Is It Worth It

Michalina Musielak and Natalia Dolgowska's video art Czy to Warto (Is It Worth It) is a kind of clip to Zdzislawa Sośnicka's song of the same title. Its form, however, brings to mind one of the most elaborate projects in the history of Polish photography: the Sociological Record by Zofia Rydet, who tirelessly roamed Poland with her camera and photographed Poles in their homes and apartments. Her camera was always positioned perpendicular to the model, at "natural" eye height, and the frame usually covered three walls of a room, the interior of which was meant to express the personalities of the people photographed and invite them into their private world. At the same time, the sum of these private portraits created a certain generalized picture of Polish society.

The artists positioned the camera, as in Rydet's work, facing their heroines in place of the "fourth wall", closing off the space of the room. Movement is introduced into this arrangement by the women filmed by Musielak and Dolgowska - old and young, adults and minors. Each of them tries - without any rules, in her own way - to dance to Sośnicka's song. They are individualized by their own choreography and bodily capabilities, while at the same time, each of them is defined - in a social, cultural, class context - by the interior in which they perform: their own and private space, shaped, however, by social, economic and geographical factors that transcend it.
The video presents a portrait of contemporary Polish women with a perversely articulated feminist message that inverts the meaning of Sosnicka's song. In it, the female lyrical subject wonders "if it's worth it" to pay the price of loneliness for being "as resilient/proud as a peacock." The women in the video seem fulfilled in their solitary dance, they don't need a complement, and their movements respond to the song's contradiction that, yes, it is worth it.
Jakub Majmurek