Łęgi (Riparian Forests) – attempts at reclamation. On the poetic-visual practices of Bianka Rolando

Abstract

This article is devoted to Bianka Rolando’s book of poetry titled Łęgi (2015), which is part of a multi-element art project of the same title presented at the Leto Gallery in Warsaw (in 2015). The hermetic volume by one of the most uncompromising contemporary avant-garde poets was set in the scenery of Poznań’s Łęgi Dębińskie and their disowned – mainly violent – history; however, the specificity of the project lies in the fact that, referring to particular places and events, the author avoids explicitly referential or interventionist descriptions and narratives; instead, she performs multi-story metaphorical transformations, paradoxically conducive to developing a vision of autonomous and active nature. What emerges from the poems is a record of a private cleansing, apotropaic ritual that the poet performs in the territory of flood-meadows (it was documented in the photos included in the book and in the exhibition), aiming, on the one hand, to come to terms with (personal and collective) loss, but also to undo the finality of death; and on the other hand, to disenchant the place (according to Sylvia Federici’s proposed understanding of this category). All these activities serve to reclaim the flood-meadow in the broadest sense – its material dimension as well as its energy and a relationship with it. The proposal formulated in this article to read the volume from an ecocritical perspective draws attention to the role of non-referential approaches to nature that liberate it from anthroponormative representations (which corresponds to the metapoetic postulates of Rolando advocating the idea of anti-illustration), but also fosters the inclusion of post-secular categories in non-anthropocentric studies.