Magdalena Petryna talks to Anna Nacher and Marek Styczyński, the creators of the Magic Carpathians

The Carpathians are not very strongly present in Poland as a concept, unlike the highlanders and their culture. And it is here that the problem lies, because we have an ossified, clichéd and simplified understanding of what the heritage of mountain areas is.

When more than twenty years ago the Magic Carpathians were created as a research and artistic project, the name included the phrase “Lost Space” – how did you understand it at that time? And what made you change the name later?

Marek Styczyński: It was the first part of the name “The Lost Space: the Magic Carpathians”. It disappeared because The Magic Carpathians started to function on their own, simply as a name of the music band. We called it lost space (we could even say forfeited), because it seemed to us – today we are sure – that it was an extraordinary bio-regional energy, very inspiring, rich, vivid, organic, offering many solutions for our times, but not present in the global awareness as much as it deserves. It was also about music. I had already done other projects, where we focused on Asian music, original meditation music. We were fascinated by instruments that were difficult to obtain at that time, and I discovered that the Carpathian vitality, so close to us (physically and spiritually), hides the phenomena that are at least as inspiring as the ones from countries fashionable at the time, such as India with the sarod lute, sitar and tabla drums or Australia with the didgeridoo. We decided that it was definitely worth focusing on the area which we come from and which we are part of. As a naturalist I always knew that the Carpathians should be considered together with the Balkans, and suddenly there was a very interesting zone of rich sources and various inspirations, sometimes going far beyond music. We gradually got to know many roads connecting the Carpathians and the Balkans with the world.

Anna Nacher: The lost space is also about the change in thinking that has accompanied us since the mid-1990s. All spheres with a powerful cultural identification suffer from a peculiar ailment: the Carpathians are not very strongly present in Poland as a concept, unlike the highlanders and their culture. And it is here that the problem lies, because we have an ossified, clichéd and simplified understanding of what the heritage of mountain areas is. This is doubly damaging and harmful, because on the one hand it is a rather arbitrary vision, and on the other hand cultural forms and practices that do not fit in with this model disappear or are drastically pared down. The Carpathians have always been something bigger than what is left of them in our culture today.

Secondly, the Carpathians are also difficult to grasp and examine, because it is a space where cuts have been constantly made, especially in recent history. In short, this is an area of expulsions, of which few people today want to be aware. This regards the whole Low Beskid, but not only. It was a spirit of dual movement, both in time and space. I am not talking about the obvious here, that is about Wallachian settlements, of which, in fact, researchers do not have any precise notions. Moreover, the Carpathians, reaching their northern end in Poland, adjoin the Pannonia two hundred kilometres to the south and have always drawn many shepherding and gardening patterns from it.

So we, being from the Carpathians, have always had problems with concepts that assume that we have a uniform culture, which we have to defend. At some stage, we thought that this “lost space” nudged us towards a discourse that was too museum-like and too stale, but now I think that paradoxically, after these twenty years of the project’s existence, we need to return to such a viewpoint. I was born in the Carpathians, and when I go to visit my parents living in a village in the Polica range, I see how much has disappeared – of both cultural and natural fabric. And this process has not even been documented.

In your case, turning to the Carpathian musical tradition means not only discovering extant instruments, but also constructing your own ones, experimenting with field recordings, improvising and creating musical collages.

M.S.: All well-established cultures consist of many layers, those more prominent and those obscured or completely hidden. We have always been very much intrigued by the ritualistic and extremely individualistic layer. After all, the living fabric of the Carpathian culture does contain such a layer, both in the instruments and musical practices, and in describing the world with the help of the annual calendar and celebration of the seasons. Reaching this layer requires long apprenticeship, getting to know and learning from the landscape, people, non-human co-creators of the Carpathian space, and active participation in the life and energy circulation of the Carpathian element. Our books and texts, recorded documentation, workshops, hikes, friendships and projects document all stages of this process. We have tried to be as authentic and honest as possible. This deliberate practice of more than twenty years has brought us to Slovakia, which for six years has been gradually turning into our main home.

From the very beginning, nature and landscape have been important elements of the Carpathian culture for you, you can see it in the titles of albums and songs; how the relationship with these elements of the world has changed with time?

M.S.: We have many ways of getting to know the Carpathians that we have invented ourselves. We still use some of them, taken from psychogeographic practices like free drift. Paradoxically, we gained a lot of experience treating each area as full of mysteries and meanings, as we do during our travels to our favourite areas in Sicily, Corsica and Calabria or during our journeys in the tundra behind the polar circle or in the Himalayas or mountains of Bulgaria, which we treat as a kind of rites of passage. People who live in difficult areas with landscape that is still overwhelming and expressive (e.g. mountains) have many common features. We quickly discovered that the nomads chasing reindeer were present in today’s Poland for nearly a thousand years, and that reindeer bones are regularly excavated in the Kraków Jura. Thus, exploring the Carpathians also leads us deep into time, and apart from people associated with reindeer there are fascinating traces that Celtic culture and that of many other nations were present in the Carpathians. Nowadays, we are probably much more sensitive to the relics of indigenous cultures remaining in the landscape and bearing the marks it imprinted. We are beginning to expertly recognise the layers and influences, the general flavour and the energies connecting the Carpathians, and the perfect key to this knowledge and practice is ethnobotany.

After years of artistic activity in the Magic Carpathians you have found your place in Slovakia and created Biotope Lechnica, where you work with music and plants. What has this place given you?

M.S.: Our biotope (Greek for “a place to live”) is an unplanned, but very clear result of the fact that we have taken learning about life in the Carpathians seriously. From a certain point on, there is a strong need to take part in shaping a section of a fascinating landscape, a place in an energetic sense, and to prove oneself in an ordinary life in authentic conditions. We like the distinctness of this small community minding its own business, not succumbing to mental agitation, which would be the exact opposite of the local survival strategies. As usual, when the student is ready… circumstances launch the next stage of learning and if you value determination and authenticity, you enter this stage with joy. It was the same with us and we very gratefully welcomed such a wonderful experience as renovating a few buildings one hundred and fifty kilometres from home, without a car, with limited resources and dozens of commitments, jobs in Kraków and a permaculture setup in one of the most difficult places to do it that we know of. Lechnica gives us peace, rest, the possibility to turn our ideas into reality; it is a place that gives us inspiration, opportunities and satisfaction. It is also starting to be a place of very interesting meetings, discussions, learning and artistic experiments, but above all it is a stable base and a place of our isolation. Daily contacts with the Slovaks allowed us to get rid of the remnants of Polonocentrism, which annoys as when we observe how Poles get on with the world. We notice and practice points of view, stories, poetics, rhythms and passages of time that are different from our own. Our sense of place after six seasons in Biotope Lechnica illustrates well the saying of Bill Mollison (the pioneer of permaculture) that we are constrained only by our imagination!

A.N.: I wanted to talk about another element that is also connected with the concept of lost space, which we talked about earlier – namely the great harm always done to the Carpathians by national borders; and I use the word “harm” deliberately, because we know fascinating stories about the village of Lesnica, where people say that the war started in 1938, because the Poles took over several military posts and occupied the school.

M.S.: In the local memory the war started in 1938, it’s not a mistake.

A.N.: Perhaps the discourse about Polishness, about national identity seems justified when seen from the centre of Poland, but not here on the outskirts. Slavic languages differentiated late. In the 19th century, as Seweryn Goszczyński walked around the area, he listened to peasants, who spoke the same dialect on both sides of the conventional border. And it’s not like they were Poles or Slovaks, they spoke their own language. Here in Lechnica we find ourselves in an area that has preserved it; the Slovaks do not understand the inhabitants of Zamagurze (Slovak Zamagurie), because they speak a dialect, and it isn’t Polish either. There are many enclaves, languages, dialects, cultures “in-between”. It is impossible not to do harm to this area if very narrow, restrictive definitions and categories such as Germans, Poles and Slovaks are used. And unfortunately, at such moments in history when these discourses were gaining strength something very bad usually happened here. The Lesnica village reaction to this Polish usurpation was very interesting – people simply left their homes and went to the Slovak side. Not because they had such a strong national identity, as these concepts were still very fluid. Instead, they thought it was very unfair when someone told them who they were supposed to be.

M.S.: You put up your boards here by force, and we refuse to respect them and we will not live here.

A surprisingly non-violent reaction…

M.S.: Right, I would say that this is a typical strategy for these areas. We look at it as mild, but it is firm, it is very pragmatic, people hope that they will stay in the area, they do not burn bridges. There is nowhere to go either – there is the Dunajec river, on the other side there is the Danube river basin, so the area is strictly defined, everywhere there are people and they try to live fairly peacefully. That is why today there are some subtle threads confirming that when there used to be a border, these threads also lasted, although they perhaps did not form an elaborate fabric, which was often secret anyway.

A.N.: Personally, I feel safe here because of the fact that real contacts with people, with neighbours, with friends are more important than the thin line on the map, which can assume a terrible gravity and dread. In Europe, we are once again dealing with madness, which is beginning to attribute some incredible power to the borders, the power to heal or purify in the opinion of some. Here I feel safe, because the discourse that the border is an impassable barrier has never been in vogue here. People probably like such specific identities, but the problem is that here it is difficult to believe in this uniformity.

M.S.: It’s not that this is a place isolated from the evil world, that there are no tensions, that everyone lives a fairy tale; no, it’s not perfect. But I have learned a lot here. Personally, I have learned tolerance and patience, because the Carpathian zone is a negotiation zone for me.

You two have been interested in Slovakia before, you have written two books about it together; what Carpathian inspirations can you find here?

M.S.: Slovakia is fascinating, because the Carpathians occupy over seventy percent of the country’s area. I once wrote that it is the most Carpathian country (which outrages fans of Romania and Ukraine). For example, Slovaks have a very mysterious instrument, my favourite one, which I’ve been dealing with for twenty years, fujara, a shepherd’s pipe, probably the biggest flute or recorder that exists. The fujara can be over two meters long, it is an unusual instrument and it is not entirely clear where it came from. It is not old, it goes back only two hundred or three hundred years. We are now working with our colleagues on the rest of the history and evolution of the shepherd’s pipe. Evolution, since we have constructed two fujaras modelled on the first such instrument, built by Jan Kawulok from Istebna in the Silesian Beskids. Mr Jan Kawulok (unfortunately no longer alive, an outstanding musician, instrument builder and guardian of tradition) constructed a stool fujara. It is not held, but built into a stool. Kawulok passed on a story that this instrument was an attribute of old Carpathian sorcerers, some of whom were shepherds. I don’t believe that such an instrument really existed in the shepherd’s culture. Its emergence shows fantastic creativity and stubbornness. On the one hand, it was necessary to cope here, to be able to make various things with a small amount of tools and materials, and on the other hand, there was a desire to do something beautiful, intriguing, not necessarily practical and measurable in material terms. It was from these desires, abilities and stubbornness that what we called the Carpathian vernacular engineering came into being. The Carpathians abound in such solutions, constructions and fantasies come true.

An important component that combines probably all practices in Biotope Lechnica – artistic, musical, permacultural – is work with plants. What does the relationship with plants bring?

M.S.: I professionally deal with plants and plant communities, and privately I supplement this knowledge with ethnobotany. Ethnobotany is a discipline of knowledge with more than century-long history and is the subject of university studies. It is particularly well developed in the USA and Great Britain, but several years ago it appeared in various forms in Poland as well. Like everything else in our country, it exploded and then went out, but a few people are slowly blazing the trail. My book, “Wprowadzenie do etnobotaniki Karpat i Bałkanów – Zielnik podróżny” [Introduction to the ethnobotany of the Carpathians and the Balkans: a traveling herbarium], was another summary of my tuning into the organic world of the Carpathians and finding hidden meanings in culture. Knowledge about the place and role in the Carpathian culture of such plants as elderberry, deadly nightshade, henbane bell, Veratrum album, meadow saffron, blackthorn, yew, fir, sycamore, periwinkle and many others opens many doors and many leads. Without ethnobotanical knowledge, it is now difficult to envisage serious research on ancient cultures or to understand the present. Work with plants cannot be limited to systematics and nomenclature or lists of medicinal properties of plants. To get to know plants well, you need to have them at your fingertips and observe them for years, in semi-wild conditions as well as in the field and in all seasons. Plants are in contact with the environment, they are living, sensitive and conscious beings. They enable us to live on Earth and we will not survive a day without them. They enrich our own sensitivity and teach us that humans are not as perfect a species as they think they are. There is no nature conservation or good environmental management without plants. Plants also teach us to enter sonic areas that are inaccessible to Western ways of music teaching. Plants teach us permaculture because it is a way to design a sustainable, good life based on observations of nature, mainly observations of permanent plant habitats. Here my expertise found a complement in my hobbies – ethnobotany and sensitivity to the sound sphere.

Working in Biotope you also combine knowledge and an analytical approach with a profound personal experience of the natural world – how does it work?

M.S.: In my series of public lectures, the topic I titled “the reality of permaculture” returns, and its symbol is a Greek garden hoe hand-forged from a piece of iron. Just as certain landscapes evoke (and enable) a certain type of thinking, deepened by movement – wandering, walking, pilgrimage, free drift, garden work, so the materiality of tools and the physicality of work in permaculture determines its specific, healing flavour and intellectual potential. Hortitherapy, the older sister of permaculture, was born out of the recognition and appreciation that the effects of staying in the garden and even the smallest garden works were beneficial. Permaculture derives from nature, but nature spotting becomes more insightful when we walk out of a garden, food forest or forest garden into an area that is wild or only minimally affected by people. In Nature we feel very well, it is a diverse and surprising element, extremely lively and flexible, completely undogmatic and wonderfully pliable. We have never, even for a moment, felt like owners of land, garden, meadows… rather we are close by and for as long as possible.

You can look at habitats and networks, but you can see them as a resource and not as part of the world you are building relationships with.

M.S.: Our observation perspectives are different, but they produce almost the same effect. Apart from my profession, I’ve been a musician for forty years, Anna studies herself and her surroundings through vocal practices and the ability to develop her experience into a melodic and rhythmic treatment of emotions and experience – she also looks at everything from the perspective of culturally oriented humanities. Where we are from in the sense of the birthplace is probably important too. The essence of the name Magic Carpathians was to define this as well. We are from the Carpathians, it is a magical space from many points of view, not only in terms of esotericism, fairy-tale associations etc. In this context I think about a sort of magic that happens, is a phenomenon that we feel, but fail to fully explain – we can admire, adore and cherish, as we did yesterday evening: we stood for an hour and watched what happens in the sky. Of course we can try to explain that these were specific types and forms of clouds, but maybe this admiration is more appropriate and says more about what we can really do in this environment and who we are. I think that this is where such a multiple view comes from, and permaculture seems to have been tailor-made to develop in the Spiš region. Because Spiš is a permaculture, a huge permaculture that has passed the test in many ways, for many hundreds or even thousands of years.

Permaculture is understood here in a broader sense than tending a garden?

M.S.: Permaculture is a term coined by Bill Mollison in the early 1980s from the words “permanent agriculture” and means an ethical way of designing stable living conditions based on respect for nature and people. The three basic principles of permaculture are: take care of the Earth, take care of people, limit your needs. This last message, perceived as too radical forty years ago, has been replaced by “share your surplus”, but our current situation of environmental disaster inclines us to return to the original wording of the founding principles. Permaculture is now a world-wide network of alternative communities, food cycles and seed banks, rich in forms, as well as centres of social practices based on respect for nature and understanding of real human needs. Permaculture is possible everywhere, at any time and by everyone. Permaculture Magazine, the UK’s leading journal, has been published for 26 years (in two versions – for Europe and for the US), and permaculture flourishes in big cities like London, in the countryside, in the suburbs, and is also a way to revitalise devastated areas and communities. Different permaculture practices are used in refugee camps and in large deforested areas of Africa to transform them into rich and sustainable ecosystems. Today, permaculture has gone far beyond being a collection of gardening techniques (and has never been merely a technique) and serves as a model for the design of sustainable communities and individual life solutions.

The key to understanding your experience of space may also be the title of one of the Magic Carpathians albums, Acousmatic Psychogeography – the mutual influence of man and the environment is associated here with the rejection of ocular-centrism.

A.N.: When you spend a lot of time in such an environment, other sensory economies and the combination of sight and hearing are much more complex than you think, and other senses are also involved. It turned out, for example, that for me the sense of smell is a powerful form of communication with the environment, I have a feeling that many plants communicate with us through smell. Listening, which we most often treat as a musical quality, can simply be a research activity. For example, I often listen to a storm approaching me, and I’m quite good at estimating how much time there’s left before the storm, in a mountainous area of course, and this is very subtle knowledge, which would be difficult to pass on to others – it’s not accidental that it’s called “silent knowledge”.

Does it result mainly from the experience of being in a particular space?

A.N.: People who were close to nature, who were immersed in it, had this knowledge. It came from experience and observation – in fact, in today’s research on climate change, in a humanistic version (there is an approach called environmental humanities) there is a lot of reflection on building links between science and so-called indigenous knowledge. More and more is being said and written about the fact that if we were able to make better use of the knowledge that has already been developed, we would definitely be in a different place today. And it is not the case that the knowledge generated by Western culture – with its predilection for strict measurements, empiricism, scientific facts – is useless; of course it isn’t. But the knowledge developed, for example, by Inuit communities in Canada works at different levels and concerns other areas, where Western science often does not have access. Hence the very interesting attempts at a reconciliation, and it seems to me that part of the indigenous peoples’ knowledge is triggered by other sense registers. They can draw on the full sensorium, they can also develop it scientifically, not in the Western sense of the word, but it is a legitimate way of producing knowledge about the world, grounded in experience and its intellectual reworking, perhaps by means of other procedures, but the effect is very similar. In short, listening is now a way for me to explore the world. It gives a slightly different view, access to different processes. Listening gives very good results when it comes to relationships with water – these are the topics that have fascinated us lately.

Carpathianness understood as dealing with a particular space and climate fits here?

A.N.: Yes. I’ll give you a very simple example – three small houses in which we live here were built without foundations. Let’s think what happens to one of our fundamental cultural metaphors. In our culture, there are many stories about strong foundations, bedrocks, building on the rock and so on. Meanwhile, it turns out that it is impossible to build on any rock in this area. Abstract systems will not work here, what matters is that the houses will be standing here, in this particular place. It is not the assumption about effective ways to build that is decisive, but actual effective building in specific conditions.

Biotope Lechnica is a laboratory where you are still gaining and sharing your knowledge?

M.S.: We have been dealing with the Carpathians for so many years, we have a project known in the world, maybe more in the world than in Poland. After all these experiences we find so much to learn in this place that I sometimes wonder whether we can demand such a long focus on one area from people. How to pass on such knowledge? I am convinced that it is impossible to talk about it. Some things can only be learned by working, doing things in practice. By the word practice I understand not only work with plants, but also artistic activities, initiating new parts of permaculture, creating niches for people and animals, cognitive expeditions, collecting herbs and fruit, decorating houses, creating garden sanctuaries, making fires and incensing things with resins and herbs, irrigation, improving the waste and water cycle, enriching plant collections, sitting quietly and listening/looking/tasting with your smell… there are so many possibilities and the main thing is – let’s do something real!

I suppose that the Carpathians, taking the Spiš space as an example, could become a universal model of overlapping cultures, a negotiating mould of existence that assumes we do not wake up in the morning with the feeling that we know what the whole world should look like.

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

Anna Nacher – culture expert, works at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, her academic interests focus on media theory from a culture studies perspective, research on sound, media art, e-literature, video games in artistic strategies. Author of books “Telepłeć: Gender w telewizji doby globalizacji”, “Rubieże kultury popularnej: Popkultura w świecie przepływów”, and “Media lokacyjne: Ukryte życie obrazów”. Singer, co-creator of the Magic Carpathians, co-author of alternative guides and travel books.

Marek Styczyński – expert in the ecology of mountain areas, musician, multi-instrumentalist and constructor of new instruments, ethnobotanist, actively involved in implementing permaculture in a wide sense of the term at Biotope Lechnica. He is the author of the book “Zielnik podróżny: Rośliny w tradycji Karpat i Bałkanów” and co-author of alternative guides and travel books, articles, columns and popular science texts.

The Magic Carpathians – a project started in 1998 by Anna Nacher and Marek Styczyński. The artists create music that draws energy from the musical traditions of the Carpathian bend, indigenous cultures of the European North, Asia, as well as countercultural experiments from minimalism to American and German psychedelia. These sources produce music that eludes generic definitions and grows out of the spirit of improvisation.

There are fourteen albums with the music of the Magic Carpathians (in Poland, the United States, Italy, Sweden and Great Britain). The band went on two tours in the USA in 2001 (nearly twenty concerts, including the legendary Knitting Factory club in New York) and in 2006 (more than ten concerts, including the prestigious Terrastock Festival and the famous New York club Tonic), regularly plays in Europe, and was featured on a compilation released by the British music magazine “The Wire”. The Magic Carpathians have performed at major festivals (the OFF Festival in Katowice, 2014, Experimental Stage), in well-known clubs in major Polish cities, small bookshops (such as Tajne Komplety in Wrocław) and art galleries (CSW in Warsaw; EL Gallery in Elbląg; Zero Gallery in Berlin). The musicians run their own music preservation label, World Flag Records, which has published nearly forty titles documenting field recordings made during travels, improvised music sessions, as well as recordings of sound walks and experimental recordings (e.g. new types of instruments).

Biotope Lechnica – a field centre of bioregional and permacultural practices in the small Slovak village of Lechnica. It is a place open to herbalists, cultural researchers, gardeners, artists, theoreticians and practitioners of ecological education – to all people interested in developing ways of sustainable and responsible living and seeking answers to today’s crises inspired by traditional forms of farming and creating. It offers workshops and internships.