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We speak in Echoes
2026

 An echo does not operate on the logic of repetition, but rather on that of displacement, which destabilizes continuity and reveals the fissures between the past and the possibility of rewriting it. What returns is never identical to what was; the echo introduces delay and distortion, making memory a process rather than a recording. The echo is also a mediated, non-autonomous voice, always entangled in a relationship. The material plays a key role here. Silicone, a material that is both soft and synthetic, imitating skin yet devoid of its history, becomes a “second skin” – a surface on which the tensions between the organic and the manufactured are revealed. As an industrial material associated with production and repeatability, silicone introduces a dimension of contemporary labor into this practice: labor separated from the body, yet reproduced by it. It is skin that does not remember, but on which memory is recreated as a trace, as an echo.

The exhibition draws on the artist’s popular heritage not as a static repository of forms, but as a living field of practice, inextricably linked to the history of coercion, reproduction and the invisible labor of the body. Collaboration with her mother, emotional labor, and the recurring gestures of sewing, reconstructing, and touching evoke practices that for centuries have existed on the margins of visibility: as work that is necessary yet unrecognized. In this context, heritage is not neutral; it carries within it a record of economic and social violence, inscribed in the body, rhythm, and matter.

Agata Jarosławiec’s exhibition occupies the tension between the unsaid and that which is stubbornly inscribed in the body and memory. Her practice is based not on direct articulation, but on speaking through an echo: a speech that is displaced, delayed, and not entirely her own. This activates what might be described as a somatic archive, a space in which inheritance occurs not through representation, but through the repetition of gestures, tensions, and relationships operating outside the order of language—within the realm of affect.

The concept of the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) featured in the exhibition organizes the exhibition space as a structure of confinement and separation. Echoes in this space do not travel freely – they bounce off the boundaries, returning distorted, trapped within a system of divisions. Historical practices of enclosure, which enabled the emergence of the capitalist order, find their continuation here as mechanisms regulating access, visibility, and the possibility of being. Enclosure not only separates but also produces subjectivities subordinated to the logic of survival.

The theme of cultural mimicry takes on particular significance here. The experience of social advancement manifests itself as a life “echoing” the forms of others: a process of assimilating languages, gestures, and codes that are not one’s own but are necessary for functioning. It is an ambivalent survival strategy: it enables entry into new structures while simultaneously leaving a trace of a rupture. The subject does not stabilize but remains suspended between what is inherited and what is assimilated. 


The project was funded by a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

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