XL NOTES

2025

Site-specific installation at Papiermachermuseum, Laakirchen, Austria

In her site-specific installation XL Notes, Xenia Lesniewski transforms handwritten notes—accumulated over years as fragments of thoughts, memories, and questions—into oversized, meticulously painted reproductions. Fleeting moments of thinking, which might otherwise have faded on scraps of paper, here assume monumental presence and weight.

At a time when ideas are increasingly recorded digitally, rapidly, and often algorithmically, Lesniewski’s analog intervention reasserts the physicality and slowness of thought. Her process is not merely reproductive but interpretive—oscillating between translation, preservation, and reinvention.

The sheets hang loosely throughout the space, evoking an open archive that invites not decoding, but observation. Margins, spacing, corrections, and crossings-out—details often deemed peripheral—are foregrounded through scale, taking on a new visual and material agency.

XL Notes resists conventional hierarchies of media and meaning. Rather than presenting fixed statements, the work exposes traces of cognition: hesitations, detours, silences. What is crossed out or left incomplete is not omitted, but emphasized—as productive intervals within the act of thinking.

The installation activates its viewers not as passive readers but as engaged observers of process. Lesniewski’s expanded notations become a quiet yet insistent meditation on attention, ephemerality, and the visual articulation of the marginal. In doing so, XL Notes offers a space of slowed perception—where fragility, doubt, and presence converge.

Curated by Petra Zechmeister.

Installation shots Yvon Luca