The final year at the →Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow is when every student must complete their diploma project. I approached the topic from different angles, and after several months—and at least a dozen ideas—something finally clicked. Yes, I knew what my art diploma performance would be.

The working title was The Wawel Stone.
It made sense. I was studying sculpture, so stone felt natural. And being in Krakow, the theme came almost by itself.

For the theoretical part of the project, I had to gather source material. It took time, but eventually, I managed to reach people who had something to say on the subject. I structured their statements to alternate between believers and skeptics. The conversations were recorded on a tape recorder and later transcribed. My interviewees came from very different backgrounds.

I started with physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics, then spoke with dowsers, priests, former museum employees, archaeologists, historians, psychotronics experts, and finally, visionaries and healers.
After over seventy interviews, I decided to wrap up the research.

From Research to the Stage

It was time to write a script.
The idea: to create my art diploma performance in a completely dark theater.

I needed a space without side lights, stairway lights, or emergency signs. Just absolute darkness. The →historic venue I found had exactly that.

By chance, I got a behind-the-scenes look at how theater lighting engineers work. While sketching out the sequences—down to fractions of a second—I realized how essential their timing is to the flow of everything the audience sees. My key tools quickly became a stopwatch, a pencil, and a sheet of paper.

On stage, I arranged a row of stone blocks. Lighting shifted in a raw, minimalist way—from above and from the sides. A dish-shaped lamp hung from the ceiling on a twenty-meter cable. At a certain moment, a string of sparks, several dozen centimeters long, appeared between the stones.

Under the table was a doctoral student from a high-voltage lab, generating over 30,000 volts. Whatever that meant in technical terms, I just wanted to create theatrical lightning bolts—in total darkness.

Following the principle „You can have anything you want, as long as you know exactly what you want,” I eventually found myself speaking with electrical engineers. One conversation led to another. And suddenly, I had a specialist waiting beneath the stage for my signal.

Table, stopwatch, pencil, paper. Repeat.

Somehow, I also managed to get into a local radio studio to edit the interviews. That’s where I met composer Krzysztof Filus, who created a soundtrack for the piece—woven with voices of people speaking about the stone, belief, and energy.

From the Stage to the Defense

The adrenaline didn’t end after the performance. The theater was only a short walk from the Academy.

Backstage, I tossed my dusty clothes aside, put on a shirt and jacket, and headed toward the examination room.

What I hadn’t expected was that a radio announcement had filled the theater—and that many audience members followed me to the Academy to see the project defended in front of the faculty.

I had never stood alone on a theater stage before, and I had underestimated how deep stage fright could go. The group followed me in silence, like a procession. It felt like I was walking to my own execution.

Then I heard someone calling behind me:
„Mr. Waclaw, Mr. Waclaw, wait!”

It was my drawing professor. He had caught up with me just before the building.

„I have to tell you this… When you picked up the light bulb and started screwing it in the dark, the way it squeaked in the silence… and then it lit up red, above everyone’s heads… and those moving shadows from the stones…
It gave me chills. I can still feel them now.”

Professor Bogusz Salwiński passed away recently.

I still remember every word of that short review. I doubt I’ll ever forget them.

Thank you, Professor.

The art diploma performance ended on stage, but the project didn’t. I had to head over to the Academy for the official defense in front of the committee.
More in the next post → about the art diploma defense at the Academy of Fine Arts.