The garden, shrouded in black, and filled with the suffocating smell of heated asphalt, has an inhabitant. He lives the life of an outlaw, a cursed man of the land. This story can be told in many ways. Its spokesmen: the manlet, the pajeet, the wagecuck, or the Wojak, online extrapolations of male suffering, of being locked in a cage of internalized and intersubjective demands and expectations, are an epidermis, a shell. Our protagonist lives in a world of black sunlight, surrounded by half-living organism-like figures. He tries to break through his darkness into the light of day. In a world of forging profit from the emotion of protein biomass, the blue light of the screen brings suffering inseparable from solace. As more hortī are cut down, the statistics on male suicide do not fall. The incel has become a ruse to play out the male-female conflict. After all, none of us chose our lives, it is life that chooses each day how we live it. Closed Gardens of Solitude comprises two works. The first one, Gardens of Solitude by Agata Lankamer and Agata Konarska, focuses on addiction to technology and escape into virtual worlds. This escape is undertaken by an incel – a chauvinistic figure, living with a sense of rejection by society, connected to models of sanctification by (involuntary) celibacy. The artists examine his motivations with empathy and without judgment. They present a video installation in which we can visit a utopian garden: a symbol of fantasy and frustration, the real world of virtual loneliness. The second project, Closed Gardens by Adam Martyniak, deploys the artist’s exploration of dark ecology and the reclamation of materials. Sculptural objects created from tires made of petroleum-derived materials resemble organisms from the plant world but are equipped with completely non-plant features and functions; lasting as if they were suspended in their own life. Both projects are connected by a reflection on technological transformations, linking our lives with the global transformations to which earthly organisms are subjected on a cellular, affective, or conscious level. Perhaps the beings who were here before us, those successive generations of creatures, charred proteins buried under a bed of moss, monstrous worms, and dinosaurs, now enchanted in used tires, alliterations of past beings – perhaps they were as lonely as we are?

— Cezary Wicher