She extends his hands in front of her. On one of them I see a tattoo of the euro symbol. ShHe arranges heris fingers framing the landscape in front of her. I know it very well. I can smell the image in my nostrils. We used to call it the smell of winter. Today we know it’s the smoke from the chimneys of the concrete houses in the suburbs, the so-called cubes that our grandparents built as a precautionary measure for future-less multi-generational families in the 1970s. The last house on the street, and behind it just a cornfield and a view of the mountains. When you were a kid, you could hide there, walk the dog, and when you were a teenager you could pop out for a cigarette or drive an old Audi from Germany into the middle of it and make love in secret. The suburbs of Bielsko-Biała, a county town in southern Poland. I also come from there. Like her, I return once a year from emigration and look nostalgically at the once green wasteland built up with warehouses. Just beyond the cornfields a bypass built with EU money makes noise. A dozen minutes and we are already on the expressway leading to the West. From there you can smell a different smell. The smell of money. Metallic, cold, pungent. It’s enough to leave. Work your fucking ass of for a few years.

Borders in the EU are becoming less and less visible. Symbolic signs on the side of highways. And yet, crossing them, you feel a change in the quality of the asphalt and the landscape. And something changes in you as well. Who are you when you cross the border? An exotic homo sovieticus? Poor but sexy*? A Euro-orphan? A citizen of the world? A child of the Erasmus generation? A digital nomad? You speak at least three languages. You practice a local accent so you don’t know it right away. You graduated from universities and pay taxes. You have all those numbers you stood in the office for. And stubborn identity politics will push you into rigid essentialist categories anyway. It will make a caricature of you.

Identities are hybrids. Fluid, changeable, negotiated and always plural. Constructed of personal histories, memories, experiences, symbols, language, a sense of belonging and exclusion i.e. situated and embedded in a particular context. They tend to be temporary, layered, often contradictory. They are constantly “produced,” constructed along with their representations, as Stuart Hall wanted**. Stretched between past and future, memory and fantasy. Constantly re-told and renegotiated according to place, context, need for survival or resistance. Shaped by relationships with others, but above all by invisible systems of power, cultural narratives and social structures. By capitalism and its infrastructures, from which it is difficult to escape.

Anna Raczynska (for a while also known as Anna Steinherz) has created a personal semiotics to talk about the paradox of borders, fluid identity and being in between. Identity contradictions come into focus in one of her most recognizable works, Future Primitive (2021). The object, made of Polish wheat and dried flowers, at first glance evokes the form of a traditional harvest wreath, rooted in the Slavic ritual of thanksgiving for the harvest, appropriated by Catholicism. At the same time, its composition is arranged in the shape of a symbol of the euro – an emblematic currency of the West, associated with a speculative economy, where the circulation of services and information has detached itself from material basics such as land, raw materials and manual labor. This work presents contradictory ideas about the relationship between East and West. Here, the East appears as an agricultural, traditional and “delayed” space based on cyclical time, while the West represents linear progress and modern purity. Future Primitive becomes a commentary on the decades-long processes of labor migration from Poland’s peripheral, agricultural regions to Western European centers, and at the same time an irony towards the utopian promises of integration and unity within the European community. Moreover, presented in exhibitions in recent years, it has gained new meanings in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the problem of grain prices, or protests related to Europe’s so-called “New Green Deal”. The simplified sign of the euro symbolizes power and accommodates many meanings and political tensions.

The theme of money, power and economic status can also be found in other works by Raczynska, such as A Monument to What Weighs Nothing but Costs Everything (2021). A personal, everyday object is scaled to monstrous proportions and takes the form of a heavy metal ATM card, bearing the artist’s name and an expiration date symbolically marking the end of her studies at the academy. The work can be read as a critical commentary on the reduction of subjectivity to an economic dimension, in which an individual’s identity is constituted by being inscribed in the logic of visibility of the banking system. The magnification and physical heaviness of the object reinforce its oppressive character, making the bank card a material symbol of the power of capital exercised over the individual experience of everyday life. Expiration Date encapsulates both an existential fear of transience and a critical reflection on the temporality of the status of the “young artist” in neoliberal society.

The euro pictogram also becomes an excuse to talk about the lives of artists in a class and economic context. A taboo subject. After all, no one will admit that paying with a card with a smile for aperol spriz during the Venice Biennale is left with a dozen euros until the next payment comes in.in the account for the next transfer. The economy of poverty is the elephant in the room of the art world regardless of age or background. Only a few percent come out ahead financially and make a career, the rest function through scholarships, benefits, occasional commissions, and if they’re lucky – they live in inherited housing or function with the support of a partner. Raczynska channels her fear of precarity through creativity, giving it a therapeutic dimension.

The boorish symbol of the euro returns as a phantasm. It organizes the individual and global reality of desires and drives. The phantasm, according to Slavoj Žižek***, is a key concept taken and developed from Jaques Lacan’s psychoanalysis has an ideological function – it masks lack, obscures the Real and enables the subject to maintain the illusion of a coherent reality. It is an imaginary structure that sustains our desires and enables us to function in the social world, even though reality is full of contradictions, violence and emptiness. For artists in the East, the euro is a phantasm of security, belonging to the “real” art world and emancipation from poverty and local constraints. For the West to the phantasm of neutrality and “natural” economic order coming from the center. For the East, the phantasm of European unity and community despite inequality, migrant exploitation or social hierarchies, and the phantasm of cultural and civilizational advancement. The phantasm is not an opposition to reality, but rather a frame through which we perceive it.

On the other hand, in the work discussed earlier, Raczynska refers by its title to American author John Zerzan’s Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), in which he criticized civilization and technology as tools of enslavement, contrasting them with life before the agrarian revolution – based on community, sensuality and balance with nature. Raczynska processes these ideas in the context of contemporary tensions between Europe’s center and periphery. In this view, Future Primitive is not just a critique of the capitalist utopia of prosperity represented by the Euro sign, but also an attempt to reclaim a political imagination that could move beyond the binary divisions of progress and backwardness. Raczynska does not so much glorify tradition as she transforms it into a speculative gesture and asks whether a “primitive” tomorrow based on values other than money is possible.

A tomorrow that hasn’t happened yet, but still looms on the horizon – like a sun-warmed highway from which one can turn back at any moment. Where the smell of the artificial forest from the Wuderbaum pendant mixes with the dust of summer. In this tomorrow, one can lie down among the ripening patches, close one’s eyes and drink sweet juice from a plastic pouch, as if the world knew no other economy but the moment. Without worrying about accent, income, background. Without being ashamed of having straw sticking out of one’s shoes – for it is from this straw that a new story grows.

* Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy – Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, New Alresford 2014. 

** Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, in: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams, Laura Chrisman, London 1994. 

*** Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, New York 1989.