Hay. The Phantasmagorical Work of Anna Raczyńska

The essay begins by establishing personal context, describing a return to Bielsko-Biała in southern Poland and reflecting on how crossing borders, you feel a change in the quality of the asphalt and the landscape. And something changes in you as well.

The essay explores how identities function as fluid, changeable, negotiated and always plural, constructed from personal histories and shaped by power systems and capitalism. It emphasizes that identities are constantly produced and exist as contradictions stretched between past and future. Drawing on Stuart Hall's writings on cultural identity and Slavoj Žižek's theorization of phantasms, it examines how labels—an exotic homo sovieticus? Poor but sexy? A Euro-orphan?—imposed and internalized, reveal the shifting terrain of identity within a post-socialist, increasingly integrated Europe.

A central focus examines Raczyńska's Future Primitive (2021), which combines Polish wheat and dried flowers in the form of a harvest wreath while simultaneously arranging them as a euro symbol. This work critiques the contradiction between agricultural tradition and Western economic progress, commenting on labor migration and "European unity" despite persistent inequality.

The essay discusses A Monument to What Weighs Nothing but Costs Everything (2021), where a magnified ATM card becomes a material symbol of the power of capital exercised over the individual experience. This addresses the precarious economic reality of artists within neoliberal systems.

The text concludes by invoking John Zerzan's Future Primitive and Other Essays, suggesting Raczyńska's work proposes alternative political imagination beyond binary progress/backwardness divisions.