The notion of a shared space and how it is being negotiated and structured are
central within my multidisciplinary practice. I am especially interested in the
political potential of negotiating the urban sphere by the city’s citizens. I
believe in the argument that antagonism is a base for democracy. Therefore, for
the last couple of years I have been exploring strategies for citizens to
reclaim and negotiate urban areas, celebrating and shaping them freely. I am
also interested in issues connected with the contemporary transmigration worker
phenomena in European cities (resulting in transnational ethnic communities
whose culture and commitments are neither wholly oriented toward the new
country nor the old). Together with the subject of cultural diversity, I
consider these to be the most urgent and fascinating challenges of sharing the
contemporary urban sphere.
Through
video narratives, sculptures and collages, my practice revolves around the
question of addressing the problematics of the social. My works combine the
realms of film and contemporary urban spaces. I have been researching how can I
discuss issues associated with migration, social housing, gentrification, and
surveillance by referencing and learning from different film genres and
filmmakers.
I have
been making fictional documentaries and investigating the potentialities of
this genre within the process of addressing and negotiating the public debate
about the Polish worker immigration phenomena. The setting for my film Sobota / Zaterdag / Saturday (2011)
was the city of Rotterdam – its public monuments, historical sites and housing
areas. The subjects and participants of this project were Polish people working
in the Netherlands. Sobota /
Zaterdag / Saturday stems from my interest in deconstructing,
re-applying and re-inventing the language of propaganda films from the 1950’s
in order to address the contemporary disappearance of the social ideologies
that determined the construction and re-construction of post-war European
cities. I follow the living conditions of Polish immigrants with an emphasis on
the individual, to avoid stereotypes and the anthropological gaze.
By
setting a fictional narrative in real space my films are political as they
question the reality of the actual location. However they try not to intrude
upon the lives of the inhabitants of the area, who are dealing with problems –
such as gentrification of their district or negative stereotypes about
immigrants – which are negotiated within the work. My projects aim to address the
community inhabiting the space by using the basic elements of cinema language,
rather then being directly operative within the community itself. I take a
critical position toward surveillance as a component of the city fabric,
culture and as an instrument of control over the citizens (please refer to my
video:Questionnaire, 2011). I also
want to avoid patronizing my films’ subjects. In order to shift from these
problematic forms I invite the participants of my projects (including myself)
to play a certain fictional character (i.e. a Hooligan, as depicted in films
from the 1950’s) or a stereotypical figure from contemporary public debate (a
Polish Immigrant Worker in a project: Sobota
/ Zaterdag / Saturday). Staged situations, appropriated soundtrack (i.e. in
the 1950’s documentaries) or black and white images in my videos intentionality
expose the construction of these works. Still the settings, the remnants of
reality, the type of protagonists, loose narrative and sculptural elements
present in the videos claim a position in the social discourse.