While conducting research on the 1968 migration of Polish Jews at the Institute of National Remembrance, the artist encountered a declassified file concerning a relative. In the first pages, she came upon a statement by a Secret Service agent: “I request that an [investigative] case be opened under the secret code name ‘Parasite.’” This detail acts as a Barthian "punctum"—it pricks, it wounds.

What story does "Parasite in the Archives" tell?

The work confronts this historical violence by reclaiming the very trope levied against the subject. From Enlightenment-era usury accusations to 20th-century racial pseudoscience, the dehumanizing rhetoric of the “Jewish parasite” has long figured diasporic Jews as the abject other. This topos is bound to "doikayt" – rootedness without a state – where the charge of parasitism indicts statelessness itself.

Artistic means used in Dominika Laster's installation

The piece submits the violence indexed by the surveillance file, along with its psychic and bodily residues, to processes of ritual purification. By printing the document onto dried SCOBY and submerging it in a fermentation substrate, the work materializes the harmful trope to alchemize it: the acid and growth of microbial culture render the accusation porous, blurred, and finally unrecognizable. While the investigative and persecutory apparatus of the Polish People’s Republic operationalized parasitism as a mechanism of interpellation, biology offers a different logic.

In ecological terms, parasitism is not mere exploitation but a form of adaptive plasticity. Contrasting the harmful stereotype with this living reality, the work uncovers latent dimensions of creative "survivance".

The project is part of the Rotating Gallery programme, which presents the work of Jewish artists. This year’s edition is dedicated to “boundary questions”, with successive presentations taking the form of installations and performative actions created by individual artists or collectives.

More about the Rotating Gallery