“Magua” is a Canarian word describing a kind of melancholy — a sadness, grief, or longing for something lost or never fulfilled.
For several years, I documented the nightlife, club, and music scenes of two capitals — Berlin and Warsaw. I spent thousands of hours in dark halls, basements, and temporary spaces, surrounded by sound, smoke, people, fleeting euphoria, and a sense of dissolution.
In 2021, I unexpectedly found myself on the small Canary Island of La Palma. The shift in intensity, rhythm, and space became a starting point for reflecting on sound, memory, and the experience of absence. Like fog – “mgła” in Polish – magua fills space until it becomes dreamlike. Memories and experiences lose their contours, dissolving into shapeless stains of recollection. Identity becomes fluid and blurred.
Thousands of hours vanished irretrievably.
They had to disappear so that I could find something else.
— Helena Majewska
The eponymous Magua arrived like a mist—quiet and dense, it filled the space and quietly reshaped it. For years, Helena documented the musical life of Berlin and Warsaw. Over time, the accumulated intensity and sensory overload led her toward silence. The transition from documenting the crowd to contemplating the emptiness and peace of La Palma captures a conscious transformation: from a fascination with external energy to an exploration of the internal.
In the city and on the island, music was never just a background; it was a soothing fabric binding scattered memories. In the club venues of the two capitals, sound provided support, building a safe space to lose and find oneself again. Yet, when the intense hum of the city faded, magua emerged. Music shifted its intensity, becoming a phantom sensation that—despite the absence of physical sound—endures, if only in the murmur of the waves and the gusts of the Canarian wind.
The soundtrack for Helena Majewska’s exhibition is created by the team behind Pointless Geometry. Justyna Banaszczyk (FOQL) composes a soundscape for the exhibition space. In her work, she weaves experimental music with sound art and auditory poetry, creating narratives in which the voice becomes both an instrument and a material. Her composition enters into a dialogue with Majewska’s photographs—it touches on similar registers: strangeness, intimacy, and the fear of what eludes naming. Dariusz Pietraszewski, aka copy corpo, will perform a special DJ set using tapes and vinyl, corresponding with Banaszczyk’s composition and creating another layer for the photographs on view—here, it becomes not a backdrop, but an additional dimension of the exhibition.
Curator: Krzysztof Candrowicz
Musical arrangement / Soundscape: Pointless Geometry
Producer: Katarzyna Krawczyk
Patron of the exhibition: PKO Bank Polski
__________
» GET TO KNOW THE ARTISTS «
Helena Majewska is a Polish visual artist, sociologist, and photographer currently based on the island of La Palma in Macaronesia. For many years, she documented the Polish and European experimental, avant-garde, and club music scenes while simultaneously working on commissioned projects for cultural institutions and organizations, including Amnesty International, Berlin Atonal, Unsound, Avant Art, SAUNA, Sanatorium of Sound, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, and Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Jana Matejki w Krakowie. She was also closely connected with the Warsaw-based club Jasna 1, where she documented nightlife and co-created a visual archive of the local club scene from the very beginning of its existence.
Relocating to a small volcanic island, alongside a growing interest in more sustainable ways of observing and experiencing reality, shifted her artistic practice toward exploring the relationship between humans and nature, local rituals, and alternative models of living. Photography became for her not only an artistic medium, but also a way of processing experience and integrating with the environment in which she lives.
Her work has been published and presented internationally, including in The New York Times, Mixmag, Crack Magazine, Resident Advisor, and Newsweek.
Justyna Banaszczyk—known as FOQL—is a sound artist and composer from Łódź whose practice spans experimental music, sound art, and radio formats. She co-runs the Pointless Geometry label and is a co-founder of Radio Kapitał — a community-driven station that has served as an incubator for non-commercial sound and audio practices in Poland for years.
Her work constantly crosses genre boundaries: from electronic and noise music, through sound art, to radio plays and sound poetry. She has performed at leading experimental music and new media festivals—Unsound, Sacrum Profanum, Avant Art, Up To Date, and Warsaw Autumn.
