Identity vs. Personality

“Identity consists of borders, while perso- nality is what grows incessantly.” Yet, the relationship between form and matter is unsolvable and, indeed, it is this very feature to be considered the status that guarantees a structured and efficient evolution in cultural or personal terms. But how much should we rely on structures, and what if the support turns into constraint? A liquid society, as many have called , compels to a compulsive tracking of new parameters that confer the role of an individual “suitable for the global ”. Identity has paradoxically become a task by itself and the individual, an isolated monad, is now a serial consumer of new forms that, instead of providing meaning and safety, deepen the fracture with the self and with the other ones. 

From Zielonka’s whole body of works emerges a distinct investigative position that is deeply rooted in theoretical questions and that, moving through sociopsychology, history and architecture, invests politics, intended both as a system of relationships and as a constellation of powers that gravitate around it. The artist’s interest is, in different perspectives, to examine the influence exercised upon an individual –as to say, the liminal zone between power and the object of its exercise. The core of her investigation around the different modes of existence and, most importantly, patterns of thinking, requires a coherently careful approach, rejecting any possibility to be inscribed within a specific category.

Rather than statements or manifestos, Zielonka addresses questions towards herself, the viewer and their surroundings, deploying a method defined as interview. Through personal researches and direct inquiries to specialists of various fields, her professed ignorance of the truth pursues knowledge by adopting skepsis, dialogue, induction and deduction, thus resembling Socrates’ maieutic method. The aim is to represent the process of investigation and to elicit knowledge through a dialectic approach to those truths that shape beliefs, scrutinizing their consistency with other beliefs. Therefore, there is no political nor sociological statement but rather a continuous process of questioning that enacts critical thinking, where critical is not intended as polemic, but rather as intellectually attentive. 

Shaping anthropic habitats, architecture shapes the world and, at the same time, is shaped by the human conception of what the world’s global structure is. Its highly symbolic value, connecting both history and utopia, has been profusely adopted by the artist, whether playfully or, more analytically, as a prism of reflection upon society. Architecture is a monument of a given historical frame and, at the same time, witnesses its development throughout time; inner structures and patterns emerge visually, as her early sculptures reveal more openly. Articulated in space, time and in the movements between the two, a building becomes the embodiment of identities with their wounded bricks and their façades covering inner, invisible structures built along the narration of our experience. Zielonka’s interest transcends the urban, mechanized apparatus of ideas; its iconography encompasses nature, artefacts, religions, shadows and vibrations that variously manifest different veils of Maya. 

That is, sets of values that, despite aiming ultimately at the truth, cover from light or from free movement and deny access to reality, letting it shimmer through its distorted or irregular pattern. As a counterpart of this repertoire, the constellation within Zielonka’s work is concerned with Atmen or pneuma , meaning simultaneously our spirit and the air we breathe. The translatability of what holds living beings together while maintaining their individual existence is experimented with different media and permeates many ink works as much as air permeates existence: trembling and moving subjects, medical case histories, wind drawings and transmedial artistic collaboration are various declension of this ongoing research. 

What we see is then that, if on the one hand Zielonka represents fixed structures and limits, on the other hand she tries to convey the quality of life and the subtle changes that constitute the state of being with vibrations and shimmering shapes. The act of drawing entails this approach as well: “The very moment that I draw one line, I start to dissolve it again”, she states. Yet, the expressionist ragged lines, ripples and deliberate rubbings on the fresh ink recompose in an organic image, balanced in the dynamic tension between stability and fluidity as it is the Zenonian centrifugal movement of human from the collective. 

The large-format, apparently innocuous works of Zielonka disclose an inner tension that deals primarily with shapes. Form is considered the essence of an image and the contrasts between the black ink and the white paper let structures and forms to emerge bare open in their changeable perimeters . In her drawings, surfaces are boiling and whirling, proportions and parts are displaced: there is an aberration of the bi-dimensional fixity through real-life details’ manipulation. The distortions of perspective, recalling the vertical one, follows a semantic and symboliclogic rather than a phenomenological one as it is the case of linear perspectivism. 

Zielonka’s works are constructed through a labor-intensive process in which details of raw documentation are selected, extracted and manipulated for excess or synthesis: rigid architectonic structures shrink or dilate as biological ones, vibrating and breathing as the lively matter they serve and, ultimately, embody. Interestingly, the ink drawings prevent the viewer to decipher them through a single point of view. These processes of disassembling and reassembling do rarely shows clearly their junctions, creating a surrealistic sense of homogeneity. This is one of Zielonka’s strategies to reflect formally the multiple perspective of the concept of identity in cultural and personal terms. This multiperspectivist approach, along with its proximity to collage, recalls inevitably the early cubist projects of Braque and Picasso as well as David Hockney’s joiner technique, later developed into panography. Yet Zielonka does not show a multitude stitched into one multifaceted whole, nor is she primarily concerned by the space-time continuum; rather, she focuses on the relationship between physical and inner space, creating a monad partially separated and reassembled, as it happens on a daily basis and throughout history with objective or personal structures. 

According to the semiotician Jurij Lotman, it is the friction between the collective and the individual -the ability “to break the rules”- to be the main driving force of our development. In this perspective, the faculty to choose consciously, proper of a thinking individual, becomes an active factor of progress that distinguishes the human to other biological or artificial systems. Humans are “abnormal” creatures who depend on the collective as much as their own individuality and whose intrinsic capacity to behave in an unpredictable manner shapes the very matter of intellect . This eccentricity reveals paradoxically the boundaries of our own Umwelt, soliciting/empowering us to consider, prospect and create other ones. 

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1) Zygmund Bauman, Liquid life. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2005. The Polish-British sociologist theorized that late modernity, shaped by global capitalism, increasing privatization and by the information revolution, deter- mines an ambiguous and fluid set of relations of isolated individuals. 

2) Zygmund Bauman, Globalization, The human conse- quences. 1998. 

3) Anaximenes of Miletus 

4) Plutarch 

5) The famous paradox of Achilles and the turtle by Zeno of Elea (V BC) shows through dichotomy that movement over any finite distance can never be completed, and therefore that motion is illusionary. 

6) Color, with all its variable in terms of individual perception, is seen as a distraction from the essential and therefore used in rare, highly symbolic occasions