Katastrofa na moment: „Śmierć palmy” Joanny Rajkowskiej
A Catastrophe for the Moment: Joanna Rajkowska’s “Śmierć palmy” (Death of the Palm Tree)

Summary/Abstract: The author offers an interpretation of Joanna Rajkowska’s performance “Śmierć palmy” (Death of the Palm Tree, 2019) against the backdrop of the visibility of the Anthropocene and genocide and ecocide studies. The primary context here is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call fundamental for environmental criticism: that the climate crisis should make us rethink the collective historical consciousness and the collective identities it has produced. The article recalls the original idea of Rajkowska’s installation “Pozdrowienia z Alej Jerozolimskich” (Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue) (to envisage “the void left by the Jews”), the history of its reception (through the prism of middle-class affects), and its numerous subsequent “incarnations” of alliance or protest. Although the installation appears to have turned from a memorial (the context of the Shoah) into a monument of the Anthropocene (the context of the climate catastrophe), in fact the withering of the palm tree does not invalidate previous meanings but rather shows their intertwining. The performance of the withering of the palm tree was related to the World Environment Day and lasted only about a fortnight, but the installation problematized the entanglements of the Anthropocene throughout its presence.

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