Parachute
Jakub Czyż, Konrad Gubała, Martyna Kielesińska, Weronika Kocewiak, Anna Siekierska

The moment of jumping suggests taking a chance, and perhaps shifting away from dystopian narratives.

As a counterpoint to the prevailing belief in the dominance of a world driven by the pursuit of progress – a world focused on achieving ever-higher levels and promotions – artists, immersed in a dark fantasy, ensure we do not forget what troubles, gnaws at and weakens us; in short, what makes us human.

A jump can, in reality, have two origins: it may be voluntary, or it may sometimes be a matter of necessity. The moment of the jump is a time of bodily reorganisation, as if the mind has not yet realised that it is falling, or conversely, it is a purely intellectual decision to change the body’s position and the trajectory of its movement. Falling is a somatic surprise, a suspension between the past and the present. A liminal space in which nothing that is entirely real exists. At the same time, it is a moment of the body’s maximum efficiency, as well as its complete inertia. And what if this mixture contains a method for survival?

They are no strangers to the posthumanist narrative, both in terms of the dream of reuniting with one’s inner primal self and the utopian vision of sublimation through the natural world that surrounds us. Nor are they oblivious to the capitalist narrative of ‘de-animalising’ humanity in the name of standardisation, resulting in the creation of a posthuman – a cyborg. A  thinking being, yet limited in sensation or hypersensitive, yet physically capable of using one’s own body as a tool in an anomalous manner.

Ultimately, the title’s parachute jump is not a foreshadowing of collapse; on the contrary, it encourages a shift away from the dystopian narrative of the end (of humanity).