The Body Melted in the Temperature of the Stomach

I had the pleasure of documenting Aleksandra Przybysz's performance. I photographed in intervals of a few seconds. I later chose single frames thinking of the artist's eating of the tea mushroom as an act of oral pleasure, something sexual.

A body melted at the temperature of the stomach.

This portion of the work consists of a sequence of seven photographs in which I eat SCOBY I have grown.

This is the ultimate form of contact, an act of total fusion and assimilation of the qualities of the substance. For ancient peoples, eating certain organs was a symbolic form of worship and meant the absorption of a person's strength and energy.

For me, to eat the SCOBY is to overcome the feeling of revulsion that accompanied the project, to shift to the other pole in the correlation of rejection and attraction. Repulsion is transformed into a kind of pleasure - the pleasure of eating. The term consumption (from the Latin consumptio) meaning "eating," "consuming" directs us to another area - the field of sexuality. Consuming food with the mouth is sometimes a metaphor for the sexual act, kissing a ritualized gesture of feeding.

• Aleksandra Przybysz

Tomasz Kawecki is part of Issue 17 by Guest Editor Torbjørn Rødland.

Check out his Artist Feature In Praise of Shadow.