Describing the world is by no means an easy task. Apart from what we see, hear, touch, and feel, we also have our own personal microcosms to take into account. Our inside can only be expressed to a limited extent using the available vocabulary. Language, however, can be replaced as a tool of communication by the tongue contained in our gobbling mouths, as I call them. 

One day in May with a group of third-graders, I stopped in front of the monument to Agnieszka Osiecka, situated at the intersection of Obrońców and Francuska streets in Warsaw. We listened intently to all the sounds around us, trying to name them. On reflection, however, we realised that we are our own doors to the world’s perception, and so we changed the strategy. Rather than naming the sounds around, we attempted to recreate them as aptly as our own bodies, surroundings and imagination would allow us. Hence the squeals, noises, creaks and clatter in this piece of music – all coming from within our gobbling mouths. As Osiecka described her inner world in poems and song lyrics, so we describe the world around the monument with what emerges from our own inside. 

Rafał Ryterski