Walk Dates:
May 16 (Friday) at 5:30 PM
May 23 (Friday) at 5:30 PM
Meeting point: Czerwone Maki Tram Terminus
Kraków is one of the oldest cities in Poland, which has gradually expanded its area by annexing surrounding villages. Places once filled with forests, meadows, and scattered single-family homes have begun transforming into spaces covered in concrete, sidewalks, apartment blocks, and modern office buildings. However, in Kraków one can still find places that evoke the rural experience in multisensory and performative ways. Field research focused on locating such spaces, enriched by many vvłuczęga discussions, led us to the Czerwone Maki terminus and the nearby meadow-forest areas nestled between modern residential and corporate developments. We would now like to confront our observations with an outside audience and invite everyone interested to join us in experiencing “rural spaces” in Kraków through two performative walks.
On Fridays, May 16 and 23, 2025, at 5:30 PM, let us uncover the microhistories of places where village and city intersect, overlap, and merge — by listening deeply and gathering bouquets that will become part of the exhibition currently on view at Shefter Gallery.
Both walks are accompanying events of Bogusław Bachorczyk’s exhibition Vlach. The first walk will be led by Anna Nacher — cultural studies scholar and artist, professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts of the Jagiellonian University, and co-creator of the Magic Carpathians project. The second walk will be led by members of the vvłuczęga collective — an informal group of students associated with the Department of Performance Studies at the Jagiellonian University. The collective was formed during curatorial workshops in the 2024/2025 academic year. During the walks, we will follow the traces of relations between the city and the countryside, between urban space and nature, between memory and the present. You are warmly invited!
We encourage all participants to read a short text related to the event in advance:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IK8B4V0BYwIvtgsnFFIn_VVJ1lZU3FEi/view?usp=drivesdk
Dr hab. Anna Nacher, prof. UJ – works at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University. Her research interests include digital culture, sound studies, media art, electronic literature, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. In the fall semester of 2019/20, she was a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the Creative Digital Media program at Winona State University (USA). She has delivered guest lectures at Aarhus University, Aalborg University (as part of the Media Art Cultures Erasmus Mundus program), UCLA Art|Sci Program, Washington State University-Vancouver, and the University of Minnesota. She is the author of three books and numerous articles and book chapters published in Poland and abroad. In 2021, she co-curated the online exhibition of digital art and electronic literature created during the Covid-19 pandemic https://eliterature.org/elo2021/covid with Søren Brø Pold (Aarhus University) and Scott Rettberg (University of Bergen), under the DARIAH-eu grant.
Editor-in-chief of Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, and managing editor of the online journal ebr – Electronic Book Review (Open Humanities Press) https://electronicbookreview.com. Between 2019 and 2024, she was a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.
She combines scholarly work with artistic and ecological practice. Since 1999, she has co-created the improvised music project Magic Carpathians, with which she has released numerous albums in Poland and abroad, completed two tours in the US, and performed extensively in Poland and Europe. She is also active in solo projects involving field recordings and electronic literature. Since 2020, she has collaborated with American artist Victoria Vesna. In 2021, she was an online Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Art of Performance at the University of California.
Since 2015, she has co-managed, together with Marek Styczyński, the permaculture center Biotop Lechnica in Lechnica, Slovakia. Since 2023, she has served as president of the Biotop Lechnica Foundation.
More (including full list of publications and artistic projects): http://breathlibrary.org
More about the Biotop Lechnica Foundation: https://biotoplechnica.eu
vvłuczęga collective – an informal group of students associated with the Department of Performance Studies at the Jagiellonian University. The collective was formed during curatorial workshops in the 2024/2025 academic year. vvłuczęga’s practice is focused on new-humanist flows, multisensory approaches, autoethnography, and sensitivity. The collective body of vvłuczęga includes:
Anita Kopeć, Marta Kurzacz, Adriana Markowska, Suri Stawicka, Zuzanna Świątek, Ola Tłuszcz, Nastazja Zajączkowska
Artist: Bogusław Bachorczyk
Curator: Arkadiusz Półtorak
Curatorial collaboration: vvłuczęga collective / Curatorial Practice Workshop at the Department of Performance Studies, Jagiellonian University
Visual identity: Oksana Shmygol
Producer: Lucyna Shefter
Coordinator: Adriana Markowska
