Silent Narratives
“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.”- Solnit R, The Faraway Nearby
Stanislawa, my great grandmother (1888–1968). Her life feels like a slow fade, a woman once present, then thinned by silence. Stories say she was gentle, sang quietly, but lived with depression. The reason she took her life is unknown. What remains is the sense of someone who kept disappearing long before she left.
Six generations of women in my family
Gathering these photographs of six generations of women in my family wasn’t a sentimental exercise. It was a confrontation. Laying their faces side by side felt like opening a long‑sealed archive of inherited gestures, quiet resistances, and unspoken wounds. It became a phototherapy, forcing me to recognise how much of myself is built from their experiences, not just their features. In each image I saw a repetition. This cascade of portraits is a study of genetic, emotional, and behavioural inheritance, revealing that what passes between generations is not only bone structure, but survival strategies and silences. Putting these photographs together meant finally acknowledging the lineage I carry, not as nostalgia, but as truth.
Childhood memories- Unfinished business
The cyanotype evokes the residue of childhood memory and the persistence of unhealed trauma. Growing up in Eastern Europe meant inhabiting a landscape of scarcity, being raised by grandparents, and existing within a social fabric marked by the presence of alcoholism
Project Polish PGR
Polish Państwowe Gospodarstwa Rolne (PGRs) — the state agricultural farms established under post‑war socialist policy, formed a distinct social and economic micro‑environment in rural Poland. Designed as collectivised labour units, they often became sites of chronic underinvestment, structural precarity, and social marginalisation. The PGRs were isolated settlements where housing, labour, and social life were collapsed into a single, state‑managed space. After 1989, many of these farms were rapidly dismantled, leaving behind dilapidated buildings, abandoned infrastructure, and communities stripped of employment, services, and prospects.
My grandparents lived within one of these farms, and the everyday textures of that world — scarcity, intergenerational caregiving, and the pervasive presence of alcoholism, shaped the emotional landscape of my childhood. These histories continue to reverberate in my adult life, surfacing as unhealed trauma, fragmented memory, and a sense of inherited precarity.
My research project seeks to understand what went wrong in these spaces and how political transformation produced social abandonment, how collective memory erodes when sites are left to decay, and how personal narratives, including those marked by loss within my own family, intersect with broader histories of rural dispossession in post‑socialist Poland.
I spoke to communities left without work and basic services.
Places of prayers
Some of PGRs retained small places of gathering called “Swietlica”, where they display pictures from past events. That gives me a glimpse of hope.
I stood by the window of the flat where my great grandmother took her life in 1968. I met a man who remembered her and told me a story about her.
Elderly members of community spoke of their lack of care, often turning to alcohol
As a child I did not know that a place of where my grandparents lived and worked was a labour system created by the government.