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IIn this kinetic sculpture from the body of work Soft Syntax, Gosia Wojas pushes her inquiry into materiality, embodiment, and resistance into motion, quite literally. The work features a commercially manufactured conveyor belt overlapped with a pigmented silicone band running continuously over a steel frame. Visually minimal yet conceptually dense, the piece stages a stark confrontation between the language of automation and the vulnerability of soft matter. 

The silicone, cast in a muted flesh tone, slips endlessly over the steel mechanism in a gesture that is at once banal and uncanny. Its movement mimics industrial precision, yet the pliable surface evokes something more corporeal: a tongue, a membrane, a prosthetic organ caught in an endless loop.

Though it appears self-operating, the sculpture in fact demands constant human calibration, its rhythm sustained only through touch, correction, and care. This subtle dependency disrupts the fantasy of autonomy, revealing the fragility of systems as sovereign.

Rather than facilitating efficiency, this machine performs a kind of absurd labor, a soft refusal to become productive in the way it was engineered to be. There is no output, no object transported. Instead, we’re left with the image of softness enduring repetition, like trauma looping through generations or bodies bound to systems they never chose.