NATURE+9 MATERIALISTIC REALISM - DE-STRUCTURALIZED FORMS

September 13–20, 2026 // Post-workshop presentation on September 19 at 6:00 p.m.

ARTLab Wyspa  Wyspa Progress Foundation

Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

Department of Sculpture and Intermedia

Concept and direction: Prof. Grzegorz Klaman

Assistant curator: Dr. Piotr Mosur

Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

Department of Intermedia, Studio of Transdisciplinary Activities

Assoc. Prof. František Kowolowski, Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Assistant: Jiri Kudela

In collaboration with:

Mobile BIO Lab and academic supervision: Dr. hab. Katarzyna Jankowska, Professor at Gdańsk University of Technology, Department of Environmental Engineering Technology

Matter, as the foundation and seed of life—at once ubiquitous and accessible, susceptible to appropriation, occupation, and misappropriation (capitalism)—eludes straightforward categorization. Following Bataille and Rosalind Krauss, we stumble along the way upon the Gnostics—that is, the unease of the mind, the dismantling of idealism in the face of something low and fundamental. How are we to find ourselves as bio-machine subjects—evolutionarily shaped, material beings? Do we become something beyond ourselves—in spite of ourselves, heterogeneously and beyond the transcendentally imposed surveillance-system—a mass of matter in the process?

"Low materialism—of which formlessness [informel] is the most concrete manifestation—is intended to bring about declassification, that is, a simultaneous lowering and liberation from all ontological bonds, from all ‘ought to be’ (devoir-être)—from all model roles. It is, above all, a matter of the declassification of things, of tearing them from the grip of the philosophical concepts of classical materialism, which is nothing other than idealism in disguise: “Most materialists […] place dead matter at the top of a conventional hierarchy that orders various types of facts, without realizing that in doing so they have succumbed to an obsession with the ideal form of matter—a form that, more than any other, approaches what matter ought to be.” (Bataille)

  This “should be” is a form of “homologous” appropriation—it presupposes a standard or normative measure. Meanwhile, formless matter, as acknowledged by low materialism, which resembles nothing—and especially not what it “should be”—cannot be assimilated into any concept or type of abstraction. From the perspective of low materialism, nature creates only unique monsters—there are no deviations in nature, for there is nothing in it but deviation. (Bataille) Ideas are prisons; the idea of “human nature” is the most vast of prisons: in every human being, the animal is imprisoned [...], like a convict.” (Bataille)

We participate in a process that offers us successive, unexplored, and endless states in order to free ourselves from the binaries of the Capitalocene and neoliberal individualization.

Grzegorz Klaman