In the coal country of Upper Silesia, where the ground sinks above mine shafts, Magdalena Lazar gathers scrap metal, cast glass and found glassware into What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth at bliss in Warsaw.
In 2015 a new name was proposed for the human-dominated age: the Carbocene, which foregrounds a dependence on burning coal and oil. The curator, Eva Slabá, uses it to frame the show, arguing that “burning fossil fuels is not evidence of human power, but rather evidence of how deeply humanity has been influenced by the very matter and energy from the Earth's depths.” Magdalena Lazar comes from the mining region of Upper Silesia, and her works draw on personal and family memory within that carbon-heavy legacy.
The central work gives the exhibition its title. Lazar sets scrapyard metal against found 1980s decorative glassware. The horn-shaped glass forms echo the mushroom called the trumpet of the dead and recall a 15th-century alchemical manuscript, where decay appears as a vessel of black water, a stage called nigredo. “Inside lies a couple in a loving embrace,” Slabá writes, “marking not an end, but the origin of a new life.” Sand, the raw material of glass, lies beneath, and a charcoal drawing of organic soil remains runs along the wall.
Second Sun turns coal into image. A photograph of extracted coal is woven into fabric by the jacquard technique and lit by the orange light of a vintage lamp, so a Silesian sun seems to rise out of the dark. Steel arches bind the piece, echoing the structural anchors that keep homes from collapsing under mining tremors, while a hand-welded line from internet culture, “It's so over,” reads both as emotional whiplash and as a critique of a rhetoric swinging between industrial decline and old mines reborn as logistics hubs.
Tongues in Decline addresses the erosion of local identity. Two cast-glass tongues, set with horse bits and with melting forms like icicles, lie on lace-trimmed oilcloth and stand in for the Silesian dialect, once the music of her childhood and a badge of working-class life, now fading through disuse. The loss runs past vocabulary into a way of reading the world.
Private history surfaces in My Nightmares Are Transparent, Opening onto Prehistory. An etched drawing shows the Zabrze house the artist's great-grandfather built, the man later killed in an accident at the Bielszowice mine, overlaid with metal eyes that peer into the ground like an X-ray. In At My Most Nostalgic a swarm of steel keys pours from discarded door handles, marking repeated moves and a lost home. Vegetative Season sets out metal plants bearing pods, one with a black glass seed that, Slabá suggests, could point to the satellite mapping of the planet at night, lit not by itself but by the burning of energy.
Lazar climbs from the depths back to the surface. Her work does not cast the Silesian as a figure to fear or to find eccentric; she meets that history with respect while refusing the illusion of human control, and holds that nothing truly vanishes. What is dug up, changed or thrown away keeps circulating as matter, memory and energy, and the same holds for shared narratives, culture and language.
