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Dates

2018 - 2021
Author

Małgorzata Smieszek
Topics Social Issues, Contemporary Issues, Archive

Alluding to the words of Józef Tischner, the home becomes the reference point for all affairs and endeavors that make up the human life journey through the world.

I create a visual journey through my family house. The journey, however, does not reside in a sentimental stock-taking of memorabilia, but becomes a journey into the depths of oneself, on a discovery of the meaning of fundamental aspects of being. Birth, house/home, death as well as themes of passage and continuity become a terrain for her photographic peregrination. A selection of photographs as a medium is not only a capture of a passing moment and a reflection upon it. It is, above all, an opening of a path into the past. Thanks to photography, we are able to confront personal, private and intimate stories with the present. To invoke, here and now, what once was. To revive the past. Only photography, with its documentary, commemorative and personal dimension, allows for this device.

https://youtu.be/T3hFmzEFhaQ

A sense of security, of guaranteeing protection to oneself and loved ones is what drives human towards creating enclosed spaces. Building walls, the floor and the roof – both in its actual and metaphorical dimension – fences us off the outside world. Occupying a space in the physical sense is permeated with existential dwelling. The house – beyond the actual – acquires a sacred dimension. Alluding to the words of Józef Tischner, the home becomes the reference point for all affairs and endeavors that make up the human life journey through the world.

The house is assigned to a particular space. In this place we are rooted and from the place we grow. Nonetheless, a need for displacement arises with time, a need of treading one’s path even at the cost of a loss of security. The incessant cycle of being protected and offering protection to loved ones. We embark and return – to a different and, in some sense, the same place. "All roads of the human through the world are measured by a distance from home." Józef Tischner

Cut off roots, however, can make themselves felt, emanating a phantom pain, as if from a lost body part. Is it not the case that, unconsciously, we get ourselves into situations that arouse our deepest fear? Those in which some fright paralyses us to the point of blocking our breath, nearly halting the life that flows through us. And then, despite ourselves, instinctively, we begin to feel that only immersing ourselves into the frightful can bring relief… Sometimes, in our escaping, we reach the limit, the edge beyond which we encounter an awareness that the thing we have been escaping from is, in reality, the thing of which we are composed.

Sometimes, one needs to become immersed in a dead house, to commune with the already dead artefacts of a once bustling life, to walk the tightrope of security, treading uncertain floorings, under an unprotective roof. To feel a place where a certain cycle came to an end. The communion with decay, following traces of a former life, a space departing into nothingness, all these can be indispensable to become aware of the fact that life and passing inhabit us all the time.

Life ends in death, but in death it may also begin. In the very moment of our birth, we begin to die, every lived day brings us a step closer to the fact. A symbolic burial of the fear of death can breathe new life. Suffice to recognise oneself as just one element in the cycle of life and dying, extending – backwards and forwards – into generations.

Living in a house, under one roof, creates a specific kind of multidimensional bond. Closeness is a connection to another human: to our caretakers in childhood, peers in youth, and in adult life – to our own family. But closeness is also a connection to oneself: to one’s story, to people thanks to whom we have come into this world and to those that will follow, to fears, shame and guilt, joy, achievements and pride. All those things that make up every one of us. The way home leads right through this kind of closeness.

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