Look around / sense around hear around touch around Zuzanna Berendt... [et al.]

What you hold in your hands is a book, a map, a catalog, a guidebook, a treasure-collecting stockbook and a collective notebook. It’s a place of interconnections, collaboration, questions and ideas. It is a book accompanying the Polish pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial 2023. It is a map of the artistic research process which began in a specific location: a former slaughterhouse in Prague’s Holešovice district. This place has its history and memory, materiality, and human and non-human inhabitants. The guide leads you through this and other places, but also through this and other times—giving glimpses of the past and speculating about possible futures. The stockbook collects beaver tracks on trees growing along the Vltava River, words, elements of the peeling facades of slaughterhouse barracks, images, descriptions of work methods and exercises. In the collective notebook there is room for whatever you yourself bring to this place and other places where you come to look, to smell and to touch around. What you hold in your hands has its own weight, texture and surface area that can be precisely measured in square centimeters. And it all matters.