"Trans-fereo" or: the Inversion of Time

the concept of metamorphosis not only determines the Onone project and Alicja Zebrowska’s variations on Body Art and the aesthetik of the hybrid body. It has for a long time been inherent to her work and can be found in the Land Art projects as well. In 1992, sho installed a brightly shining, four-cornered stele at the peak of the Koscielic mountain in the Tatra mountains, not far from her place of birth. On a small plateau, she constructed a circular pyramid of fine, light-coloured sand. The project was titled „Trans-Fero” (from the Latin word transfero - I cary over, I transplant, I shift, I transfer=metaphor, I change=metamorphosis). The material Alicja Zebrowska used had been extracted from a quarry 150 kilometers far away.
The significance of this action was as a form of symbolic restitution. Through millions of years of earth history. The sand and sandstone of the Tatra mountains had been eroded, carried off, ground down, or compacted and brought to a place far from its origins. Alicja Zebrowska turned this process around. The arrow of geological time, which only knows one direction, is reversed in the artistic process. Carrying back the sand, the transfer up into the Tatra mountains becomes, thus, a symbol for time, in much the same way as the stele and the pyramid become ciphers for a geological point of origin. Here art means reading traces and interpreting traces on the horizon of world-time, beyond the time of human history. It operates aesthetically in theunimaginable. What are „millions of years”? Is the slow crosion of sandstone-massifs, their transportation over hundreds of kilometers, this decomposition of mountains into fine sand imaginable? Immanuel Kant called this dimension beyond the comprehension of the senses and beyond imagination the Sublime. Alicja Zebrowska presents the Sublime not through imposing gestures, but through minute sambols stele and pyramid may well call to mind monumental architechture, which demonstrates imperial power, but here these forms disappear in the rough, dark massivity of the Tatra mountains. Through their almost white liminousity and regular forms, though, the are unmistakeably symbols that could only have been brought forth by human beings. Simultaniously, the refers to something transhuman – to the monstrosity of geological time. This is not present, but presented. Faced with the colossal dimensions of nature, these unassuming symbols reduce the insolent monumentality of the archetechtonic will to construct to a truly human size.
Alicja Zebrowska also demontrates, what a sign can or should be at all. ’Transfer’ means, namely, the same as etaphor’, which in Greck is ’to carry over’ (metaphorein). Alicja Zebrowska took this literally, when the sand was ’carried back’ over 150 kilometers to the peak of the Tatra mountains. This procedure holds a mysterious deop dimension of the symbolic process. What the artist does here is to practice a ritual, a magical ceremony, in which ’something’ is substituted and transformed. The transfer takes place not only between locations, but also from one status to another. The signs arc handed back at the very site of their material source. Is it possible that this structure, which follows the logic of sacrifice, determines the semiotic process as a whole? Is Alicja Zebrowska saying that our theories of the sign, which assume that the sign is arbitrary and donventional, are superficial or even wrong? Are there other processes in art, in which the semiotic ’reimbursement’ is a reminder, that signs are a kind of sacrifice? A sacrifice, in which the signifier is set as a substitute in the place of a substance, a process from which even the ’forthest’ sign in time and space remains dependent? These questions are too difficult to be answered here. One thing is certai, though. With her installation „Trans-Fero”, Alicja Zebrowska wanted not only to create a piece of Land Art. She wanted also to explore the process of semiosis, of metaphorisation, and of (geological) metamorphosis. This aspect connects the installation to the, at first glance, so different Body Art projects.