Agata Adamiecka, Clara Probst, Marta Górnicka
STILL ALIVE. DIONYSUS AND DIGITAL/ RITUAL CHORUS

Fragment conversation with Marta Górnicka from STILL LIFE catalogue

Who is Dionysus for you?

Dionysus is the key figure of politicaliity today, one which opens up the possibility to confront the situation we are in, and perhaps points to the direction in which to go in order to overcome it. Dionysus is ›the stranger‹. He comes from the outside of our world’s logic – that is from the outside of the closed system of accumulation, exploitation and violence, in which we are locked so tightly that our imagination is unable to generate an alternative. He is the one who leads the way to escaping the mechanisms that separate us from life and are aimed at reproducing death.

A dithyramb is a song which connects humans, animals, plants and soil, crossing any boundaries, annulling any categories imposed on what exists. Dionysus walks between worlds and dimensions, and the song sung in his praise transforms reality. — It is precisely Dionysus’ transformative power that has the greatest political potential for me today. Dionysus is a bastard who defies any categorization: He is beyond divisions between genders, races and species, between the human and the non-human, the organic and the machine, the physical and the digi- tal. He is multi-form, polymorphous, simultaneously digital and ritual. He speaks many languages, calls out in an animal’s voice, or a video game monster’s. He is a figure which brings all the cogs of ideological machinery to a halt. A formula which explodes all formulas. A figure of a new order. The Re-Invented Society.