Malvina Janasik (b. 1992) is a London based artist and writer, born in a small coal-mining city in Poland. Her practice revolves around connections, displacement, rage, and the dizzying disorientation of video games.
She holds a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art, which she received from the University of Westminster in 2017.
I use writing in my practice as a form of pathfinding: through the imaginative actions of fictitious walking, sleepwalking, loitering, stumbling in the dark, wandering and getting lost I trace my steps and map out journeys and meanings. I place myself firmly in the worlds I write about to experience the sensory and bodily stimuli, which allow me to participate and fully engage with my work. I’m drawn to strange and distant connections, spaces in between, hidden alleyways, cracked sidewalks and chewing gum – that dirty adhesive that glues cities together. The space in between is often overlooked – but it's the in-between that connects, links and unites. By turning my attention to these veiled, ambiguous paths I want to inspire connectivity, kinship and alliance.
I’m fascinated by the disorientation induced by time travel (with archive and sci-fi as spaceships) and the splitness of self, offered by video games. I centred my Final Major Project on the MA Writing programme around themes of immortality, resistance and death. My text naturally morphed into a written video game: with clues that could be found and performed as symbols; written documents presented as “lore” scattered throughout the imagined, glitched landscapes; quest objectives sprawled like maps. The aim was to inhabit the worlds I was writing about, to place myself physically near the characters and to experience the immersion associated with video games. My goal was to investigate the mechanics of dying in games; the game over screen, which sends the player to the last checkpoint in an infinite loop (the immortality), and the definite, real game over: the refusal to play (death). I died a lot. But in the end, it was about resistance, about stubbornness: only through rejection could I break out of the infinite loop.
Anger is what keeps me writing and I feed my anger with words.
Game Over is a game-text/text-game about in-betweenness, death, and immortality, grappling with the question: “Who writes history?”. It explores the idea of voice as a form of resistance, going against the grain of comfortable, well-known, and conservative archetypes. By tracing the hierarchical authority of history and the often mute rigidness of the archive, I wondered about what the voice is and how it is immortalized. I weave the voice of my text with the voices of seemingly disparate characters, uncovering their stories and revealing ways in which they were granted the right to speak, or — contrarily — how they were silenced. Their voice is interrupted, half-muted, disembodied. It pierces decades and reverberates in the future, chiming like a crystal bell. The voice of reason, the voice of madness, the voice that was cut in half and stuffed into someone else’s throat. Sometimes the voice jars loudly but is meaningless. Sometimes, thanks to its muteness, it is revolutionary. The voice travels and ends up in multiple endings, foretelling multiple beginnings. It is immortal.
My research into immortality, resistance, and death led me to two main areas (that later unfolded and expanded further, in the manner of white veins running through a lacey sheet of caul fat): the past (in which I focused on the proto-vampiric creature, the walking dead of the Slavic folklore, or upiór in Polish); and the future (imagined through sci-fi, specifically the genre of cyberpunk and video games as my focal point). I read both the past and the future from the sleek surface of the screen, their essence diminished into a compressed .pdf format, their potentiality unrealized, ethereal. I excavated slivers of this research from collapsed, digital remains. I took virtual walks through the crumbling, mossy London cemeteries.
Upiórs, vampires and cyborgs all coexist within the text. Not only do they tend to be popular enemies in video games, they are all human-like, but monstrous and out of control. They have to be fought, killed, curbed, diminished into nothing, dominated. They are like mirrors, reflecting human anxieties about ethics, about humanity itself, and mimicking internal battles between order and chaos. By asking “What is it like to be human?” I examine my own unease, the instability of my thoughts, the discomfort of my physical body. I attempt to embrace the hideous monstrosity that lives within me — the nagging, questioning voice. The refusal, the opposition, the stubbornness: they all break loose from the inside of my ribcage.
For a collaborative exhibition "Hellish Love: An Exhibition of Objects from the Swedenborg Archive", I wrote a text responding to Swedenborg's ear bones. The text reads:
SWEDENBORG’S EAR BONES
THE EAR
It listens. Can you hear it? Drumming, gurgling, hissing, crackling, grumbling, creaking, rattling, tapping, shrieking, howling, humming, echoing, roaring, whispering. Speaking. The ear is a social creature, it’s built of parts that are in continuous dialogue with each other: they converse, pass on sounds and vibrations between each other and further on, into the very core of your soul. You are suspended in a wave of a steady, constant sound. Parts of your ear talk between each other, but they also allow you to talk, to connect with other people and the surrounding world. And you respond, resonate and speak in sound waves. Ear puts you in context and it puts you in space: the sound, the balance, the harmony. Equilibrium: oh, thank the ear.
THE BOX
The shade of green is that of ficus elastica, smelling of juniper and pine. Round shaped, I imagine it would snap gently at my fingers, as if the golden fastening was magnetized: just like a box of cheek blush does (Bourjois Little Round Pot blusher, shade: rose frisson. A quiet pop is the sound it makes). Inside: velvety black, with a worn-out spot right in the middle (faerie circle? full moon behind clouds? toothpaste?). It’s light, unassuming. The small inscription is difficult to read, as if the confident hand that handled these sprawling letters was rushed, perhaps unaware of its importance (scratching sound of a quill on paper). It reads: “Small bones incus & malleus of Swedenborg’s ear”.
THE BONES
Three bones of the middle ear: malleus (hammer), incus (anvil) and stapes are the smallest bones in the human body. Hammer and anvil rest in the green box, disassociated from the body: like cut off nails, or hair separated from skin. Reminiscent of a strange ritual mothers perform when they keep their children’s teeth in a small jar: as if to remember that moment in the past, the moment when their offspring were young enough to still have baby teeth, but just old enough to lose them.
Listen:
Clink, clink, clink, clink.
Like hammer hitting anvil, sound resonates, vibrates and enters deeper into your soul.
