In an elegantly ramshackle studio, perched on a fold of sylvan North Devon countryside, artist Ania Warkowicz opens a dog-eared copy of French novelist Georges Perec’s 1974 essay collection, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: ‘How does one think of nothing? How to think of nothing without automatically putting something round that nothing, so turning it into a hole, into which one will hasten to put something, an activity, a function, a destiny, a gaze, a need, a lack, a surplus…’
The quote, Warkowicz explains, is a key tenet of Praktyka: the creativity-focused retreat she founded with her partner, ex-geographer and cultural enterprise manager Henry Trew, in 2018. After leaving London to travel around Poland and the Spanish Pyrenees, they decamped to the Devon borders. Finding conceptual genesis in two other literary sources – EF Schumacher's 1973 treatise on small-scale economies, Small is Beautiful; and Kurt Vonnegut’s 2006 letter to a cohort of high school students, encouraging them to create art ‘to experience becoming’ – they began devising what would become Praktyka.
