EXHIBITION STATEMENT

A POISONED LOAF

Opening May 20, 2022

Shirley and Alex Aidekman Arts Center

A Poisoned Loaf 2.0

Family lore recalls it started with a letter. A boy from a nearby village in Poland sailed to America and discovered a land of abundance. For a people born in an occupied land, suffering through another period of politically fabricated famine, that letter was all it took to lure them, fill their heads with visions of prosperity and recapture them into a cycle of poverty. They exchanged fields dead from poor weather conditions and political manipulation, for dead fields of toxins and pollutants.Yet this ideological subservience came not just through force, or through seduction, it came through their own dreams of wealth. Like a parasite, Capitalism infused itself into their hopes, both feeding them and feeding off them.

Like many other immigrant groups, Poles were pulled to the United States in search of better lives, ones where they could pursue political freedom and financial well-being. However, for most newcomers, the reality was disappointing. One Polish immigrant wrote back to acquaintances in Europe: “What people from America write to Poland is [false]; there is not a word of truth. For in America Poles work like cattle. Where a dog does not want to sit, where a Pole is made to sit, and the poor wretch works because he wants to eat.” 

Naugatuck was a magnet for recent immigrants, both my immediate and distant family among them. It was one of the first US milltowns where textile production and iron works gave way to the rubber and chemical industries. The location was ideal, close to ports, an extensive rail system, and a river to help power industry. With two of the original S&P 100 companies headquartered there, the town flourished. Until it didn’t. It all ended abruptly, after several successful strikes by workers fighting for better pay and the advent of environmental regulations.The factories all closed on the advice of consultants and moved abroad leaving behind thousands of workers to devastate the environment and soaring rates of cancer and drug abuse.

A Poison Loaf is built on an ethnographic narrative that opens a dialog with concepts of Capitalist Realism, industrialization, exile, denied expectations, and the renewal of hope through the baking of bread. It begins with the planting of small fields of winter wheat– reimagining the painting of the landscape — on the grounds of the abandoned factories and mills that my family labored in with seeds from the field of Sokołowo, the village they left behind. The water comes from the polluted rivers nearby that powered the mills. The starter for the yeast is crafted from wild fruits that now grow wild on these industrial sites, as nature overtakes the ruins of the factories. The wheat is eventually harvested, processed, and baked into a loaf of bread that remains inedible due to the high rates of chemicals, heavy metals, and other trace toxins drawn from the soil.

Bread was chosen as the visual centerpiece of this project specifically because it is one of the most symbolically loaded products in human history. Bread serves as the Eucharist, the manifestation of the body of Christ and faith, an incredible driver of Polish culture in their resistance to oppression. The sharing of bread also serves as a key element to creating community, an element of celebration, and a basic staple of the diet. It also provides a means of linking the land with the home and tying the old world with the new.

A Poison Loaf positions the bread on the family table in a simulated dining area, not unlike one found in a Polish village in the 1960s. It is set for a celebration, formed as a traditional “kukiełka,” a type of ceremonial bread, a remnant of old-Slavic customs. The installation creates a tension with temporality and place. There are traditional decorations and ephemera such as the papercut wall art (wycinanki) and chandelier-like objects (pajaki). It’s a haunted snapshot, a false remembrance that alludes to futures that failed to materialize and remained spectral. Reenforcing this state are the sounds that fill the room, with field recordings of the Polish farm that meet of wail of traditional folk singing, with a score to further reenforce a mood and evoke memories. They are ultimately symbols and signifiers, not reality. In a Baudrillardian sense, they construct an understanding of shared existence, creating this fiction with its comforting embrace and pleasant signifiers, obfuscating the truth of what is happening to us toiling away under a Capitalist Realism. Not only are Neoliberal constructs transforming our destinies, destroying the planet, they limit our ability to imagine any other future.

My practice leverages the tradition of what Poles call “Praca Organiczna” (Organic Work) — a means of developing productive habits to ensure the continuation of the skills, folklore and cultural values of the nation while under occupation– so they may eventually take root again. The farming, baking, building and craft skills all come from knowledge imparted to me as a child by my family.

While this work talks to a cruel history of human failure, exploitation and erasure, and the deceptions we accept in order to continue living, it also engenders an unexpected optimism in response to the oppressive presence. And it starts where the piece does, in the soil and water. Even though the Naugatuck Valley remains heavily polluted, the work of planting on these sites allows for phytoremediative effects, whereby the rye and associated soil microbes reduce the concentrations of toxic contaminants in a nod to Mel Chin’s groundbreaking land art piece Revival Field.5 Nearby the ruins of the old factories once again team with plants and wildlife, showing that the hold on this world by humans in the age of the anthropocene is tenuous at best. The waters that pass through still have hotspots of pollutants, but after years without chemicals being poured directly into the river, Atlantic salmon are spawning for the first time in over 300 years upstream. It punctures the veil of the despotic simulation, the falsehood of humanity’s hold on power. Ultimately we find through A Poisoned Loaf, that creation and destruction are synergetic modes that cannot be disentangled, and that our ideas, our systems, our powerful capitalist industries have the illusion of control and will be lost in the ruins of time.