Thursday in Residence #61 with Adam Robinski

"An alien, familiar landscape"
Werner Herzog, in his film "Lessons of Darkness", argues that video imagery of burning oil wells in the Kuwait were not actually taken on Earth, but on another, alien planet. The familiar has become unfamiliar. This idea has been central to Adam Robinski’s literary approach to writing about the world around him, beginning with his debut almost a decade ago, when he decided to write about the lowland landscapes of his homeland, portraying them as exceptionally exotic, scenes that took your breath away wherever you looked. Non-fiction is a very broad term; attraction is in the eye of the beholder; truth is relative; lies can be beautiful. Robinski believes that the written word has enormous power precisely because of the perspective that an author adopts, allowing him to reach for descriptions that are truly otherworldly. He explains, “An old hiker friend of mine once told me about school trips from his youth, during which the teacher would tell them to close their eyes for a moment, and then, when they opened them, he would shout: ‘Look how beautiful it is here!’ Good books do the same to us.” They enable and encourage us to change our perspective. Sometimes a journey is enough, other times you must try to become another creature, a beaver, for example, or a migrating songbird. During his residency the Jan Michalski Foundation, Robinski will continue work on his sixth book, an exploration of the Baltic Sea. It’s an unusual body of water, on the shores of which at least a few ambitious nations live, each of them seeing the sea in their own way. Robinski’s goal is to understand these differences, as well as the commonalities.

Fondation Jan Michalski, Thursday 3 October 2024