Archives: Projekty

Everything heads toward the centre

One of the key references informing Tochman’s work is the short fiction of Italo Calvino. Exploring themes of labyrinths, the condensation of reality, and its multilayered nature, Calvino constructs cosmic landscapes as uncharted territories—spaces that become symbols of infinity and the inexpressibility of human experience. In the short story All at One Point, the author takes us to a time preceding the expansion of the universe, a vision inspired by the scientific model of the Big Bang. He describes the difficulty of existing in a reality so dense and compressed that there is no room for movement. The protagonist attempts to move, to find a place for himself, to differentiate his own being, yet the conditions are extreme. The sense of personal identity becomes blurred, as it is impossible to distinguish oneself from anything else. Only the transformations unfolding within the landscape allow the protagonist to begin shaping a sense of individual identity.

Agata Cukierska, Katarzyna Kalina, from the curatorial text for the exhibition Endless Blue, CSW Kronika, Bytom, 2025

Sunspot photobook

Sunspot released by RUST Publishing is a visual and textual journey through an unfamiliar landscape, guided by intuition and chance. The path was traced using sunspots—luminous afterimages left on the retina after looking into the sun—which served as a spontaneous mapping gesture and a starting point for further exploration.

Through photographs and fragments of text, the artist searches for meaning in accidental symbols and fleeting signs, assembling them into fragile, temporary narratives that are constantly unraveling. Repetition, displacement, and ambiguity shape a shifting labyrinth that invites the viewer to wander.

This book explores the tension between the human urge to comprehend space and the inherent elusiveness of the world. Drawing inspiration from the travels of Roni Horn, the land art of Robert Smithson, and the literary visions of Borges, Calvino, Verne, and Abe Kobo, Sunspot is both a poetic atlas and an open-ended story of perception.

Photography – Joanna Tochman

Editing – Jakub Szachnowski, Krzysiek Orłowski

Design – Jakub Szachnowski

Text – Joanna Tochman

Translation – Oskar Wanat

Prepress & DTP – Jakub Szachnowski

Special thanks to Tomáš Agat Bloński and Szymon Nowak

for their support in the production of darkroom prints.

Photography Studio II / Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków

Edition of 200+10. 28x22cm + 20x15cm (book inside) / 56 pages, Swiss bound / Papers: Munken LYNX, Munken Rough

White desert

White Desert is a speculative landscape, suspended in time and space. The installation draws on the motif of the garden as a site of imagination, resistance, and transformation. Within the white desert, under near-laboratory conditions, we witness the emergence of a new ecosystem. The organisms that inhabit it hover on the threshold between plant life, animality, and abstraction. These nascent life forms await classification, while everything is coated in a strange, toxic dust.

The work is inspired by Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness — Prospect Cottage. Created on a barren, stony shoreline beneath a nuclear power station, the site stands as a raw and poetic landscape, shaped in defiance of environmental conditions and the logic of survival. On a narrative level, the installation also references the literary worlds of Italo Calvino, where space and time fracture, and matter takes on the qualities of dream, memory, and metaphor. White Desert is a place in which imagination operates as a form of survival.

Sunspot

Sunspot is a record of a trek through an unfamiliar landscape. The route was determined intuitively by marking a map with solar spots—luminous afterimages that appeared on the artist’s retina after looking into the sun. This gesture became the impulse for further exploration and an attempt to subject the landscape to geometric imagination. Throughout her journey, the photographer searched for meaning in randomly encountered symbols, arranging them into temporary narratives that kept unravelling. Repetitions, shifts, and ambiguities formed the structure of a moving labyrinth, through which images and texts guide the viewer. The project speaks to the tension between the desire to understand space and its elusiveness. The artist drew inspiration from the travels of Roni Horn, the concepts of Robert Smithson, and the writings of Borges, Calvino, Verne, and Kōbō Abe.

All photographs presented in the exhibition were developed by hand in a darkroom, emphasizing
the physical nature of working with light-sensitive material. This process, which requires
precision and attentiveness, is an integral part of the project and resonates with its contemplative,
experimental dimension.

Jakub Szachnowski, curatorial text for exhibition Sunspot, Fort Institute of Photography, Warsaw, 2025