Dorota Chilińska, within the co-realised with Elżbieta Jabłońska Młode [Young] project, invited us to work on the Wall exhibition. The presentation took place in the departamental S Gallery, located in the former military casino at 121 Mickiewicza Street in Toruń. This very characteristic architecture was created around 1910. Until the outbreak of World War II it was a military casino. After 1939 it was used by German officers, then the Red Army was stationed there. In 1950, the building was handed over to the Nicolaus Copernicus University as the headquarters of the Military College in which mandatory military training for students took place. To this day, there is a shooting range, as well as traces of the foundations of military equipment and weapon warehouses. After the shutdown of the College in 1991, the Department of Sociology was located in the building, and later the following departments were housed there: Faculty of Theology, Department of International Relations and Department of Art and Culture History.
Formally, the action consisted in walling up on the 4th of April 2017, a bottle of spirit in one of the walls of the S Gallery. The selected area is also a bearing structure of the building. The wall as a medium, where its bearing capacity takes into account the memory of the place – is a key component of the extract. Maceration lasts indefinitely. This gesture is important because of the fact that the PhD Defense is going to take place in the S Gallery, and the Supporting wall is its essential part.
The Supporting wall site-specific installation is embedded in a certain shamanic practice of reading hidden messages in a bottle of pure vodka. It involves a belief that assumes that the alcohol stored in a specific place for a long time – absorbs messages from ghosts. In my work, I consistently completed the ritual, sealing the bottle with a bee wax. Like honey, wax has been used in many folk ceremonies because of its healing and symbolic properties.