emotional readiness and availability – nursing work reveals its dual nature. On the one hand, nurses support and save lives; on the other, they themselves are exposed to burnout. They stand as symbols of systemic marginalisation: their contribution to healthcare remains largely unseen.

The sculpture is situated directly beside the University Clinical Centre. Placed among greenery, it becomes a monument – a gesture honouring the demanding and often undervalued labour of nurses. The installation features the voices of the artist’s mother and the grandmother of one of the curators – nurses whose experiences form a transgenerational story of care passed down from one generation to the next.

We hear the voices of Krystyna Połom, a 95-year-old retired nurse who worked for forty years in psychiatric wards – and of Teresa Jarosławiec, a 66-year-old retired nurse who spent forty-two years working in a surgical ward and outpatient surgical clinic.

Curators: Karolina Połom, Maja Murawska

Listen here: