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It's always summer there and nothing changes | 2020
Photobook coming soon
It is impossible to turn back the time, to reconstruct the situation after it expires, what is available is only a modern projection of the image of the past. This project is an attempt to recreate memories in an empty apartment left by my grandparents; deprived of any contexts. Furniture and objects become symbolic memory carriers.
„It is always summer and nothing changes” is a once heard sentence about dreams in which we visit our grandparents’ houses. When I think about the apartment where my grandparents lived for 70 years, I imagine it in a very similar way - flooded with summer sun. The emotional connection with this space made the clichés imprinted in my memory as if time had stopped. And yet time goes by and the apartment is transformed. For the last two years, during which the photographs were taken, the apartment was being prepared for sale, and in a more metaphorical sense it was dying out. Its inhabitants - my grandparents - have disappeared long ago, but the objects that remained unchanged created the illusion of their presence based on memories and traces of history. The process of removing items and the final renovation of the apartment constituted a kind of reset, losing identity and finally breaking with its history. In this empty space devoid of its past contexts, I made an attempt to reconstruct
my memories using the furniture and objects that I had kept - they became carriers of memory and symbols of the past. Introduced back into the apartment, instead of their original function, they fulfill a new - symbolic - attempt to place them in their old context which is just an empty gesture. Memory is unreliable, and truth is combined with fantasy and situations from old photographs, the image of the past is shown through the prism of the present. The relationships I come into with or the relationships that I have created between them are not situations from the past, because these cannot happen, but a visualization of how I experience them now. Referring to my childhood games, I create a projection of the image of the past, not its reconstruction. It is only an attempt to recreate the lost world in a space where it is no longer present. The photos were supplemented with images of pieces of furniture and elements of the apartment cut from archival family photos.
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