Handle With Care: Navigating Fragile Futures *2025

Exhibition at SIC!Elephanthouse in Luzern, Switzerland

latex, aluminium, steel, textile, forget me not flowers, resin, one channel video installation

side- specific installation / various dimensions

In the installation Kollapsmaschine (2025), the artist deconstructs the Tesla Cybertruck, which is a symbol of capitalist faith in technology as a means of combatting the apocalypse. Conceived as a bulletproof fortress on wheels, the vehicle loses its hardness in Raczyńska’s vision when it is clad in black latex, becoming akin to soft, porous skin. Instead of triumph, there is vulnerability; instead of armour, there is carnality. The artist challenges the idea of the car as a symbol of freedom and control, revealing its hidden function of masking social dependencies, oppression and violence. 

This ambivalent dimension of matter is also present in the Soft Burden, Hard Shell (2025) object. Suspended in space, the ‘corset-armour’ combines opposites: femininity and masculinity, nature and technology, softness and hardness. Decorated with forget-me-nots embedded in resin, it appears to have been extracted from a river or fallen from the sky. The reference to the legend of the knight who cried ‘Don’t forget me!’ at the moment of his death imbues this piece with a sense of memory and loss, rendering the armour less a symbol of triumph and more a protective shell of memories and sensitivity.

In the 3D film Elsewhere. Part I (2020), Raczyńska explores the theme of migration. A white van, a symbol of mobility and work for those in the diaspora, is dismantled and presented as a space of absence, with the echoing voice of a woman filling the emptiness. Here, the image of everyday life becomes a spectre, and an ordinary vehicle becomes a vessel for memory and longing. In Part II (2025), these themes are developed in the context of digitalisation and globalisation. Here, social media creates the illusion of unlimited mobility and hybrid identity, blurring the boundaries between humans, machines, and infrastructure. However, in this world of excess and acceleration, Raczyńska reminds us of the fragility of the human body and the need for planetary consciousness – communal breathing in rhythm with the Earth. 

Her art reveals that behind the myths of power and control lies a paradox: the pleasure of oppression and subjugation of one’s own vulnerability. Using materials ranging from latex to resin, Raczyńska reveals that the body and technology are not easily divided. She creates visions in which armour and corsets are tools of both protection and enslavement, where memory, fragility and desire intertwine to form a complex and ambiguous whole.

Text: Michel Rebosura