As part of the international Artistic Residency Programme of Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz, the winner of this year’s edition, Tom Swoboda, gives a guided tour of his exhibition Zooscape, realised in Bydgoszcz.
Zooscape was born from the core of Animal Space senses – Tom Swoboda’s long-standing project about animal space and the need to describe the relationship between humans and animals made from a place of feeling.
At Zooscape, we draw on the landscape of the zoo in Bydgoszcz’s Myślęcinek Zoo and from conversations with people who work there. As a place where animals live, the zoo is permeated with questions of architecture for the animals, as well as the relationship with them and the role of humans in all of this. The zoological space embodies the story of what man also is, the relationship he has with himself, with the world, with other animals, with the memory of what is subconsciously written in him and with the awareness of who he truly is.
Today it is a place and a story full of pain and longing, full of risk and absurdity, twists and turns and contemplations of existence, life and death. All these oppositions cry out to – paradoxically – trust that there is a space for the creation of the new.
The presence and conscious action of the artist in this multidimensional space allows the voice of this landscape to resound and the aesthetics of empathy to reveal the potential of attitudes of thought and creativity based on the (rejected by Christian thought) continuity between man and nature, between humans and animals.
Danuta Milewska

Wednesday
17 April 2024, 12.00 pm
duration: 1–1.5 h