The work of Polish artist Agnieszka Polska (Lublin, 1985) resides at the meeting point of contemporary art, experimental cinema, literature, storytelling and science fiction, combining formal experimentation with the asking of historical, political and philosophical questions, such as those relating to ecological responsibility or paradigms of perception and cognition. There are important thematic and formal parallels between the works My Little Planet (2016), What The Sun Has Seen (2017) and The Happiest Thought (2019), which all adopt a “situated” 1 poetics to question, self-reflexively, the act of watching, the status of the observer and the position of the viewer.

Across the three films, the backdrop mirrors the form in the same way that the form reflects the backdrop. While the motives behind Polska’s work are what constitute the driving force of its aesthetic inventiveness, this latter is what draws out its complex perspectives regarding the present, processes of seeing-knowing and audio-visual forms. Through the tension between visual and sound fields (voiceover, music and sound design) and the dialectic between animated and indexical images, the three short films achieve a spatialisation of time (The Happiest Thought depicts the Permian–Triassic extinction, which took place around 252 million years ago, drawing a comparison with our current ecological catastrophe). Voiceover and editing (vertical and horizontal), used as narrative elements, create in parallel a temporalisation of space. It is precisely through a reflection on space and time (the title of the short film from 2019 makes an allusion to this idea, which would lead Albert Einstein to formulate the Theory of Relativity in 1915) — and on cinema as a spatial and temporal practice — that Polska explores, in these three films, a series of questions connected to perceptive and cognitive paradigms, to processes of observation and knowledge production, and to objectivity as a historically modulated category. Questions, then, that are fundamental to both the field of science and the terrain of cinema, in particular documentary and ethnographic film.

My Little Planet is an allegory of a dystopian society in which time is measured via the rotational movements in space of banal day-to-day objects, such as the tip of a cigarette. Parameters and temporal units, described in intertitles and illustrated by the sound of a cuckoo clock, are represented by the astronomical rotation of objects. In the same way as in What The Sun Has Seen and The Happiest Thought, Polska here places spatial and temporal elements — images and words, the visible and the unrepresentable — in tension, installing a mechanism analogous to reading that interrogates the mental space and political responsibility of the viewer. Beginning from a logic of repetition and an exploration of the gap between the signified and the signifier, My Little Planet also evokes the double meaning of the word “revolution”: its etymological meaning, applied up to the 18th century, designating inevitable astronomical movements or rotations; and its modern meaning regarding political revolutions, or in the words of Hannah Arendt, “the haphazard movements of human destiny”.2 While that evocation speaks to the emergence of a new relationship between humans and the cosmos, and to the separation of the subject and object of knowledge with the dawning of modernity and its scientific system — both themes that are dear to Polska — it also demonstrates the political dimension of her work, which, among other things, rests on an affirmation of the capacity of art to reflect and transform the world.

What The Sun Has Seen borrows its title from a poem by the realist/feminist Polish poet Maria Konopnicka (1842-1910), which describes the daily activities of a rural family as observed by the Sun. However, Polska not only ironically transposes the content of the poem to the present, but also complicates the relation between observer and observed. The enunciations of the voiceover imply that the relation between the perspectives of the observer and observed is constructed reciprocally. “The Sun saw our little house”, the voiceover says. The phrase presupposes a reciprocal (or interchangeable) perspective: the perspective of the Sun over the house and its inhabitants; the view of the inhabitants regarding the Sun (and the awareness of the act of observation). This creates a dialogue with certain philosophical and anthropological ideas that conceive of the relation between observer and observed in terms of reciprocity, such as the philosophy of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or in which the opposition of subject and object is dissolved, such as the Amerindian perspectivism of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The visual representation and discourse of the anthropomorphic Sun condense the doubly aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of Polska’s work. The poetic statement of the state of the world — ecological crises as a consequence of a “global geopolitical strategy of unlimited exploitation of all human and non-human resources”3 — is based here on a questioning of the basis of modernity and, in particular, the separation of observer and observed as one of the foundations of modernity’s perceptive and cognitive paradigm (and of cinema as one of its devices for seeing).

The Happiest Thought continues these reflections and methodologies. Through another representation of cosmic space and the objects held in its gravity, and through the tension between image, voiceover and music (both provided by North American performer Geo Wyeth), Polska establishes parallels between the Permian-Triassic Extinction and today’s ecological catastrophe. By inscribing that “happening” in history, outside of the historiographic paradigm, the artist articulates the past, the present and the future. The representation of the Permian-Triassic Extinction through the use of animation becomes a prefigurative warning about the disaster likely on its way. The cadence of the voiceover, sounding like a popular online meditation course, explores the mechanism of hypnotism for activating the receptive sphere and creating a critical viewer, aware and reflexive. Similarly to in My Little Planet and What The Sun Has Seen, sound and image are used as forms that “think”4 and give agency to mechanisms that can change the world.