Piotr Mlącki
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Corona Muralis
The area of research and construction of Piotr Mlącki’s artistic space is History. Corona muralis is a manifold work that juxtaposes historical areas and events that are apparently remote in terms of geography and culture. A copy of Sigismund II Augustus’s crown is encrusted with trinitite – a very rare glass that formed in the process of melting of sand grains during tests of the first nuclear weapon. But what connects the king famous for his vision of the Polish colonial empire in Central Europe in the 16th century with the history of a stone formed as a result of a thermal reaction on the desert in the state of New Mexico in July 1945, shortly before the destruction of Hiroshima? As the author of the work notices: ‘From a geological perspective, trinitite can be interpreted as a mineral foreshadowing the end-stage of history – the atom age. At the same time, it expresses the highest stage of imperialism. … As it would later turn out, the imperial style of the Jagiellon expansion became the beginning of the end.’ It is good to think about this.
Prof. Mirosław Bałka
photo: Marta Matysiak