Code and Nostalgia: The Material Memory of Kuba Święcicki

Kuba Święcicki’s Resonant Decay (2022) weaves 154 metres of salvaged VHS tape into suspended sculptures at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków (MOCAK). This installation invites visitors to navigate a forest of memory, where the material reflects and obscures LED projections on the walls.

Święcicki preserves and reinvents. “I’m not interested in nostalgia as decoration,” he said at a 2023 artist talk at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. “These tapes are social documents, material archives of a time before digital ubiquity.” His practice stands out among artists reclaiming traditional materials. Unlike those who use wood or ceramics, Święcicki’s medium—plastic tape coated with iron oxide—symbolizes fragility. As magnetic memories degrade, so do the cultural narratives they hold.

He is not alone in this exploration. In 2019, Alyson Shotz’s Tape Drawings reframed cassette tape as linear sculpture, focusing on light and shadow. In contrast, Święcicki emphasizes the narrative potential of his materials. His 2021 work, Endless Spool, incorporated home video snippets—distorted wedding vows and fragmented holiday fireworks—alongside the physical tapes, illustrating how memory distorts over time.

Each tape strip is unwound and rewound by hand, transforming industrial material into bespoke artefacts. This labor-intensive process echoes Eastern European textile traditions, where handmade tapestries depict personal and national histories. Dr. Marta Kowalska of the University of Łódź noted, “His work demonstrates how traditional craft methodologies can be reimagined through post-industrial detritus,” in Textile Studies Quarterly (March 2023).

The discourse around Święcicki’s work intersects with technology studies. Magnetic tape, introduced commercially in the mid-20th century, revolutionized recording. As digital formats replaced analogue, these objects became waste. Maxime Dufresne states in E-Waste Archaeologies for Journal of Material Cultures that discarded objects are “layered with the socio-technological imaginaries of their time.” Święcicki’s art excavates these histories, reactivating the latent narratives within the oxide-coated surface.

Accessibility and sustainability are implicit in his method. His preference for outdated formats may seem counterintuitive in a digital age. Yet, he argues, “We’ve lost touch with the tangibility of media,” he remarked in a 2023 interview with Contemporary Art Now. “VHS is honest. It decays in front of you.”

However, maintaining this decaying honesty is costly. VHS tape is fragile; over time, the iron oxide coating flakes, making original audiovisual material irretrievable. For Święcicki, this fragility is functional. His installations question how we reconcile memory’s limits with our desire for preservation. This issue is urgent, as UNESCO reported an 86% loss of audiovisual heritage due to improper storage and obsolete formats in 2021. Święcicki’s work reflects this ongoing erasure while resisting it.

Not all critics embrace his approach. Marija Novak, writing for ArtForum in 2022, argued that his reliance on obsolete formats risks reducing memory to mere aesthetics. Yet, curator Iwona Nowicka at MOCAK counters, “He is not imitating history. He is interrogating the ways we construct it, the ways we forget.”

Święcicki challenges assumptions about technological progress. By grounding his narrative in analogue media, he confronts viewers with decay, prompting a profound recognition: obsolescence itself might be a form of art.