The text analyses Zofia Kulik’s two films that form the cycle ”Cultivating the Archive: How the Sum Total of Small Actions Builds the Archive” (2016) and ”A Sum of Rags and an Archive Next Door, the Kingdom of Helena Kulik, Zofia’s Mother, in which the Archivist Grew Up” (2017). Both interweave two themes: work and the mother – daughter relation.
The artist shows that her connection with her mother runs through ‘activitation’ (‘czynnościowanie‘, Zofia Kulik’s term) – an inner urge to constantly ‘do something’ and the resulting ongoing performance of a range of activities that are (or at least Kulik and her mother believe them to be) necessary for the maintenance of the collection and the surrounding environment. However, their activities are not identical and, above all, they function differently in the social order. The films do not raise the question of labour division in a straightforward way, but it resonates more strongly in statements concerning the mother’s significance in the development of the artist’s career. I also highlight a different economic aspect of ‘activitation’: the failure to satisfy the neoliberal demand of productivity.

ORCID

Agata Jakubowska is a modern and contemporary art historian and a professor at the University of Warsaw. She is the author and editor of numerous publications dedicated to women artists, e.g. Feminist Art Historiography in Eastern Europe and Latin America (ed. with Andrea Giunta, “Ikonotheka” 33, 2023), Sztuka i emancypacja kobiet w socjalistycznej Polsce. Przypadek Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś (2022), and All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the long 1970s (ed. with Katy Deepwell, 2018).