Patrycja Orzechowska

The series under the title KINDERTURNEN [Gymnastics for children] consists of more than one hundred collages, which are made upon the Polish translation of the German book published in the fifties under the same title. The item is richly illustrated with photographs showing examples of exercises for preschoolers. On the photographs taken at an orphanage we can see children’s agile bodies performing sequences of exercises from sections on strengthening feet, torso, and the exercises for agility, dexterity, courage and balance. So we have exercises aimed at, as the authors mention in the introduction, upbringing children as comprehensively developed, healthy, brave and responsible individuals. Instructions for exercises both with and without equipment or movement games have been compiled on opposing pictures, representing correct and incorrect performance of the tasks. It was these tasks ‘with error’ that inspired me to create my own, alternative choreography of children’s bodies, where their systems create more disturbing structures. Figures inscribed into various structures, empty forms, cages, skeletons of buildings and constructions of letters arranged in whole words become deprived of the original accessories and equipped with other attributes intended to develop a new form. It happens also by giving these shapes, cut out of the context, lightness, devoid of gravity, and placing them in a new gray space of paper. This gentle ‘training’ is used, on the one hand, in order to search for order and harmony, and on the other hand, to ask a question about innocence of childhood games and the possibilities and aims of filling empty forms. There appear a lot of new exercises for agility, balance and smartness, and among them there are tasks for: disentangling from a complex configuration, keeping the body upright and rolling a ball/head to the destination.

I summed up the whole series in the art book KINDERTURNEN. ALTERNATIVE CHILDREN’S GYMNASTICS. A COLLECTION OF EXERCISES IN 101 SCENES AND 19 CHAPTERS¹. They are arranged in the following nineteen sections: Rings, Letters, Homework, Skeletons, Plants, Ornaments, Visual Exercises, Monstrances, Black Clouds, Underground, Black Holes, Black Mirrors, Structures, Nets, Rhythms, Other Dances, Breathing Exercises, Afterimages and Remains. But… the collection of collages grows up constantly, limited only by the finite number of children’s figures.