See “Then I bought, so that I looted” Mo Tomaszewska's performance: as part of the ON (A) -OFF cycle. Alternative Women's and Minority Practices

The starting point of the performance is the story of the artist's great-grandmother — Agnieszka, a woman loved and important in the family. However, the artist's memory also remained a painful sentence uttered by her husband: “Then he bought it so that I could plunder” — recalled by their daughter-in-law with clear regret. The sentence, which functioned as a joke, reveals the linguistic and cultural logic in which the woman is reduced to the position of an acquired object.

“I am interested not only in its content, but above all in the mechanism through which such words pass through generations, repeated and tamed as an entertaining anecdote,” says the artist.

The performance looks at what is preserved in the family story and what disappears from it. In this story, the voice of the man is preserved, while the experience of the woman to whom these words were addressed remains unspoken. The artist relates this story to the social and moral realities of the early twentieth century, when marriage was an institution strongly based on the hierarchy of gender and the subordination of woman to man, and the idea of obedience to him was inscribed in the social conception of the role of woman.

The artist, a feminist who works at the junction of performance art and artivism, takes up in her practice the themes of social inequality and human rights. It deconstructs myths and traditions that replicate violent patterns, looking at the mechanisms that allow them to survive and be passed on to subsequent generations.

“I look at the duplicated, violent pattern and how certain mechanisms of the patriarchal way of thinking, today taking the form of mocking domestic violence against women in stand-up, are still present and still doing very well,” she says.

Sound arrangement: Mikołaj PoncyljuszText: Mo Tomaszewska

For whom: adultsCost: 15 złTickets to be purchased at the ticket office on the day of the event.

Sensitive content: there is a theme of violence in the performance

photo: D. Kozłowski

Mo Tomaszewska — visual artist, performer, hydrofeminist. A graduate of the Faculty of Industrial Forms (MA 2018) and the Faculty of Intermediates (MA 2022), Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She studied painting and art history at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, UK (2014). Participant of KEM School (2024). She completed a one-year documentary theater course Teatr na faktach at the Jerzy Grotowski Institute (2023—2024), where she realized a performative reading “Fluo ergo sum — I flow, so I am”. In 2022, she realized the project “I give my heart to the River” — a solitary, month-long protest-performance, during which she sailed over 1000 km in a canoe through the Vistula River to the Baltic Sea, as an act of opposition to the degradation of the largest river in Poland.