The wind filled the sails of Odysseus’ ship, carrying forward the myth of the traveller-hero: the man of action, the sovereign and awaited, whose triumphant return structures the Odyssey. Yet alongside the heroic winds that propelled him across the sea, another wind was blowing—unrecorded in Homer’s verses but no less vital: the wind that turned the sails of the land’s windmills. There, peasants ground grain into flour for bread. Such reproductive labour—performed above all by women—remains marginal in the canonical narrative told through the voice of the dominant class and gender.

The Odyssey, however, is full of banquets. Bucolic feasts and their sensory plenitude appear in the epic as the backdrop to male privilege and aristocratic community. Their abundance was made possible by precisely the hidden, everyday labour that the poem silences. At these feasts, pleasure extended beyond food and drink to include performance: the presence of the auletrides—young women playing the aulos, whose status was that of sexual slaves. Playing the aulos symbolically sealed their mouths: the sound of their instrument displaced their speech, embodying the gendered silencing that accompanied their service.

On Ithaca, the ruins of stone windmills still stand. Built on elevated sites to catch as much wind as possible, they survive today only as fragments—perforated brick shells. We decided to “set them in motion” again, not to grind grain this time, but to produce sound. By threading pipes through the gaps in the stone, the ruins are transformed into an instrument, a wind-activated organ resembling the simple pipes of folk traditions.

These resounding ruins become allegories of the auletrides: penetrated and voiced at once, resonating with the air may resonate today. The twelve windmills recall the twelve maids of the Odyssey—enslaved women silenced, raped, and executed at the epic’s close. Through this act of reanimation, the mute ruins are converted into playing monuments: a counter-memorial that speaks for the occluded histories of reproductive and care labour, exploited and erased in both past and present.

In this gesture we follow feminist theorists such as Silvia Federici, who has shown how reproductive labour is hidden yet foundational, and Luce Irigaray, who has written of women’s silenced voices and breath as both material and metaphor. The project positions the ruins as a feminist re-reading of the Odyssey: not as a celebration of the triumphant male hero, but as a tribute to the forgotten labour of those who fed, sustained, and were sacrificed to the story of his glory.

Concept and theoretical elaboration: Aleksandra Nowysz
Production: A. Nowysz, Maciej Zych
Reproductive labour: A. Nowysz, M. Zych
Sound Postproduction: Paweł Krzaczkowski

12 Auletrides - a spatial and sound installation

In the Popowice boiler house, active between 1901 and 1945, coal was transformed into thermal energy, which was then distributed through a system of tin pipes into the tram depot halls. The several-hundred-meter-long external pipe network connecting the freestanding buildings was a spectacular example of “grand-scale” design, characteristic of the modernist era. Such projects were driven—and still are—by the vision of progress equated with universal prosperity: in this case, improving the working conditions of male (and for a short period, female) workers in the cold halls. Hard to deny the justice of this ambition—yet, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, every tale of civilizational triumph carries with it the unspoken “ruins of progress.”

When the depot was built, dreams of perpetual growth paid no heed to the finitude of natural resources. The architecture of the complex was defined by vast steel-framed halls, thin walls made of materials with high thermal conductivity, and the external pipe system which—while functional—lost energy at every meter. Energy wastefulness was inscribed into the aesthetic of modernism, an era founded on the conviction that the flows of energy, capital, and technology would never run dry. The modernist gesture of smoothing—removing ornament, textiles, draperies—signaled a new epoch of circulation, in which insulation and containment of energy seemed unnecessary, even regressive.

In the boiler house I read the allegory of Goethe’s Faust: the modern man, tirelessly pursuing grand projects of development, and yet condemned to an inevitable end. The moment the last ton of coal was burned, the building became obsolete—its productive movement halted, yet it continued in the inert production of sound. For the boiler house always “played”: the by-product of warm air coursing through tin pipes was also resonance, tone, noise.

Today the boiler house appears as an instrument of another world. Its sounds are like the baroque folds described by Deleuze—infinitely pleated surfaces that open onto other rhythms and possibilities. It is not only the ruin of a modernist dream but also the resonance of new potentials, hidden in the fissures of history.

author: Aleksandra Nowysz
sound postproduction: Agata Zemla
curator: Daniel Brożek

Aleksandra Nowysz

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