Mai & August - September 2024

In their residency research Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki look at what they consider to be an extremely unreasonable act of demonstration in favor of political reason: The self-immolation of Piotr Szczęsny on 19 October 2017 in front of the Palac Kultury i Nauki in Warsaw. With this drastic gesture, Szczęsny was protesting against the PiS government in office at the time and, according to the manifesto he read out before the burning, wanted above all to shake up his fellow citizens – and call them to common sense. Self-immolation has its own tradition, particularly in the post-Soviet region. Regarding this topic Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki is interested in several aspects:

1.Performative unreason vs. political reason as a theatrical gesture
2.Gendered gestures: self-immolation as a male fantasy?
3. A single body and the collective imaginary: what’s a single bodies impact?