2021 ,multimedia installation, loop
music: Przemysław Scheller
The installation Sol Salutis is a commentary on the persistence of complex numerological, linguistic and meaning systems, and their influence on the conscious perception of reality. Basing on a reflection regarding Polish Romanticism as the point of departure, the work – once made part of an exhibition held at the Arsenal Gallery power station – blends in with the context of planetary consciousness, new realities, technologies serving both the realm of great narratives / systems and daily lives of individuals. It extends to issues of speculative potentials and giant idea and equity flow mechanisms, determining – and agitating– the world order. Emotionless calculations permeating with symbolism, individuals counting on strokes of luck and hanging their moves and actions on the language of signs – all of the aforesaid affects more than the real world; it tends to influence alternate universes and generative environments, self-propelling and self-governing. Sol Salutis is also the story of how codes interpreted as programming allow worlds to be reproduced and deciphered.
Quoting Zdzisław Kępiński (Mickiewicz hermetyczny [Mickiewicz the Hermetic], Warsaw 1980), Woynarowski points to options of translating words into numerical values, a potential Adam Mickiewicz saw as significant. In Sol Salutis, the narrative bases on the gradual decoding of meanings concealed in textual-and-numerical combinations, and revealing them to participants of an audio-visual occurrence. The artist follows Mickiewicz’s thought combining the metaphysical with the mathematical, ensconced nearly 200 years ago in A History of the Future, the poet’s unfinished work, preserved in fragments only, most of it lost. Using materials at hand, Woynarowski re-enacts individual directions alongside Mickiewicz’s potential (“futurological”, to quote the artist) visions, preceding J. Verne or H.G. Wells’ prophetic concepts by dozens of years. The writer predicted i.a. the existence of fibreoptics alluding to systems of Archimedean mirrors, intended to reflect the“fiery signs” of solar lettering. The Archimedean solution became the inspiration behind Sol Salutis (Latin for ‘sun of salvation’), the notion of transmitting “fiery signs” giving rise to ponderings regarding the prognostic of ever-changing language form, the installation itself serving as a “metaphorical apparatus” designed to decrypt signals from the future and map parallel realities.
Sol Salutis by Jakub Woynarowski, shown courtesy of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
