The cycle is a personal story about a journey. The images, which make up a cycle, show reality from the perspective of a Traveler, who, by penetrating the strange and incomprehensible world of Africa, tries to uncover universal truths about life, death, rebirth and transformation.
The attempt to enter the invisible dimension of spirituality and immortality occurs through an exploration of images of emptiness and abandoned, neglected and ruined sites interwoven with shots of organic structures, decaying animal matter and objects of a sacred nature. “This documentation of decay and death is also an exploration of magical practices in which death is inseparably intertwined with life (…) Death is not any end, nor a breach, it is natural element of life. It's just that life here is not regarded as something assigned to individuals, but as Zoe – an impersonal or rather inhuman force."- wrote Izabela Kowalczyk.
Although the series is the result of the author's fascination with original beliefs, spirituality, rituals, and worship of nature, it does not have an ethnographic aspect. The places captured in the images cannot be specifically identified, which serves to emphasize the superiority of ideas over reality, because, as noted by Wojciech Nowicki “[…]in the Anima series, photography is something else still, a material, a building block, clay, a medium borrowed for purposes going beyond documentation. The authoress, quite offhandedly, departs from the natural sequence of events, opting for her own sequence instead – because Anima is a photography-based architecture of a memory, a memory of events that had never been. The images are like blocks. In the hands of the artist (narrator) the assembly kit may yield a castle, a road, a person or a soul. Anima encourages, compels one to seek, but does not promise that the path will be a straightforward one. And, as it happens with mature images, there are more possibilities here than one would given that chance.“
The pictures were taken between 2005 and 2013 during numerous trips by Magda Hueckel and Tomasz Śliwiński to Africa (spanning such countries as Algeria, Benin, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Morocco, Republic of South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal, Swaziland, Tanzania and Uganda).
I. PROLOGUE: PEREGRINATIO
“Time is standing still”
“Anima is a journey.”
Marika Kuźmicz, “Anima”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa” , Piekary Gallery 2013
“And hence one picture to begin with: stairs on the shore, there are birds sitting on it; nobody knows how come the stairs are there, at the waterside, nor what they were a part of before. Stairs which lead nowhere and serve no purpose: here is one of those mysterious objects in which the series abounds..
(…) The birds and the water, the splash and spray, destruction; nothing much happens, but what happens is inevitable: the world exists for an instant in one form, and then it meets the inevitable; the violent nature crushes human designs…"
Wojciech Nowicki, “Decay of the body, luxuriance of the soul”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa”, Piekary Gallery 2013
II. TRANSFORMATIONS
“The routes are not signed”
“We cannot see it; when looking at the images, we must try to look at what emerges between them.”
Marika Kuźmicz, “Anima”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa” , Piekary Gallery 2013
“There is a house at the beginning. A house equals human being, but people are absent, there are only their traces instead. The house is akin to an incomplete statement, never being said entirely, but only fragmentarily; yet without doubt it is an imprint of human presence – one does not know whether the presence belongs to the past or to the present. It is a place of habitation in a state of partial decay, and one sees primarily the emptiness, the abandonment, the overgrowth. The atrophy, the mould eating away the walls is conspicuous, and it gets worse. Trees penetrate the walls, the plaster falls away, revealing the naked structure.
And then the house is gone, only the powerful roots, boughs and leaves remain; the menacing, carnivorous nature endures, because – one could think when looking at the images – it is stronger than anything made by human hand.
Ultimately, only the huge and wobbly leaves, only the tangled roots, snake-like and dangerous like a snake: as if the memory of the impermanent inhabitant of these lands, the human being, had cavedin, as if powers mightier than the human took possession of it all again.”
Wojciech Nowicki, “Decay of the body, luxuriance of the soul”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa”, Piekary Gallery 2013
III. MEDIUM
"This may be not good for you”
“The Road, which has spawned so many unanswered questions, which led us between life and death, has guided the Traveller to a place where death and life meet and intertwine.”
Marika Kuźmicz, “Anima”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa” , Piekary Gallery 2013
“Hueckel subtly guides one through the paths, shows the way, sometimes one fails to notice that the grass by the path is spattered with blood. She leads one on the paths she traces herself, guides the viewer in no uncertain manner, showing that which is worth seeing: a house that caves in, the destructive nature, the death under the blazing sun, death being buried in a hole in the ground, desiccated bodies, a bloated horse. And that mystery interior, where the spirit hunting takes place.”
Wojciech Nowicki, “Decay of the body, luxuriance of the soul”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa”, Piekary Gallery 2013
IV. SACRUM
“What are you looking for?”
“The stalls resemble altars; one does not know whether the animal entrails, dead fish and octopuses, the severed heads of birds and camels are a sacrifice or food to be bought after all.”
Marika Kuźmicz, “Anima”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa” , Piekary Gallery 2013
“Octopuses like entrails torn out of colossal belly, crumpled and pallid, skinned bodies, animal carcasses, and the decapitated head of a camel, its eyes half-closed, as if in a serene dream, and only the bloody tear remind one that it is no picture of repose but a head at the butcher’s. Besides, the severed heads are plentiful, as are the bodies consigned for consumption, and others collected for mystical purposes; the land of the spirit, Anima, is a land of cadavers. What are all those bodies for, whole and in pieces? The meat trade is understandable, nothing cryptic about it (apart from the mystery of communing with something that was a body, a house); but why the heads of birds, why the dried bat, the monkey heads and long spines, why the crocodile heads and the threadbare pelts, what for, who gathers it all?
(…) a grand fair of the now useless bodies, spreads its stalls before the viewer: buy what you will, it encourages, some trinket perhaps; but whatever you buy, it is going to be death. ”
Wojciech Nowicki, “Decay of the body, luxuriance of the soul”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa”, Piekary Gallery 2013
V. EPILOGUE: ARCHE
“You have to give something in return.”
“The book ends with a photograph of a fragment of a wall; someone’s hand drew animals and people in chalk. Animals and people represent everything that is missing in Anima; there are only their remains, leftovers that are difficult to show. This is the internal link of the series: decay, destruction, vestigial memory. This is the bridge spanning the views which are difficult to connect – mystery. "
Wojciech Nowicki, “Decay of the body, luxuriance of the soul”, introduction to the book “Anima. Images from Africa”, Piekary Gallery 2013
TECHNICAL DATA:
Number of works: over 100
Sizes: 115 x 76 cm, 75 x 50 cm, 45 x 30 cm
Technique: B&W photography, pigment prints at archival paper Hahnemühle Museum Etching 350 g