In June I was stuck. To my understanding I had paid attention only to major refrains and to the obvious: the money exchange, representations of women, the mining industry, fear, traffic, commercial city centres, and so forth. Whereas, my original task was to get in touch with the minor and not with the obvious – with the non-discursive and not with the symbolic. I remember sitting in the train from Katowice to Warsaw reading my notes and the book by Janell Watson on Guattari’s diagrammatic thought, and how I felt the discrepancy between my practice and my theoretical approach. It became a tactile, and almost physical struggle to make those two sides to meet, since I was supposed to make the performance based on the material, and not to ask the participants of the workshops to perform according to my direction. Practice seemed to be located on the periphery of the obvious; it felt messy and hard to get in touch with. I felt that I was groping in a fog, trying to make sense a bit too ardently and desperately. Bytom seemed to me fuzzy and obscured, whilst a photograph grasped this mess only through a representation. Another problem was that the process of transforming narratives of the participants into a scripted performance was in danger of turning into sentimental stories of decay and depression.
My rather presumptuous idea of a theoretical apparatus applied as an interpretation of life or model for practice did not work, and I had to leave it for a while. To analyse everyday events via a complex system of schizoanalysis did not create embodiment of the acquired material in my practice. However, in Helsinki I tried to use my previous knowledge of schizoanalysis, but I felt constantly unsure and unclear where I was heading to; what was meaningful and why did I eventually search for meanings. In Bytom the theoretical apparatus did not give me certainty but produced unnecessary distance from the participants – children, elderly people, artists, students, unemployed housewives of Bobrek – and my affective experience of the place during my visits.
