Martyna Miller

Martyna Miller was born in 1988, she lives in Warsaw, Poznań and Charzykowy in Poland. She graduated from cultural studies at the Institute of Polish Culture/University of Warsaw and from directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo. In 2016 she began Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies at the Faculty of Intermedia of the Uniwersity of Arts in Poznań, where in 2022 she defended her PhD with Distinction. Its subject is the sexinsitu project, developed since 2016, based on video documentations of people solo reconstructing their sexual memories. She is interested in mechanisms of soothing and healing, in relation to trauma and collectivity. In her projects she investigates alternative modes of production and communication, possibilities of contemporary transgressions and archiving of knowledge, moving in the space of memory and body. Most of her projects begin with a personal story, an intuitive anchor point, and evolve into long-term experiments, research, and practices, often involving different persons and tools. Her primary medium is video, the long-term editing of which resembles painting or weaving practices - the visual effect is created through processes of transforming fragments of collected material. She also uses performance, movement, voice and sound in her work. The resulting works are presented in the form of cycles, archives, repetitive actions and take the form of videos, documentaries, collections that flicker into gestures, fragments, constellations - transforming elements of her broader explorations. Martyna is a co-founder of the duo Polanki and the TYNA collective. Since 2018, in Poznań, she co-leads "an experiment of collective care" - the DOMIE project - which is an endeavor at the intersection of art, architecture, economics and social sciences based in the ruin in the center of the city. Paralelly in Charzykowy she develops The Lack of Forest project – a land-use initiative based in the postcatastrophic landscape of Bory Tucholskie, ravaged in 2017 by a tornado that destroyed thousands of hectares of forest. Working with the landscape and with the trauma of the inhabitants of these areas, whose world was violently transformed, the artist not only captures the traces and changes, but also actively engages in the process of commemoration. With the permission of the Forestry Commission, she acquired a pile of carps, which she takes care of. The hip of roots will remain the last preserved element of the former landscape and will be transformed into a monument of an ecological disaster, a sign that speaks of this event, subjected to the natural processes of overgrowth.

Profile picture by Paweł Śmiałek.

Website and Links: kontakt@martynamiller.com www.martynamiller.com www.domie.pl vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user22563201 sexinsitu@gmail.com

Proposal: Sexinsitu. An archive of sexual experiences. The Sexinsitu project takes the form of an archive, specific as it collects data and materials that it produces itself, according to an elaborated method. The basic units are video recordings. They are based on the method of work with the body, in which the participants, through body movements, recall their own sexual memories. They do this alone – without partners. The choreographies created in this way become a prosthesis of this memory, an attempt to materialize intimate and ephemeral sexual events in the image.This is therefore not an archive in the classical sense of the word, but rather a visual archive project that produces its own technology as a basis for creating a visuality of sexuality based on experience. Its task is to change not only the perspective of looking at sexuality, but to enable insight into this space for ourselves, to tame and express it.The virtual dimension of memory combines the tradition of performance with the subject matter of new media. The increasing participation of media in the production of our contemporary identities adds another element to this relationship – empathy through embodiment. The dual logic of remediation states that the primary goal of our culture is to become as technologically mediated as possible while removing all traces of our functioning through media. The importance of technology in the construction of our self is realized and fulfilled without our awareness of these processes. This recognition seems to be crucial in thinking about the body, its experiences and affects, including sexuality. As our primary medium, it has become the encyclopedic product of this double logic – the difference between the medialized image of the body and its experience in non-virtual life is as obvious to us as it is inescapable.In the image, we see only a piece of what opens up psychologically, socially, and interpersonally. We produce an image, this single, unique reproduction of a sexual memory which, in contrast to the simplicity with which we are used to associating the „sexual”, is illegible, unacceptable as a fetish. Too abstract on the one hand and too raw on the other. Naked and veiled, explicite and understated. Censored virtually and „innocent” in the situation of direct contact. It is a separate form of recording, something between a note, a sketch and a finished, monumental work. Reconstruction creates and opens up an entire universe, yet its documentation merely records this fact, marking the difference between image and life.In this dimension, the single act of reconstruction is also a manifesto. A reflection on corporeality, a corporeal trace, noting that I notice the body and sexuality as an element that connects me to the social world. I am on the side of action, search, weakness, experiment, the unknown, the You-oriented world.By presenting a fragment of my own sexual self, I fight for the possibility of a subjective presentation of sexuality, and thus for the empowerment and emancipation of all of us as sexual, sentient beings. Martyna Miller, fragment of the dissertation „Sexinsitu. Presentation of sex in everyday life” Martyna Miller’s art is an area of cultivation of creative relations with the world, the meaning of friendship, community, the presence of female narrative, but also an area of struggle for one’s own identity, sexuality, widely understood freedom and independence.The artist is aware of the constantly developing new technologies that change the area of art, but she is also deeply convinced that „the strength, durability, beauty and significance of images come from their function and role in the life of the community”.The theoretical work, and partially the video fragments realizations, have given me a great pleasure to experience wonderful, deeply emotional, intimate, nevertheless universal art, excellently guided by erudite theoretical work, and as free and independent as the author of this project.

Prof. Izabella Gustowska Participating persons: Jakub Bolewski, Dobrawa Borkała, Paco Muro Croket, Kristina Ćuk, Katarina Duplancić, Taras Gembik, Antii Gona, Ignacy Hryniewicz, Edka Jarząb, Dylan Kerr, Tina Keserović, Aleksandra Kluczyk, Katarzyna Korytowska, Yulia Krivich, Małga Kubiak, Kaja Kusztra, Planeta Kuz, Monika Łopuszyńska, Marta Malikowska, Elan Mehl, Zoi Michailova, Martyna Miller, Anastazja Pataridze, Michał Perła, Julia Poziomecka, Mariola Przyjemska, Jerzy Ryll, Anka Satelitarna, Piotr Sędkowski, Anka Stankiewicz, Sebastian Winkler, Marta Zdanowicz, Rafał Żarski All interested persons are invited to join the project. To make a recording, please write: email: sexinsitu@gmail.com instagram: @sexinsitu Within the residency I want to focus on further development of the project: collaboration between participants, creating a platform of further exchange of collected data, further image development and evaluation of the experience that we have as a group. Sexinsitu experience is definitely a group forming experience, a growing macroorganism, enclosed in a metaphor of a twinkling coral reef.