Oparek, Joanna

Small Duties is a shocking and daring poem about violence against women and social expectations of victims. It is a story divided into three parts: Revue, History, and Investigation. Its main characters are Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl, the so-called basement girls, who were imprisoned and tortured for years. After their release, they became a kind of macabre “celebrities.” They were judged, re-exploited by the media and pop culture, and subjected to social pressure. For the author, their painful stories are only a starting point for broader reflections on the mechanisms of violence, its sensational, neurotic, scandalous, and deliberately erased voices and manipulated images. The poem thus highlights the performativity of violence, exposing both what happens around high-profile cases and the fact that European cultural heritage is built on the exploitation of women.

The first part, entitled Revue, presents the characters, introduces the protagonists, and provides details about the shocking abductions. It is a critique of the patriarchal world order and theater as a medium that feeds on violence and aestheticizes it. The second part, History, is a pastiche of a crime series, where poems serve as its successive episodes. It is a story about the dramatic fate of the Fritzl family, and at the same time a critique of the media and pop culture, which profit from human suffering. The last part, Investigation, is a series of gruesome crime mysteries, a kind of vivisection of events, an attempt to answer the question of how it happened and who was to blame. It also questions the functioning of the police and the justice system. Each part is also linked by the character of Elfriede Jelinek, a writer famous for her depictions of violence. By invoking her, the author discusses the so-called obscene in both prose and dramatic writing, but also reveals the mechanism that causes an author writing about violence to become the target of media attacks herself.

Joanna Oparek has created a poem which, due to its polyphony, powerful, evocative language, moving images, and dramatic narrative, is certainly suitable for a full-length stage production and, most interestingly, provides enormous scope for the director's imagination.

“Where the matter ends, theater begins,” writes the author, and it is worth noting that the text is metatheatrical in nature. Oparek directly refers to theater in it, both as a subject and a form. She uses the revue genre, employs dialogues and monologues, uses theatrical terminology, and discusses the “theater of death” and the post-dramatic turn. She invokes names familiar to drama and theater – from Shakespeare, through the aforementioned Jelinek, to Kleczewska and Lupa. Small duties contains elements of macabre burlesque and horror, psychological crime fiction, mask lyricism, as well as sharp social satire and serious criticism of contemporary culture.

Journalist Tom visits Professor Witz, a legendary researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He wants to talk about a project initiated by the professor in 2049 in the Łódź area, which has gotten somewhat out of control. The aim of the project was to “study the consequences of the spontaneous development of coexisting organic and inorganic intelligence systems, combined and assisted intelligence, and the transintelligence of biotechs and technobiotes, as well as accompanying non-systemic entities.” The idea was to protect the rights of intelligence regardless of its origin – without favoring or discrediting any form. Over time, however, intelligence “colloquially and pejoratively” referred to as artificial began to take control of other forms, and “fully human persons” found themselves in a distinct minority. Threatened with extinction, they hide in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic city. Tom, who gradually gains more and more knowledge about the development of the project, simultaneously loses his grasp of the situation. Who is who? Is the professor's demonic daughter, Mona, a flesh-and-blood human being, or did she die with her mother in a car accident as a full-blooded human being, and her consciousness now exists in a new, “borrowed” body? Does the professor's frail shell really only contain his own consciousness, or could it also be a prison for another, younger consciousness? Who is the intelligence equipped with all the attributes of existence, and who is merely a voice? Who is Tom himself?

Referring to the mythical ship of Theseus, in which rotten planks were replaced one by one, the author asks an abstract question that is no longer so abstract in the present day: “If we replace all the elements of a complex object with new ones, so that the entire object is replaced with a new one, does it remain the same object?” And what will remain for humans in a world dominated by AI?

In the afterword to Joanna Oparek's anthology of art, Loneliness is a Serial Killer, Karolina Felberg writes:

On the margins of her reflections on human pride – the desire for divine creations and interventions – Oparek breaks another cultural taboo. She prophesies a time when organic humans will become algorithms, and inorganic beings will take over the most important competence of the humanistic era – the ability to perform creative (aimless and selfless). What will remain for humans then? Suffering, suggests the writer. Superintelligence will not learn to suffer “sophisticatedly” anytime soon. "Its beauty is indifferent. That is why it needs us, feeds on people, greedily devours the leftovers," says Mona, the daughter of a brilliant inventor. In Łódź, dominated by inorganic beings, the ark of organic humans will therefore turn out to be exactly what they are defending themselves against – their inherent ability to experience loss and pain.