It comes from ancient Rome and has its origins in the Latin word occupatio. It occurs when: Ownership of an ownerless movable thing is acquired by taking it into independent possession. [Polish Civil Code, art. 181] Yet the fact that this process is regulated by law offers no guarantee of clean intentions.

The phenomenon of appropriation is perfectly at home in the field of art. Seizing another person's promising idea or discovery, plagiarism, intellectual theft and other abuses of this kind have always been present in creative circles. They divide into the unconscious ones, often the result of insufficient research into a subject or the suppression of facts, and the fully conscious ones, which are hard to admit to. Appropriations of this kind occur under the cover of collaboration, peer support and all manner of relationships of dependence, among them the student–lecturer relationship. I am sure that each of us has faced the temptation to take over a valuable thought, or conversely, not to share it with others. To complete the picture of such situations, let me recount a scene from life:

December 2019, Spokojna 15, the Spatial Activities Studio. Roman Woźniak is at a meeting in the dean's office on Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie, and I am holding tutorial hours. A student turns up with whom we have for some time been discussing the subject of transgressions (to put it briefly and delicately). He talks about various leads, among them:

• Marina Abramović and Ulay's walk along the Great Wall of China,
• restricting another person's freedom in a relationship / discussion,
• dogs barking paranoidly at each other on two sides of a gate, even though the barrier dividing them ends a little further on, etc.

He builds interesting paradoxes that I no longer hear, because ringing in my ears is the genius of a word he utters in one of his sentences. …APPROPRIATION… The rest of what he says is like the static of a television not connected to an aerial.

I join the tutors in the dean's office and when I share my… that is, Kamil's discovery with them, the chorus of teachers repeats in many voices: APPROPRIATION!!! Let's take it and make an exhibition out of it!

And so appropriation is appropriated, and Kamil Druk becomes the ghost curator of our presentation.