Stanisław Bulder (Poland)

As a child, you don’t always understand the weight of ritual: ring the bells, kneel, strike the gong, wash hands. Serving Mass is both sanctity and play, a stage of discipline where altar boys stand between priest and congregation. During the residency, Stanisław Bulder looks at Mass not through theology but choreography—a codified dance that shapes behavior, identity, and order. The project stems from growing up in a devout Catholic family in post-socialist Poland, where the Church filled the vacuum of authority in the 1990s. Today Stanisław Bulder finds meaning in rave culture— ecstatic, communal, horizontal. Through play, reenactment, and embodied research, he seeks an archaeology of gestures, uncovering how bodies carry traces of both order and liberation.