According to Giorgio Agamben, contemporaneity is an “anachronism that allows us to understand our time as a “too soon” that is also a “too late”, an “already” that is also a “not yet”^[1].  This statement is quoted by Rémi Coignet in the opening text of the edition Changing Times: Art Facing a new world, in the 2020 volume of Parallel Atlas published by The Eyes, which includes the short film for which this essay is devoted: ‘Growing’ by Agata Wieczorek (Poland, 1992). The work, from the perspective of body-horror, a sub-genre of horror, heralds one of the major concerns of our amorphous time: the virtualisation and alienation of our bodies.

The Parallel Atlas editions are one of the last stages of the Parallel platform process, led by Procur.arte in Lisbon. Since 2017 it has united European creative organisations with intercultural exchanges and mentorships, starting with the recruitment of new artists and curators via open calls. Once connected, these actors seek new discussions to embed the contemporary photography scene.

Besides publishing, exhibitions are held at the cultural associations belonging to the project. The exhibition Growing, at Procur.arte until May 6, displays the expanded universe of Agata Wieczorek’s homonymous short film.

The artist’s ‘praxis’ resides in the human body. As a subject, it is thought in an emancipated, sometimes political perspective, in threshold situations. For instance, when Wieczorek explores the signifier of the body constantly exposed to technology, immersed in a virtual context. What is left of the real?

Agata Wieczorek presents an extensive portfolio guided by criticism of consumer society and the dogmatism of the family. For example, in Artifacts she uses human moulds made of silicone to question the evolution of the organic body, intrinsic to the intersection between medicine and the technology industry.

For the artist, this constant attempt to go beyond the human body’s finitude is justified by the ceaseless quest for economic growth, where multiple solutions are devised to meet the needs of new infrastructures, in a constant and infinite cycle of superfluous creations.

My first contact with Wieczorek’s work was through Second Skin, following an investigation into artists who, from a feminist perspective, dealt with the depersonalisation of female bodies reliant on the consumer society. The self-portraits where the models mask themselves with silicone suits (usually worn by men who practice female fetishistic masking) question depersonalisation as a form of masochism.

The abject side of Agata Wieczorek’s work shares a specific root that goes back to her time as a university student. The artist was a pupil at the National Film School in Lodz, Poland, where Roman Polanski, author of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), also studied. The horror genre, like abject art, explores the unpleasant in opposition to the tendency to aestheticise the world^[2]. Abject art also has a strong feminist backdrop, where women’s bodies (in the broad queer sense) are subjugated to patriarchal social orders. This is the case of compulsory pregnancy and the prohibition access to voluntary abortion by many states.

A few years ago, the context that allowed women to have a legal and safe abortion in Poland, the artist’s home country, changed. Before, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy covered cases of fetal malformation. A situation that was eventually overturned by the Polish Constitutional Court in 2021, leading thousands of women to the streets of the country in protest against the ruling. Now, in the country, abortions can only be legally performed in cases of rape, incest or if the mother’s health is at imminent risk.

The change in the court ruling was justified by conservative Catholic precepts in Poland. It is the European country where access to abortion is the most difficult. The European Parliament condemned the decision, considering it a fierce attack on the country’s rule of law.

‘Growing’, a 17-minute short film about something growing inside the body (or pregnancy), emerges in this troubled womb, where the watchword is anguish from beginning to end. The film follows Ewa, a medical student who spends her time interning in a student prep lab with ultra-realistic silicone-made models of human bodies. In an interview to promote the work, Wieczorek outlined the violent side of using the moulds for this purpose, as it reduces the human experience of an individual to the carnal limits of a body that can be massively reproduced. Interestingly, but not coincidentally, the short film was shot at the Presagesimulation centre of the Henri Warembourg Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lille, France. Here, medical students prepare daily for their profession without touching any human… body.

The protagonist, constantly warned via telephone by her mother about the danger of diseases and parasites in the day-to-day world, is suddenly struck by an epidemic. She is pregnant, with no explanation or imminent genitor, rendered helpless to remove the foetus and yet forced to feel happy.

Watching the film, we feel the influence of the horror genre on the screen, whether by the growth of the foetus reminiscent of Rosemary’s anguish, or its parasitic insurgence as an icon of Alien (1979).

For reasons we won’t mention to avoid spoilers, the protagonist regains power over her body, using a means no less violent than the one that abused her.

‘Growing’ emphasises the emergence of body-horror as an accusatory mechanism of a system of situations that strike half the world’s population on a daily basis. They dress and undress, rape, restrain, take, place and remove women’s bodies. The short film ‘Growing’ is a critique through the virtual body of contemporary reality. The exhibition, until May 6 in Lisbon, is a must-see expanded account of it.

^[1] Agamben, G. (2008). Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?. Rivages.

^[2]Lipovetsky, G., & Serroy, J. (2015). A estetização do mundo: Viver na época do capitalismo artista. Companhia das Letras.