In-Between

Long-term documentary project on the transformation of the Polish countryside, focusing on peripheral regions and the tensions between its agricultural past and contemporary forms of life and work.

In-Between is a documentary project about the contemporary landscape of rural Poland, with special attention to the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship. In recent decades, rural areas have undergone profound demographic, social, and economic changes linked, among other factors, to the political transformation, European Union accession, and processes of de-agrarianization. The countryside, historically based on agriculture, is becoming a multifunctional space in which non-agricultural employment, migration, and connections to industry and regional infrastructure are gaining importance.

The project focuses on peripheral areas, where these processes take on a particularly complex and often ambivalent character. Alongside improvements in infrastructure and rising living standards, there are visible phenomena of depopulation, population ageing, and the disappearance of local economic activity. At the same time, the development of industrial and investment zones introduces new employment models, reshaping the relationship between place of residence and place of work. As a result, the countryside now functions as an in-between space – between agriculture and industry, locality and mobility, continuity and change.

In-Between documents these processes through the observation of everyday practices, landscapes, and traces of transformation visible in space. It combines images of agricultural work, industrial infrastructure, the presence and absence of inhabitants, and elements indicating social exclusion and limited access to services. The juxtaposition of these motifs allows for capturing the heterogeneity of the contemporary countryside and the tensions arising from overlapping economic and social orders.

The project has been carried out since 2022 and is based on long-term fieldwork as well as the analysis of existing data, including reports on rural transformation processes. The photographs form a sequential documentary narrative in which individual images function as elements of a broader structure describing the changing social landscape. In-between attempts to organize and visually translate processes that – although widespread – often remain dispersed and difficult to grasp in a clear, unified way.