What does a year mean anymore. We measure time as if it were neutral, but years are not containers, they are filters. Some years sharpen the world, others blur it. This one did not clarify anything, it exposed repetition. We like to believe that movement equals progress, that travel, production, noise, creation are evidence of change, but what if most years are simply rehearsals of the same fear, staged in different locations?

What if a year is not something we pass through, but something that passes through us, testing which illusions we are still willing to defend. This year did not answer anything. It mostly removed excuses. Excuses not to paint, not to write, not to film, because there is no audience and no so-called profit.

Painting. When I was around 12, I started drawing people on fire – burning bodies, flames everywhere. My parents saw it, got scared, and gently asked me to stop. I stopped. For 20 years, haha. This year, staring at a white canvas, my hand kept going back to fire. I did not plan it. I did not analyse it. Fire just appeared, then people on fire, then house on fire, and so on. It slowly turned into the ‘Collapse’ series – not as a statement, more like a reflection of how things feel now (or forever?). I feel like everything decaying, shifting, breaking, but still strangely alive. 

I missed my family badly this year – that pushed me toward charcoal. Memory, nostalgia, half erased wrapped objects, people, places that do not exist anymore. These drawings felt therapeutic in a way I did not expect. I am not sure I will ever stop painting. ‘Why is it not on Instagram yet?’ my brother keeps asking. I honestly do not know, maybe I do not want it to live there. I finally rented a studio – not because I needed space to work harder, but because I needed a room where nothing happens. A room at normal temperature, no noise,no one watching, just me and the echo of my thoughts. I may never have a permanent home, but having this small studio feels necessary, a place where my thoughts can refrigerate.

Writing. There are many finished stories (or almost finished) – they are scattered everywhere. Bags, work storage, drawers at home, multiple versions in every note app, printed pages with some weird notes I don’t even understand what’s there. Most of the time, these notes feel like homeless people – existing, but not belonging anywhere. I need to find them home finally! ‘Kissing as a strike of matches’ is the name of the book, though I am still unsure. I added my key story this year – it is about fragile love, memory, and a ruined family stuck in pain. I want to publish it independently and send it only to Dustin, Dima, Wojtek, my brother, and my grandfather. 

I wrote a few small scripts too. Short, rough, unfinished. They will probably grow into short films. One day I want to make a film based on a short novel, something like ‘The history of the eye’ or ‘Woodcutters’. But even writing it here it feels risky.

Filmmaking. I’ve completed a few shorts this year, and what I liked about them most is that they were not planned. Dima visited us from the front line for a few weeks, and during the last day we decided to film a short film – ‘The meat artist‘ which is a summary of how we think about AI and image generated world we live in now. The second film is mostly personal, based on the road trip we’ve done from Chicago to Savannah – ‘Hey mom‘. The goal for the next year is to try not to film my friends (as they all are annoyed), but to find good professional actors haha.

Movement. This part went badly. I barely moved. I hate fucking jiu jitsu so much, this year was my 5th time trying this ridiculous sport, what I hate about it specifically that it is a very stupid cult, and people with serious faces trying to explain me these moves. I also hate running. I also hate the gym – I tried going to the gym for 3 months, irregularly, and hated it every single time. Most evenings I smoked Drum Blue and looked at the moon – this probably will not change much, cigarettes feel like my most consistent companion. Almost forgot. I broke my skiing speed record – 98 km/h, that felt stupid and satisfying.

Reading. I can’t read fiction anymore, I’m pretending that I lost my focus as I’m old, but probably I just don’t want it to influence my writing. I feel so big influence from every writer I remember in my head, like quotes are accidentally appearing when I try to frame a sentence, even now maybe? Most of what I read was written by artists or about artists:

• ‘Martin Wong Human Instamatic’. Incredible writing about Martin’s life, his relationships, and his works. Full of stories and small human details. I still need to write about it properly for this stupid blog.
• ‘The living stone’ by Ithell Colquhoun. I loved her work for a long time, and this year I finally saw her exhibition at Tate Britain. The book follows her life in the Cornwall wilderness, a small house, long walks, stones. She writes about rocks and she feels their history and weight. That stayed with me longer than I expected.

Cinema. What would happen if cinema stopped entertaining us altogether. If AI stepped in to define storytelling, reframing modern times by mixing Greek tragedy and Tom Stoppard in less than a second. If a single click could generate something more elegant than Homer’s Iliad. This is probably still far away.

Plato imagined prisoners watching shadows on the wall, mistaking them for reality. I like this metaphor because it flatters me. It suggests I could leave the cave. But what if the cave learned to project better images. Higher resolution. Better sound. Total immersiveness. I suspect I would step inside willingly.

Cinema today often does not free us from the cave. It redecorates it.

Maybe cinema exists now only to check whether we are still capable of reacting at all.

Which, lately, is no small thing.

My catch this year:

• At Eternity’s Gate (2018) – Not sure why I didn’t see it earlier. Stunning nature, fields, brushstrokes, anxious van Gogh. Sad, sad, sad.
• H for Hawk (2025) – Introduced by the actors, writer, and director during the London Film Festival. I mostly remember Alina crying through the film, and the people around us.
• The Iron Claw (2023) – Strange brotherhood, melancholic story about an abusive father, and how complex family relationships become when the American dream is always waiting tomorrow.
• 28 Years Later (2025) – Mesmerising music and editing.
• Stranger (2025) – A precise “love story” acting as a bridge between two contradictory worlds. I don’t understand and I fully understand. The smile toward Marie felt slightly overplayed. I imagined him more like a rock. Soulless, like rain at night.
• Islands (2023) – Incredible performance by Sam Riley. A fragile wall between lie and attachment.
• Is This Thing On? (2022) – Funny. We will all probably end up there after forty. Collapsed families and strange, unexplainable changes.
• Comedy (2012) – Tim Heidecker. Precise, uncomfortable, perfect. I am a fan for life.

Places.

• Warsaw with friends. Since the full scale invasion in Ukraine, we had not seen each other. Vadik and Vlada are fighting on the front line. They finally had a short break, two days only. Walking with them was painful, laughing, talking, knowing they would go back. I love you, my beautiful people.
• New York solo. Noguchi museum – almost obsessive, I wanted to lick and eat his basalt circles and triangles. I randomly met John, he gave me his Nikon camera, I loved his trick of starting conversations by offering a fake 2 dollars.
• Chicago. Dustin showed me everything. The strongest moment was the Miss Van der Rohe house tour. The second visit was a road trip to Georgia from Chicago: Athens, Toccoa, and 100 small things on the way. ‘Five & Ten’ in Athens became one of the best places I have ever been.
• Amsterdam. Staying at my brother’s place. He is growing fast. We made our old favourite jokes: screaming at each other like our parents during fights.
• Paris one. I lived near Montparnasse cemetery, what a fucking incredible place, Cioran grave. Many museums. I found an ‘IL YA’ Apollinaire poetry book on the flee market, when back home I found inside of the book a handwritten letter with an Aragon poem ‘There is no such thing as love’. Museum de Cluny, tapestries, unicorns, still stunned.
• Paris two. Time with my brother. More museums. The David Hockney exhibition – the massive acrylic trees were impressive, but the cut photo of a US road, broken into pieces and rebuilt like a puzzle, stayed longer in my head.
• Cornwall. Tremenheere Sculpture Garden – cool art placed inside a vast garden. Porthcurno Beach – white sand, turquoise water, almost Mediterranean. The amphitheatre in Redruth, a place to sit, and do nothing. 

Exhibitions.

• Andy Goldsworthy. Deeply inspiring, natural genius or genius of nature, I hope his work ends up everywhere one day.
• Ed Atkins. Immersive 3D films: the phone call to his mother stayed with me. The drawings (100+ stickers) he made for his daughter lunch boxes were devastating and tender.
• Victor Hugo drawings. A huge influence, charcoal pulled me in deeper.
• Susana Valadon. Wild energy, brave, uncomfortable nudity. 
• Hans Hollein. Architect, designer, artist. Felt close to how I want to think, I ordered his book immediately, need to write about it soon.
• Oceanic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Guinea and surrounding archipelagos, ancestral figures, ritual objects, overwhelming presence, inspiring to make some wooden structures.

Being obscure. It is curious to observe how social adaptability is framed as health. The ability to smile at the right moment, joke at the right second, soften one’s edges for collective comfort is praised as maturity. Meanwhile, discomfort is pathologised, silence becomes suspicious, intensity becomes something to manage.

We say ‘be yourself’, but only within a narrow bandwidth that has already been approved. Outside of it, you are asked to explain yourself, correct yourself, dilute. Obscurity, in this sense, is not rebellion. It is residue. What remains after prolonged self-editing fails.

One more year in the corporate world made this impossible to ignore. Games inside games, people smiling while calculating, wanting to eat you alive without showing teeth. It made me wonder whether this could live inside fiction. A novel, maybe, ‘The corporate smile’. A man with schizophrenia presenting absurd ideas with total conviction, infinite jokes wrapped in random numbers, trapped in strange relationships with executives who cannot tell whether he is mocking them or playing their game better than they are.

Lastly, the learning here is simple. We do not become obscure by choice. We become obscure when performance exhausts itself. And perhaps humour, that old survival mechanism, is not a mask at all, but a flare. A way of saying something is wrong with the room.