Marta Wódz, Constant, Exact, Eternal
Curator: Karolina Puchała-Rojek
Constant, Exact, Eternal is a video installation whose title draws from an inscription carved in the pedestal of a monument in Ukraine: “Constant, Exact, Eternal place. Very exact, with a special apparatus made in Austria and Hungary with a scale of meridians and parallels to the Centre of Europe, it was fixed here in 1887”. The projections show places considered to be the Geographical Centre of Europe; at least six such sites have been established since the eighteenth century, and each of them has a monument declaring that the place in question is the correct one. It was first marked in 1775 by a Polish astronomer—according to his calculations, the Centre of Europe was in Poland, in the town of Suchowola, not far from Białystok. At present, the most popular Centre of Europe is a point near Vilnius, in the village of Purnuskes, which was marked in 1989 by a French scientist and confirmed by the French National Institute of Geography. This is the only example to date of a scholar finding the centre outside of his or her own homeland. Although every Centre of Europe is in a different country, with hundreds of kilometres between them, none of them has much happening, or anything in particular to see. The places do, of course, differ in terms of landscape, but their atmosphere is surprisingly similar—they seem suspended in time, miles from how we might imagine the centre of mythical, eternal Europe.
Marta Wódz (1993, Warsaw)
Works and lives in Warsaw. A finalist of the 2017 Hestia Artistic Journey competition, she also participated in the Young Talents by Magnum Photos and Canon programme (Visa pour l’Image 2017, Perpignan). In 2017, she graduated summa cum laude from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2014, she studied at the Institute of Design at Lahti University of Applied Sciences and simultaneously took classes at Aalto University in Helsinki. Her artistic endeavours usually involve video forms and photography, and she is keenly interested in subjects related to culture, society, and contemporary political transformations.
