The wooden girl

“Movement is life, and life is movement” — a well-known phrase, wrongly attributed to Aristotle, has long since lost its status as a philosophical statement and has become a rhetorical truism. In a situation of stagnation, however, it reveals its problematic nature: does movement guarantee vitality, or can it exist as an empty, inert form? In a state of weakness and fatigue, a person is confronted with a choice between activity and passivity, between the roles of subject and observer. Without any visible outcome, every action feels false, mechanical. A person no longer feels their own agency. This inner conflict is transferred into an everyday scene — morning exercises — a daily physical practice intended to maintain fitness and health. The cracking of joints gives way to a wooden creaking. The image of “woodenness” is associated with the cultural archetype of the puppet — an artificially created body deprived of autonomy. In Carlo Collodi’s. The Adventures of Pinocchio, the puppet strives for transformation — for a transition from object to subject, from mechanical movement to a “living” body. Daily exercise becomes not a matter of health, but a practice of symbolic transformation. The work reenacts an attempt to cross the boundary between the body as material and the body as a bearer of agency.