Mary Szydłowska is a choreographer, performer and cinematographer based in Brussels. 
Their practice varies between movement, installation and sculptural objects; touching upon the peripheral and invisible phenomena within architectural spaces and institutional environments. 

In the span of recent years, they have been developing a choreographic research on practices of cleaning, creating a diptych of solo works SOAK and LEAKS. As a performance maker, they work through intimate, durational collaborations with spaces and materialities, expanding the methods and frameworks known as in-situ. They work through queering the relation to time and modes of performance production in the context of galleries and museum spaces.

Presentation and supporting venues include: Beursschouwburg, Brussels Gallery Weekend (Generation Brussels), Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, IKOB museum, Komplot, workspacebrussels and others.
 

Research

My artistic research focuses on ecologies of attention within architectural and intermediary spaces, as means for reflection on labor systems, minor gestures and neurodiversity.

For the past few years I have been researching with and through the notions of cleaning and maintenance. My research took place in the context of cultural institutions: theaters, dance studios and museums - where I’ve worked in different positions - as an artist, as a filmmaker, as a student, as a cleaner and caretaker.

I looked at cleaning as a movement executed on the surfaces, skimming, brushing the world on its outside layers; mixing the dust particles and the whole world on micro material level. Secondly, I looked at it as a gesture of care - rich in invisibility techniques within its professional performativity, as well as invisibilized by hierarchies of labor systems. A gesture, which holds a capacity of blurring a dichotomy between centers and peripherals through matter.

Within that research, which lead me to creation of a diptych of solo works, I have established a practice of creating and sharing attention limbos - based on repetitive hand movements, automatism of simple actions, which provoke dream-like states, visionary moments or self-hypnosis. This state brought me to observe a space in which deep relaxation and deep exhaustion intertwine, as a possibility for subverting meaning and experience of work and focus.

What if through cleaning we can induce a dream state? What if cleaning is a way of envisioning? Therefore - how may looking through an act of labor, in relation to future speculations, form the ways in which we relate to work? How to create subversive ecologies of attention and whom they can support and include?

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